The Killing

The Killing's fourth and maybe, probably, almost definitely final season came to Netflix last week, and it should be getting a lot more love than it has been from major media outlets and taste arbiters and think-piece peddlers and what have you.

I could talk about the fantastic acting between the two leads, Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and Steve Holder (Joel Kinnaman), the terrifying performance by the young, unknown actor who played the killer (and not just a killer, but an entire-family-murdering killer), the buzzy Joan Allen performance, or the appropriately expanded role for Gregg Henry's Detective Reddick, who gradually but believably transformed from suspected murdering pedophile into the moral center of the show.

But what really matters is the last scene of the last episode, when Linden realizes that the little moments that made up most of what we saw in the show was as good as it got for her. Most characters in filmed entertainment bring a significant back-story, and we assume that they had full lives filled with relationships, losses, joys, dinner parties, bar crawls and everything else that the contemporary well-adjusted professional person's life consists of. We assume that what we see during the film or show is just a small slice out of the larger pie of who they really are--we are just seeing a glimpse of their working life, maybe something of their home life, but for the most part they are more than what we are shown.

The one main through line in all four seasons of The Killing was Linden and Holder driving around rainy Seattle, smoking cigarettes, talking out the case they were working. Whatever else happened, they were always back in that car, Holder trying to seem like a professional, reliable man and not the tweaked out junkie he really was, Linden trying to foster something of a human personality.

One of the more affecting moments in the final season was when Linden overheard her semi-estranged son explaining to someone that he wanted to live with his mom because he feels bad that she has no one in her life. She's just a ghost who solves crimes and rips cigarettes and goes back to her empty house, keeping up the lie that she is more than that in her little interactions with people throughout the day. Hearing this forced Linden to confront her emptiness, and inspired her to scramble for whatever was true and nutritive in her life.

But at the end of the last episode, she realizes that those little moments in the car with Holder were everything--those were the best times of her life, and should not be shrugged off like meaningless connective tissue between more significant events. It's a beautiful realization in that special way things are beautiful when acknowledging how small and fragile life really is, by celebrating the most reliably ready and consistent moments of ease, no matter how unspectacular they may be.

It's hard to overstate how great that last scene was. It was like Mulder and Scully, albeit with several fewer seasons of history, realizing that the person you spend most of your time with really is your best friend, and that keeping up the fiction that there's more interesting stuff going on outside of those experiences is exhausting and unnecessary. What bravery it takes to embrace a truth like that, that the small moments are everything.