Shetland Again

[osprey_archer]

Once I’d written a post complaining about it, I finished season 3 of Shetland yesterday - and to add insult to injury the solution to the mystery wasn’t even good. They’d set up a number of satisfying possible murderers: an organized crime boss, his shady lawyer, or a corrupt government muckety-mucks.

And did they go with any of those options? NO. Instead the show pins the murders on an insane girl - seriously, there’s a scene establishing the fact that she’s been on very powerful antidepressants for years that seems to exist purely to establish that she’s mentally ill - presumably in the desperate hope that “Well, she’s insane!” might serve as an excuse for the fact that the plot devolves into nonsense.

But it actually makes the plot even more stupid, because her main insanity thing is “a monomaniacal pursuit of VENGEANCE” - and yet we’re supposed to believe this convoluted murder spree began when she saw her nemesis in a hotel chatting with a dude and then… for some reason followed the dude instead of the nemesis?

HOW DOES THAT MAKE ANY SENSE? IT’S LIKE HAVING AHAB FIND HIS WHITE WHALE AND THEN GO HARING OFF AFTER A PORPOISE.

And furthermore, the show has whole sections in this girl’s POV during the time of the murder. We’re supposed to be okay with the showrunners just leaving the murder out?

I’ve seen other mystery stories that do this - I know Agatha Christie did it in one of her novels too, so there’s precedence among the classics - but I hate it. It’s cheating and it’s profoundly unsatisfying.



But no viewer could have suspected that ending! So at least the ending is a SURPRISE, which obviously is a more important attribute in a mystery than actually making sense or being satisfying.

Well, on the bright side, this nicely settles the question of whether to keep watching if there’s a fourth season.

Comments

[ladyherenya]

Ugh. I once threw an Agatha Christie novel, in which the narrator turned out to be the murderer, down the stairs because I hated that twist so much. This sounds worse.

[osprey_archer]

It's such a cheat! Part of the fun of mystery novels for me is discovering the pieces of the puzzle along with the detective; it's no fun at all if the author has been straight up lying about those pieces.

[evelyn_b]

Killer POV is a dangerous business. I'm not a fan in general.

I'd argue that it works in the novel you're referencing, though, because the account begins as an attempt at obfuscation and only turns into a suicide note once discovery is inescapable. A first-person narrator who hides important parts of the story for reasons of his own is distinct from an author who hides them, imo.

HOWEVER, it's not going to work if you don't think through why we're seeing some things through the killer's eyes but not this presumably memorable and stressful murder experience. AND "the killer is just crazy yall" is a bad solution to a mystery 999 times out of 1000. Probably more often than that, but I'm trying to be generous.

[osprey_archer]

I haven't actually read the Christie book in question (in fact I think I've only read one Christie book. How can I hold my head up among Golden Age detective fans?), so maybe it is the one exception to the rule. If the killer has a reason to be writing the story that way, that's more forgivable than a story told in third-person POV where the author is withholding crucial information just to trick us.

Which is pretty much what you ended up saying anyway. We are in complete agreement!

You'd think a monomaniacal thirst for vengeance would work as a motive for murder, and yet it so often devolves into "the killer is just crazy yall." Even killers driven by a mad lust for vengeance ought to have an internal logic/consistency to their actions, you know? It doesn't really work if the author is just using it to try to paper over the inconsistencies in their writing.

[asakiyume]

Yeah; I like mysteries to be pretty much closed box: it has to be a character we've met. I also don't like a huge airdrop of previously unknown information in the eleventh hour. "You thought this was just the amiable next-door neighbor? Oh ho ho no, actuallyshewashavinganaffairwiththesonandwasafterthedad'smoneyandwasangrytobe....

Whoa, Nellie. Put some of that in the episodes that led up to this.

Otherwise it feels like cheating to me.

[osprey_archer]

Mysteries work best I think when they seed the pieces of the puzzle through the story - so that the final reveal is some small but crucial bit of information that snaps all the rest of the puzzle pieces in place. We've already discovered that the next-door neighbor is not as amiable as she likes to appear, and we already knew that she was having an affair with the son... but we didn't realize that her alibi for the night of the murder was false, or that she stood to inherit if the dad died, or whatever.

Or if the detective has all the information, but needs to look at it from a different angle, and then it snaps into place. A good mystery IMO is one where, once you do get that final piece of information, everything makes so much sense that you wonder why you didn't see it before.

[missroserose]

I've often compared a good mystery story to a piece of trompe-l’œil art, where the whole picture is present from the beginning but looks distorted and abstract until viewed from precisely the right angle, at which point it snaps into focus and everything makes sense. Otherwise, yeah, it feels like cheating. I'd say it's amazing how many lazy mystery writers there are out there, but then, there are a lot of lazy writers out there, period...but you'd think mystery writers would be at least a little more conscientious! When you're lazy writing a mystery, it really shows!

(...And now that I'm actually looking up the terminology, it appears what I'm actually thinking about is anamorphosis, a particular subset of trompe l'œil. Cool, I learned something today.)

[asakiyume]

Yes: I meant to say so earlier, but I endorse what you say here 100 percent.