Forbrydelsen (The Killing) - Season 3

The Killing is back to the form of season 1. There is simply more room for emotional attachment when a family is involved.

Little Emilie is kidnapped and Sarah Lund, teamed up with a new colleague (again) and an old love from Special Branche, take over the case. It appears to be connected to the death of a girl a few years back. The old case was filed as a suicide, but as the kidnapping investigation progresses, and the law enforcement team get led around their noses by the kidnapper, it turns out that the girl was murdered.

The kidnapper of Emilie, daughter of the CEO of the powerful Zeeland Cooperation that has close ties to the Prime Minister (yes, of course, politicians are involved in all this again), is the murdered girl's father. Lund and her troop are forced to investigate on both fronts now and get to the original killer before the kidnapper does.

Privately, Lund is still living by herself and her relationship with her son Mark is more strained than it has ever been. When she sees her son while she is supposed to deliver money to the kidnapper she realizes that he is about to become a father. This shocks her for a moment and she misses the train she was told to get on by the kidnapper. So, all is not well.

After she ends up in bed with her partner from Special Branche, she gets cornered by his wife, which doesn't improve the situation.

In the end, they save the little girl in the nick of time. When Lund realizes who the original killer of the kidnapper's daughter was, she also understands that she has no hard evidence against him and he is unlikely to ever be prosecuted for his crime, at which point she does the worst possible thing she can possibly do. She shoots him.

The season ends with Lund on a plane fleeing to - one assumes - Finland. One also assumes that this might be the end of the series.

7/10

Forbrydelsen (The Killing) - Season 2

After stellar first season, Forbrydelsen would obviously have a hard time matching the high expectations (my high expectations, that is). So it is not as good as the first one. However, it is still much better than most other  crime shows on offer.

The milieu we are in this time around is military. Murders occur that turn out to be connected to a frequently referred to 'incident' in Afghanistan. The group of Danish soldiers involved in said incident, along with a lawyer representing them, are killed one by one. There is a story of a mysterious officer calling himself 'Perk' that was part of the issue. The claim is that civilians have been killed by the Danish soldiers. The group leader, Roben, insists that the culprit is this Perk, but his even being there (and his mere existence) has been denied by special forces. And once again, politicians are also involved in what starts to appear like a cover-up the longer the investigation lasts.

Sarah Lund, who has been recalled from her boring assignment in Sweden to assist with the investigation, goes again off into her own direction and more than once she is wrong in trusting her instincts, but through her irrational methods uncovers details that prove to be vital.

In season one, as the investigation moved along and new details about suspects emerged, we moved from one possible murderer to the next (and we did it with Lund-esque conviction). Back then it was always clear (to me, anyway) that it must have been someone we encountered early on (because that is how these shows work). The same applies for season two, only here - when the culprit took shape - I did not see it coming. Like, at all.

The show picked up speed around mid-season. At first, I had some difficulty staying with it because it lacked the grieving family that you could feel for enough and will the investigation to move forward. Most of the people in this are unsympathetic. The only one that had an air of likability was the newly installed justice minister. He, however, did through his principles overboard in the end to play at being politician for the sake of it.

Solid.

6/10

Forbrydelsen (The Killing) - Season 1

This is an excellent, excellent show.

It starts with the discovery of some bloody bits and pieces in an open field. Sarah Lund, on her very last on the Copenhagen police force (she is about to move to Sweden with her fiance) gets the seemingly minor case. She has to work along with her successor, Jan Meyer.

Quickly, it becomes clear that the case involves the disappearance of Nanna Birk Larsen, a 19 year old college student. After the discovery of her body in a car dumped in some lake. The car is part of a fleet belonging to the campaign office of local politician Troels Harmann.

The investigation starts at Nanna's school, with her friends and former boyfriend acting suspiciously. When nothing much comes of investigating them, the focus turns to one of Nanna's teachers, who saw her the night she disappeared and has been seen to remove something that could have been a body into a friends car. The secret he hides, however, turns out to be something entirely different, but not before Nanna's father takes the law into his own hands and is stoped just in time before killing him.

All the while, circumstential evidence (the car, the party flat, surveillance tapes) mounts against Hartmann, who is running for mayor. He is in and out of police custody, his alibi crumbles, and the political vultures circle over his head. He does get cleared, eventually, but the focus stays at town hall. As a consequence, a civil servant is killed in a hit-and-run, presumably because he knew to much about a moderate politician, who had an affair with Nanna until half a year previously. After he gets shot by police, the evidence against him is deemed enough to shut the case.

Doubts about his guilt arise when similar cases get connected to Nanna's, that go back some 15 years. We are now looking for a serial killer. While Lund's life falls apart around her and she seems to be out of her depth, the investigation moves closer to home, and now men working for Nanna's father become suspects. Lund cuts a lot of corners, and one of her unauthorized investigations costs her partner his life.

Her persistence and instinct are what cracks the case eventually, but it is a costly victory.

The US version has nothing on the Danish original, least of all a lead actress that awesome.

7/10