The Killing Was Never About “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?”
The backlash against The Killing’s first season finale, which did not reveal Rosie Larsen’s murderer, was not the fault of showrunner Veena Sud but of the marketing department at AMC. They gave us an empty promise they had no right to make with us. They chose to incorrectly focus their marketing strategy around the slogan/question “Who killed Rosie Larsen?” a strategy that included a website that tracked the potential suspects from within the cast. If you ignore this marketing strategy and look at the show itself, you’ll see the truth: The Killing was never about Rosie Larsen.
The Killing was about what happens to a city after a murder. It is about what happens to the family of the murdered victim: how each family member reacts differently, how a younger sibling confronts the reality of death, how a mother lives on past her daughter’s death, how a father faces the truth that he failed to protect his child. It is what happens to a political campaign tied to the murder: how a murder reflects on the powers that be, how it is used as a weapon in political games, how strangers lose sight of the reality that a girl is dead. It is most primarily about the two detectives assigned to solve the murder: the toll their job takes on their mental health, their abilities to be a mother and uncle, their relationships with loved ones and co-workers. The solving of the crime is secondary and always was secondary. We are now six episodes into season two and we are following all of these characters on a journey that gives us new suspects each week. But the suspects aren’t important and I have stopped trying to piece the puzzle together. I am enjoying the journey not predicting the destination.
What we have this season is again, at its core, a portrait of a remarkably fascinating female anti-hero in detective Sarah Linden as portrayed by an anti-glamorized Mireille Enos. Enos is always absolutely magnetic even with just an unmoving stare. She’s a brave performer working seemingly without the gloss normally put on actresses and working in tightly controlled and muted subtlety, a subtlety that makes the occasional burst of emotion all the more effective. Linden is always thinking and always trying to not let her emotions get involved in her work. Both of those mental tasks take concerted effort, effort we read all over her face. I’d watch for Linden alone.
