'The Killing' Did What?!

The season finale of the once promising AMC show The Killing seriously ticked me off. I can’t decide which was worse, the fact that we didn’t really find out who killed Rosie Larsen during the season finale, or that they incongruously had Holder appear as though he’s been bought off or corrupted (or manipulated) by someone in order to obtain dummied up photos to use in order to arrest Darren Richmond, the upstart, good government mayoral candidate/sad sack widower/serial lover boy/escort service patron.

In my CliqueClack TV review I said I found the last second twisteroo which turned Richmond's apparent guilt on its head annoying, “not at all clever or intriguing.” I’m certainly not the only TV critic who feels this way:

Of the people who were left “cross-eyed and panting with rage,” the Los Angeles Times said: “Their words all but quivering in cancel-my-subscription frustration, critics, fan bloggers and tweeters could not believe that after all the show had demanded of them (13 whole episodes), after all the ‘red herrings’ and shots of Seattle looking like a rain-soaked ghetto instead of the hipster birthplace of Starbucks and Nirvana, we didn’t even get to find out who the real bad guy was.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman wrote, “. . . [A]s someone who has defended The Killing, if for no other reason than a story like this needs to be fully told before the final judgment is passed, there really is no defending the show after the finale . . . But ultimately a series comes down to its storytelling and, given the conclusion (or lack thereof) in the season finale, it’s just impossible to prop up the weaknesses if there was no final saving grace. And there wasn’t.”

The Boston Globe’s Matthew Gilbert, invoking a Saturday Night Live/Seth Meyers’ bit, wrote: “Really, The Killing? REALLY? . . . I have been a solid defender of The Killing, despite its flaws. But the finale was almost indefensible . . . [W]e really should know who killed Rosie.”

The show’s executive producer, Veena Sud, told Entertainment Weekly: “We wanted to do what we think is right and surprising. Maybe some people will be disappointed in it, just as some were disappointed in the series finales of Sopranos and Lost, and other people were absolutely thrilled.”

But when a critic said to her (before the finale aired) that many fans were expecting closure on the Larsen case and might not like the last few minutes of what turned out to be a three-card-Monte of a finale, Sud got defensive telling HitFix: “We never said you’ll get closure at the end of season one. We said from the very beginning this is the anti-cop cop show. It’s a show where nothing is what it seems, so throw out expectations. We will not tie up this show in a bow.”

I’m not asking for a shiny bow in the finale for the show that was aggressively promoted with the question, “Who killed Rosie Larsen?,” just something that doesn’t insult my intelligence and doesn't resort to yet another in a long line of fake-outs.

Image credit: AMC via the Los Angeles Times.