A thread for The Killing, aka much-lauded Danish drama "Forbrydelsen" (with spoilers)

Yeah, that was bold, I thought that was someone who might feature in future series too. The one new character that has been introduced late that might turn out to be quite dodgy is Leon's brother. They also seem to be keeping Morten away from suspicion, which I'm finding a bit odd considering his closeness to Hartmann. Got dodgy eyes as well, it's always a sign.

"someone who might feature in future series too" -- exactly.

it's not clear what leon's brother does. but he is rich (?) and wears a suit while leon is a removal guy/cabbie. there's some story there, and i guess an explanation of how leon is mixed up in what seems to be a wider conspiracy -- brix (the police chief, that's his name right?) seems to have done something very bad this last ep. i mean, leon didn't pull the trigger did he?

I was trying to read the expression on the dude's face just before the bad thing and it wasn't really one of recognition imo. Think that the oh-look-leather-gloves bit was a very deliberate attempt to confuse us, but I'm not gonna fall for that.

My wife said something weird the other day: why did they have that thing about the new shoes in the first episode? And talking of expensive shoes, did we ever find out who bought the boots?

i thought meyer looked surprised above all

i guess holck bought the boots. maybe not, but that seems plausible enough.

but whose new shoes? i have forgotten!

We might have misremembered this but I think that the very first scene in the town hall was Morten telling Hartmann about his new shoes on their way to some meeting. Significant (what happened to his old ones?) or was it just a quirky way of introducing them?

> was irl shocked by what happened to a major character

i thought they fumbled this with that terrible cliche. (trying not to give too much away here)

hadn't spotted leon in earlier episode.

vagn and the dad have been involved with nastiness before, beating people up. he referred back to it when they were about to give the teacher a thrashing in the van. the two of them also seem to owe the boyfriend's dad a favour.

thought them uncovering leon's deserted flat, complete with death gallery, was done too fast - they'd've got 2 whole episodes out of that earlier on.

the bigger cliche would have been him surviving (like kima in 'the wire')!

yeah vagn and pops are shady and the thing in the basement is well suspect -- though i sort of feel those mean cops planted it

otm on the boyfriend's dad -- he has to come into it somehow

Boyfriend's dad seems more of an organised crime sort of guy than a rapey psycho, and that's how he ties in with Dad and Vagn and their shady past imo. I mean, this is a serial killer at work isn't it? Not sure why they haven't investigated more old cases though.

this is a serial killer at work isn't it?

Actually scratch that, I'm daftly assuming that both murders were done by the same guy, but there are inconsistencies in the way they were disposed of, so maybe it was two different killers? But they were in the same location, so it looks like at least the same person dumped both bodies (maybe they were being blackmailed, seems like some money has been changing hands between that one guy and his bro). But then that whole necklace thing... gah!

ok i don't actually think this but: vagn and leon had a sideline in disposing of bodies. maybe sometimes for organized crimey dude. sometimes for highly-placed murderers. hey it could happen.

Looking forward to check this out, but is it better than Spiral? That was the last euro-thriller to get all the critical raves, and it turned out to be, er, rubbish.

xp lol @ that, but I don't want it to be Vagn cos he's turned into quite a sweet character. The water pistol thing, his real anguish at seeing the mum and dad fall apart, the way he only wanted dad to beat a little bit of shit out of the teacher.

I don't know what Spiral is!

this has become a major saturday night pleasure.
current routine : eat with kids. drink red wine. watch crappy saturday night gumph. kids go to bed. watch this + more red wine.
subsequently, the catch up prior to the start of each episode is vital.
best thing on non-sky/cable tv in ages.
there was a time i thought they were referencing twin peaks with bloke-cop always eating, and there was even a scene with a lady who i thought was going to become similar to the log lady, making me for a week or two theorise it was going to go all surreal.
thankfully, it hasn't, and has kept me and my better half guessing/reguessing for last 2 months.
brilliant.

there was a time i thought they were referencing twin peaks

Absolutely, don't forget the video tapes of the dead girl.

yeah the pics from the american remake look super twin peaks

Towards the end of something like this, I start thinking of characters who appeared early, then disappeared from the radar but could be mixed up in it somehow. Rie's dad, for example, and the first police chief who left possibly Knowing Something and was replaced by dodgy Brix. Boyfriend's Dad also a good call, hadn't thought of him.

Rie's dad, for example

oh! that is a good point. yes. i think rie stayed true but obviously has something else in play.

Rie's dad is pulling strings somewhere for sure.

Thing that puts me off the boyfriend's dad is maybe a bit ridic, but wouldn't the producers avoid having a muslim as the villain of a major series like this considering the cartoon controversy in Denmark a year or so before this was made?

Not that anyone would protest against it or anything, but they might just be sensitive towards portraying muslims as the bad guys.

i definitely don't think he's the major villain -- but they have been sensitive to that, and to denmark's racial politics, they had a muslim guy wrongly accused, and hartmann vindicated by backing him

So, were we happy with how this ended?

Keeping it spoiler-free, but even though there were still loose ends I thought the quality of the drama, especially the scenes in the basement and the woods, more than made up for it.

is it me or are the doors to the offices in the police station terrible looking? like some terrible marbling effect.

thought the penultimate ep was str8 fire

a few probs with it, i guess... i hope that the old cases are a part of the next series

coz the cops seemed a bit unnecessarily shifty no, if there wasn't a high-up conspiracy, if it was just vagn, right? so brix telling lund not to pry must have meant something.

kind of funny but i can't keep track of 'what happened'

I thought it was just because Brix was worried that Lund might find something connected to City Hall and make his hopes of career progression suffer, a "trying not to bite the hand that feeds" affair.

I thought the ending suggested that there was more to it than had been revealed - Lund looked like she was still mulling things over in her mind as she walked outside in the final sequence, and Troels' phone call to Brix seemed a bit ambiguous to me - but Lund had finally realised her own "crime", if you will, was getting too wrapped up in the case.

yeah my gf + i were trying to sort of recap it, and we couldnt remember a lot of the reasons for difft things... like what was the deal with the bloody room downstairs at the school? how did that tie in

thank goodness for iplayer to help recall the bits that the red wine has fugged up.
way too many questions were flying around on sunday morning between my wife and i.
still one of the best tv dramas in a long time.

yeah no question

Just finished watching this. Some absolutely killer scenes (the hoodie moment! the bloodstain!) and some nice plot symmetries too but there are lots of niggly things that are still bugging me (he dumped the car in the water - how the hell did he get back to civilisation afterwards? I can't get apparent ages to fit the timeline either). Also a massive clue from earlier which they didn't make a big deal of or bother spelling out later, but in hindsight I should have picked up it (remember that plaster on that one guy's neck?)

Thinking about that top and wondering about its age. Did matey boy find it at the storage place and put it on there? To conceal his identity or as an act of remembrance? Couldn't have been in his wardrobe all that time, right?

xpost was the bloody room not where Oliver and Lisa (ie the classmates) had sex, and she tried to jump up because the pal Jeppe was filming it on his phone and she cut her arm?

Few eps into the second series after finishing the first in record time.

I agree with folks that I never could quite piece together what exactly the series one killer *did*, there are some details [spoilery stuff removed, I'm sure you can pick some] that don't hang together at the end.

If you'll notice the second and third series are half the length of the first one, which is a smart decision. At a certain point in the first series they've considered so many main characters main suspects that it gets kinda absurd. They address that a bit in the show, but still. That and the fact that everyone lies to the police routinely and wait until they're shoved in a cell before they start explaining why they're not the guy, which creates drama but gets crazy after a while. The English title of the show really should be I Should Have Told You ...

But it's still awesome. I like how Meyer becomes the reasonable cop over time and Lund becomes the loose cannon. Lund's full-on OCD is cracking me up; it's funny how every popular detective in fiction is essentially Holmes, a socially dysfunctional, borderline autistic savant.

Reading up on this has led me to Engrenages too, so I'm stoked. It's nuts having access to entire seasons of shows these days, it's like crack

If you'll notice the second and third series are half the length of the first one, which is a smart decision. At a certain point in the first series they've considered so many main characters main suspects that it gets kinda absurd.

yeah. think in the end this show was as much about the characters as the mystery, so that although it was convoluted, it was still good. in a way, troels had very little to do with the case, given the amount of time we spent with him even after he was eliminated as a suspect. i did expect more from that storyline, some cover-up of real guilt, idk. will watch again in a year or two.

I saw all of it. Season 2 was great as well. Such a great series. As I'm a knitter, I kept checking out her sweaters. lolol

not sure if i'll wait for s02 to come to UK television. presumably subtitled versions are out there somewhere. but first i will watch the US remake, if it's any good.

Is it not possible for people to discuss the series without spoiling it for others?

not really. rule of thumb: if the series has been broadcast, it's fair game. but sorry!

Maybe get a mod to put a warning in the thread title?

yeah ive asked

Oh damn, yr quick.

Lund psyching herself up in the police car to do what she knew was stupid but necessary was fantastic. Spiral back on BBC4 this weekend with the astonishingly beautiful red headed defense attorney.

Just finished Series 2, which in some ways is better (more concise) - the character of the Justice Minister is really endearing, I don't think you'd find someone like him as a gov't figure on a US drama.

Count me in for one of those sweaters!

Taking a break from being tubeglued to crime TV to get back to the human race - when I come back it's on to Spiral, glad people dig that. And redheads.

NOT THE CRISPS - NEIIIIIIIN

Should have embeddinated that

http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DKaDk0YdCWjI

Guuuuuh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaDk0YdCWjI

I got really, really addicted to this. There are some excellent, excellent performances by the cast. Some of the subtle looks and facial expressions and inscrutable interiority you get out of the characters is fucking excellent. In fact pretty much everyone was excellent. Eventually got kind of fatigued by Troels Hartmann but mainly because, unlike The Wire, the political superstructure really had fuck all to do with it. Someone stole a car in episode one and that's still all it was in the end. The Jan Meyer buddycop was my favourite though. He was just unbelievable the way he is simultaneously this gun-toting hardass and a guy who says "I promised my wife I'd keep a job for more than three weeks."

I just finished it this morning and I realize when I think back to the initial suspects (that semi-retarded guy who tied up an old woman for absolutely no reason) how distended the plotting of the show had really been. It would probably work better if you watched only one episode a week... A few days later you've sort of forgotten and you're ready for someone else to be the main suspect. Watching it on DVD or downloaded kind of compresses everything too much (whereas the Wire seemed to work even better the more of it you watched in a sitting).

In a weird clumsy way I like how practically everyone was the main suspect at some point. I was even considering Pernille Birk Larsen at one point. Or some weird combination of Pernille Birk Larsen and Troels Hartmann (who misleadingly seemed to recognize each other in a hallway early on in the series... with weird music playing over the top). Kept wanting them to introduce satanists or something but oh well.

The Jens Holck thing was, I think, where the series started to tip over into something that didn't really have all its marbles... like almost in a Tommy Wiseau way, but obviously still outwardly very serious and well-done.

(not reading this thread - yet) I'm on ep. 15 & wondering what five more episodes are going to consist of. I mean, Jens H could not have been a red herring, right?.. I have to say that I did pick him for the deed pretty early on (always the quiet ones), but now I am generally dumbfounded & loving it completely.

I hope the US version takes a different path so that watching it won't simply be a retread.

Who is the American actor who looks just like the actor that played Brix? I can't place him.

Jan Meyer was the best! That actor has the Dutch/Danish face going on that always reminds me of these:
http://www.weirdotoys.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/puppets01.jpg

boo, my little drawing didn't work.

Excellent.

meyer's bananas

The Bridge is back on BBC 4! First two episodes were really good.

lol

— Did you forget to log off?

— No way! … I don't know

The Bridge is good. Martin's charachter seems to have a more sympathetic on Saga's Aspergers like traits in this series.

—Are you walking out on your mother's speech?
—Yes, that's exactly what she's doing.

i was enjoying how no one on danish tv is familiar to me, and then i start watching 'borgen' and there's lund's old partner meyer in a new role, doh

oh man 'borgen' is so watchable, way more compelling than 'forbrydelsen'

it's like if they took all the sorkin shit out of west wing and just left you with the drama of governing

also half of it is about journalists so it is also better than the newsroom

there's lund's old partner meyer in a new role, doh

VERY different character as well

find Borgen extremely over-rated. The Greenland episode, oozing with Scandi goody-goodyness really threw me off the whole series.

i like how she started out all full of life and then became dead inside

the circle is drawn a little too closely, i think. like after their green party muslim friend quits government, there he is again 1-2 episodes later in their PEACE IN AFRICA episode to act as translator between the african presidents. they didn't have any professional translators in for that shit??

even ol bengt had basically disappeared before nyborg had to fire him. makes it seem like she runs the country w/ basically one pr flack and her secretary and civil servant. then again, it only has a population of 5 million.

So caught up with season 2 of 'The Bridge', well up to episode 8 anyway.
Saga Noren is such a BOSS!

Oh man, what an ending!

troels looks like limmy

― cozen, Monday, 14 March 2011 12:33

LOL

Just finished S1 of this. Good stuff! Would like to read the thread but don't want to see S2/3 spoilers.

Ha, that's a bit like us -- we snagged a cheap used Blu-ray import of all three seasons last year and saw the first, but haven't had a chance to do the follow-ups.

Got S2 lined up. Cheap used sets is usually how I do TV series'. Of course now I'm intrigued by The Bridge...

Saga Noren is such a BOSS!

I feel like I'm going to miss her when the show ends, although I've only watched the first two seasons so far.

The villains in seasons 1+2 of The Bridge were kind of ludicrous but heck it's very good entertainment.

oh, this is probably a better thread to bump.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03bnc34

The Bridge series 4 starts on the 11th, on BBC2(!). all 30 previous episodes currently available on iplayer if you feel like a binge.

I'm down with any scene where Saga and her partner are in the car and she's aggressively questioning him about his sex life.

you may like this then (turn on subtitles):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ4bMOU23D0