The Killing – So who killed Rosie Larsen?

If there’s one thing that watching all these hours of The Killing has taught me, it’s that it’s rare that things are as they seem on this show. You think the high school teacher, who married a former student, had a weird, too-close relationship with a current student, who hid one of the intensely personal notes he wrote to her hidden in her room? Well, it wasn’t like that; he was just a caring mentor.

You think that the shady guy with a collage of photos of the family members for whom he works above his bed, so he can gaze at their faces as he drifts off to sleep, has an unhealthy obsession with them. Well he definitely has an odd obsession and might be a creepy stalker, but he didn’t try to hurt the family. Protect them with lethal force, yes, but hurt the family members, no.

That’s what makes the notion that Darren Richmond killed Rosie Larsen suspect. As Linden said in episode three, “Assumptions are your enemy.”

Sure, there’s a video of Darren meeting Rosie at a campaign rally. We learned that (improbably in my opinion), Rosie worked with a high-priced escort service frequented by Darren, who also, apparently, was seeing other women who weren’t escorts. Rosie’s body was found in the trunk of a  submerged car belonging to Darren’s mayoral campaign. Gwen, who received compromising photos of Darren with other women from the mayor, told Linden that Darren got out of bed on the night that Rosie was killed and came home soaking wet. (That also happened to be the two-year anniversary of his wife’s death.) Throw in the fact that one of the escorts said Darren mused about what it would feel like to drown, and there certainly looks like something is out of whack here. (I’m betting that when Darren’s wife was killed by a drunk driver that water and drowning was somehow involved.)

But is this out of whack, disturbed, horny politician kind of stuff (real-world examples abound), or murderous stuff? If you go by everything we’ve seen in The Killing, all of this would mean that Darren did not kill Rosie, particularly given the fact that Holder knowingly produced phony photos of Darren supposedly on a toll bridge at 3 AM, driving the car Rosie was found in. And with the last scene of the season featuring Belko trying to pull a Jack Ruby on Darren, I’m convinced that Darren didn’t do it. My prediction is that he’ll be another innocent victim (innocent of the murder) lying in a hospital bed like Bennet or lying in a grave.

The whole Holder getting into a car and telling whoever was inside that the “photo worked,” and that Darren was “going down,” really ticked me off. It was such a reversal from everything we’ve seen of Holder. Viewers saw him in private moments, not just when he was Linden’s shadow, and he didn’t appear to be the kind of guy who’d frame someone innocent. Turning Holder into a corrupt cop, his drug use aside, just seemed like a misguided plot choice. The way in which he and Linden each, independently, settled upon Darren as the prime suspect couldn’t have been planned by Holder. It would bring into question Holder’s meeting with the escort who IDed Orpheus as Darren, unless Holder was working with someone (like Adams or an Adams associate) and, after hearing from the escort, Holder and the other person (people) were able to whip up those toll bridge photos. Perhaps Jamie, who had access to lots of images of Darren, is still working for the mayor who seems to have an affinity for disseminating photos of Darren.

I was also disappointed by the “resolution,” for lack of a better word, with the Larsens, with Mitch continuing to walk around in a fog, detached from her family, like an observer rather than a member, dropping all the questions she had about the Larsen family’s bank account, hugging Stan and then leaving. It’s only been 13 days since Rosie died. So learning that Mitch “left” — don’t know if that’s a permanent condition or temporary while she tries to gather herself — seemed like a cop-out.

Lastly, I have to remark on Linden, who seemed remarkably chipper with her son whom she feared had been murdered when he went AWOL a couple of days ago, finally boarding the plane to California just as she learned that her partner deceived her with those bridge photos. Clearly, by looking at her eyes, you could see that she felt like she had to immediately act on this information. In my mind, if I play that scene out in my head, I’d be stunned if Linden did not insist on getting off that plane.

When the episode wrapped, I wasn’t at all pleased that we still don’t know who the murderer is. I didn’t find that fact at all clever or intriguing. I found it annoying.

What did you think of the finale? Of Darren’s arrest? Holder’s duplicity?

Clacked by Meredith O'Brien
on Jun 20, 2011 @ 10:53 EST5EDT