The Killing’s Netflix Season Intrigues, When It Isn’t Distracting 

, the perhaps unfairly maligned adaptation of a popular Danish murder mystery series, has left AMC and begun a new (if brief) life on Netflix, and I'm tempted to tell you that this is a perfect point to pick the show up. New beginning, new viewership, all that. And I think that’s half true. This season’s central murder mystery—concerning a wealthy family’s brutal slaying and the students of a rigid military academy who are somehow involved—is plenty intriguing, playing more as a thriller than the somber grief melodrama of Seasons 1 and 2, or the issue-y, but effective, look at teen runaways in Season 3. For that reason, you should check out this new run of episodes.

But, as has always been a problem with this show, Season 4 of

spends far too much time in our lead detectives’ lives, kicking around in the fallout from last season's finale, which saw morose Seattle detective Sarah Linden (the forever frowning Mireille Enos) killing her paramour, who just so happened to be both a bigwig in the police department and the guy who was murdering all those runaways. With the help of her cocky, troubled partner, Holder (Joel Kinnaman, swaggery as ever, but with less charm now), Linden covers up the murder and tries to move on. But, of course, on this show, with all its rain-soaked miserablism, moving on is exactly what she, and the complicit Holder, can't do. There is a lot of guilty ache and anger, and many departmental obstacles to maneuver, all of which distracts from the thing we really care about. Or what I care about, anyway.

The common thinking might be that with actors of Enos's and Kinnaman’s caliber, these characters had to have something more to do than ask questions of suspects and peer sadly at bloody walls and murky, secret-keeping bodies of water. Hence, these looks into both detectives’ tortured lives. But at this point, four seasons in, we’ve seen Linden screw up with her sullen but patient son (conveniently dropped off to spend a dreary spring break with his mom), or Holder struggle to stay clean and sober, so many times before that I’d have to imagine that the actors are bored with it too. Maybe not! Maybe they welcome every time these troubled cops forget some personal obligation, yet again disappointing a loved one. But I’m tired of it. (And I’m tired of the conflict in so many detective stories being a wife/husband/kid/whatever who doesn't understand. “Stop solving that quadruple homicide and take me to dinner! You promised!” These people have sort of selfish priorities, no?)

If all that moping and canned conflict doesn’t chase you away, the rest of Season 4 is a dark, soapy delight. Who doesn’t like a story about a seemingly perfect family whose sordid secrets are revealed only after their gruesome deaths? (A fictional story, of course.) Especially when there’s a forbidding military school for troubled boys involved, home to a host of suspects, including the family’s sole survivor, his cruel bully, and the steely, furtive head of school, an Army colonel played by Joan Allen. It’s wonderful to see Allen back in imperious action again, mixing a bit of Pam Landy sternness with something sadder, and secretive. After four episodes, I have a hunch where her story line is going, but

Which is why I’ve stuck with the show when many others have long ago abandoned it. Sure, the first season was a cop-out full of frustrating red herrings, but the Rosie Larsen case did wrap up in devastating, somewhat shocking fashion by Season 2’s end. And then there was the poignant but scary sociology of Season 3, which showed that there was a real heart beating under all that cold, damp Pacific peat. So I’m expecting, hopefully not in vain, for Season 4 to show us another new side of this uneven, but rarely uninteresting, series. Most promisingly, the show flows much better when consumed in mass quantities, which Netflix subscribers will be able to do starting today. Without the week-by-week waiting, the show’s narrative hiccups are more excusable somehow, pulled along as we are by the mystery’s grim engine. If creator Veena Sud can restrain the impulse to follow our detectives home too often, this presumably final run of

could prove a satisfying, unsettling way to close the case.

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