I watched the first season of The Killing, and for a show that started off so well, I can’t help but wonder what went wrong. It started off as a Twin Peak-ish kind of show where a young girl is murdered (the girl who shows up in so many television shows these days, from Heroes as Claire’s twisted roommate to Californication as the underage girl who seduces David Duchovny and then steals his manuscript, publishing it as her own), and the detectives spend the first season trying to figure out who did it. But as so many others have already pointed out, the biggest problem with this show was that they created two characters for the detectives who have to be the most incompetent investigators in the history of detective work. There were so many times where I sat, thinking, “really? That’s the direction you’re going to take in this investigation?” It was like they hired a bunch of office workers who have never seen the inside of a police department, other than one on TV, and then gave them detective badges, letting them loose on the streets of Seattle. And then because that wasn’t good enough, they had to hire an entire city of incompetent police officers to follow their lead, doing even worse so that the two really bad detectives might actually appear to look good.
What’s sad is that I saw the ending of this first season coming from a mile away. Granted, I didn’t peg it until the final episode, but that’s not really my fault. The writers were making this shit up as they went along, so that there would have been no way to figure out the whodunit because even the writers had no clue.
For most of the story, they focused on an obvious actor as the main suspect. He’s the guy who played the antagonistic leader in the television show the 4400. He’s a great actor, and he pulls off all of the nuances really well. But because the writers generally didn’t know where they were going, his ability to go all across the map acting-wise only made the show that much more frustrating to watch.
The problem with the writing is the inconsistency. An example was the last episode where the former drug addict police officer “figures out” that the mayoral candidate (the 4400 guy) has a thing for brunettes, showing a newspaper article where the picture has all of the man’s previous affairs, and they’re all brunettes. It’s pointed out that he is compensating for the loss of his wife, who also looked just like these women. What no one has pointed out, including the stupid police detectives, is that the mayoral candidate’s main squeeze right now is a beautiful blonde. So his “usual” type is not the usual type he has been having an affair with the entire series. It’s that kind of inconsistency that stems from convenient writing that is badly orchestrated. It’s why the show has suffered so much.
There was one episdode that was so obviously filler right towards the end. The detectives are investigating a possible connection to a casino, and then out of the blue the female detective’s son comes up missing, so they spend the entire episode looking for her son. No further investigation. Just looking for the kid. And bonding. And doing all sorts of dramatic element stuff that should have been conducted much earlier in the series, not in one of the last episodes. And then at the very end of the episode, they throw in a “oh here’s some information about the case in case you forgot there was an actual murder investigation going on”.
The sad thing is I think I’ve figured out who is responsible for the murder. The girlfriend of the mayoral candidate has so easily betrayed him to the point where it feels like she’s probably killed the original girl in jealousy (thinking he was having an affair with her, which he probably was). I wouldn’t be surprised to find out in a strange episode involving a dancing dwarf in a red motel that his current girlfriend used to be a brunette in an earlier period of her life who had an affair with him as the brunette but because she changed her hair, he doesn’t recognize her as the same person, and this is how she is getting her vengeance.
Sadly enough, I don’t think I’m that far off when it comes down to crunch time and the writers don’t have any more of a clue than they did the week before.