Spoilery thoughts on the end of Deadloch
Aug. 11th, 2023 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrThis is all SUPER DUPER spoilery and the show is the kind of mystery it's a lot of fun to watch unspoiled. If you have any interest in watching, do that first! This post will be waiting!
Here is my non-spoilery review.
Just after finishing the final episode I cheerfully rambled to a friend about the ending, since I thought they would be interested and they are never going to watch the show (and enjoy being spoiled for things anyway)
So! Here are my slightly edited reactions.
Just finished the lesbian-detective-solves-murder-mystery Deadloch and it had it's flaws but was pretty fun, it was clear they had a list of Heterosexist Murder Mystery Cliches and used them as red herrings before very definitely NOT doing that.
Which worked as both effective red herrings and sly social commentary, though they could have had some trans characters BEYOND the (plausibly straight) cis dude who turns out to be a crossdresser, which was setup for him being a red herring and then the gay male police officer going HDU HE IS A GREAT GUY GENDER IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT AND CLICHES ABOUT CROSSDRESSING SERIAL KILLERS ARE THE REAL PROBLEM. And he really is a great guy and it was all a misunderstanding and the character basically never comes up again except for a shot of him publicly smiling in a dress in the epilogue.
But there was this whole thread where like, men keep being murdered, and we see their naked or seminaked bodies all laid out like female murder victims usually are, and then it turns out each guy was an absolute asshole with lots of people, especially women, with motives to murder him. And so it's like oh god did one of the mistreated women snap and start killing.
BUT THEN
They realise the serial killing didn't start in the small town. It started with killing female sex workers in Sydney.
And the killer turns out to be the male love interest of the other detective, who always seemed implausibly into her from first sight and was nice to everyone in a Bland Love Interest Without Much Inner Life way. He gives this whole speech about how he met one of the mistreated women, and heard her horror stories about the shitty country town she grew up in, and learned about Feminism, and went Ah! I will be an Ally to Women, and murder Bad Men. And they will think this is great!
They do not. When they try to explain this to him he's like ah but you're just victims of the patriarchy who don't know what you need :(
Like the show makes you think it's someone motivated by Specific Personal Trauma or whatever but no, he's just a serial killer. His current MO is killing men he can tell himself he is Bettering the World by killing, but before that it was killing women he thought he was Bettering The World by killing cos he has some fucked up weird christian issues with sex.
It felt like a metaphor for people who are consistently assholes, but change their assholery to seem more progressive when that turns out to be an effective way to justify it. When his girlfriend has the killer at gunpoint he says she should calm down so they can "snuggle and watch some Buffy" lol. The show has a long line of people (mostly men but also an "antiracist" white woman etc) who justify doing whatever they hell they want as Helping Others while being bigoted and self serving. (in the final episode the racist white woman gets randomly bitten by a snake and dies after attempting to murder two aboriginal girls, which was a bit on the nose but this was not always a very subtle show)
The show felt like it was written by people very involved in queer social spaces who have maybe Seen Some Shit. Specifically, white cis lesbians who maybe have not entirely unpacked some of their own biases, it was not a perfect show by any means.
But the ending with that guy ranting about what a great ally he was, covered in blood, including of a woman he'd just stabbed (he apologised for that, but she was trying to stop him escaping) and then 'escaping' into a river while the detectives were like don't do that you'll drown and he's all lol I swam around hiding bodies for all these years I'll be fine but it's a very fast river and he goes over waterfall and gets impaled on a log. That was all very satisfying.
His now ex-girlfriend detective asks the lesbian detective if lesbianism is something you can learn and then the next time you see the two of them they are plausibly in a throuple with the detective's wife.
Oh also like, this obnoxious sexist dude who wanted to be mayor gathered all the men to be safe from what he assumed was some Evil Lesbian Serial Killer. And of course it was A Trap.
Serial killer is cheerfully telling the drugged dudes (including a bunch of guys we know are gay, into crossdressing, etc) that they just have to be killed for the greater good
and then the gay police officer in town is like wait I know how to quickly help this, and gathers all the women (including two medical professionals) remaining in town to help rescue them and save them. Which was an enjoyable reverse damsel moment. If again a bit heavy handed but sometimes I am into that!!
And I liked that it was like yeah sometimes men are assholes but plenty of men deal with heavy shit too and ultimately we have to all be in community with each other.
And also some women are assholes and deserve to be killed by snakes. But not murdered. Murder is bad. Just, you know.
Friend: hahahaha
If they happen to be killed by a snake.
Friend: IF A SNAKE HAPPENS TO BE PRESENT
Maybe that's not so bad.
She'd been using the presence of the snakes as an excuse to keep Aboriginal people off her land. It's just not SAFE you see...
Also the two detectives were hot, and even though it refused to have any Sexy Dead Ladies there were a few excuses to have attractive middle aged women show their boobs for (in universe) artistic reasons, and the Tasmanian Tourism Board Funding Mandated Shots Of Pretty Trees were pretty and not too distracting.
Thinking about it after I went to bed, I did feel a little weird about how the killer gave off Weird Dude vibes, that had previously pinged me as a little autistic coded. Also in the end the two obnoxious, vocally sexist dudes had their tongues cut out before they could be rescued, and the show is very "obviously cutting people's tongues out is terrible" but also at the end there's a shot of one of them sitting sadly and silently by himself and it did feel a little "karmic justice, now he literally can't talk over women". Which is pretty mild as Problematic Murder Mystery Endings go, but still.
I had some other thoughts, hmm...
The skewering of sexist incompetent male police officers was a bit heavy handed but I enjoyed it, the show gets around the uncomfortableness of revelling in The Police Force Saving The Day by having the leads get kicked off the case at the last minute by an obnoxious male higher up who struts around being sexist and incompetent and assuming the problem is Evil Man Hating Lesbians.
Some of the final episode scenes don't make a lot of sense if you think about them for very long but worked for me in the moment as a way of tying everything up in a satisfying way.
The show did a great job of setting up a sequence of kinda sexist/transphobic etc red herrings that totally had me and Cam going "Is it X? That's a bit of a cliche but it all fits" then lampshading that it was Definitely Not That, Geeze.
Still like my idea of a trans guy being one of the men in the final episode, so the killer can be all "I'm such a great ally I respect trans people which is why I am killing you too :)"
I liked the way the show wrote the Dumbass Conservative Shrieking White Woman. In the end she is both perpetrator and victim of the problems in the town, who has been abused by more powerful men since she was a kid, and once she finds out her son is gay she decides to be a somewhat annoying but mostly well meaning ally. And in general the ending makes a point of showing all the women who the killer said he was helping have worked together with each other and the remaining men to save themselves and each other.
They played around with "detective whose wife Just Doesn't Understand (and is maybe the murderer???)" tropes before settling on "the wife and detective just need to work through their problems but are ultimately ok" which...mostly worked for me? I think? Their marriage is still kinda messed up but one of the themes is that people are all messed up but can still make things work, so, sure.
Here is my non-spoilery review.
Just after finishing the final episode I cheerfully rambled to a friend about the ending, since I thought they would be interested and they are never going to watch the show (and enjoy being spoiled for things anyway)
So! Here are my slightly edited reactions.
Just finished the lesbian-detective-solves-murder-mystery Deadloch and it had it's flaws but was pretty fun, it was clear they had a list of Heterosexist Murder Mystery Cliches and used them as red herrings before very definitely NOT doing that.
Which worked as both effective red herrings and sly social commentary, though they could have had some trans characters BEYOND the (plausibly straight) cis dude who turns out to be a crossdresser, which was setup for him being a red herring and then the gay male police officer going HDU HE IS A GREAT GUY GENDER IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT AND CLICHES ABOUT CROSSDRESSING SERIAL KILLERS ARE THE REAL PROBLEM. And he really is a great guy and it was all a misunderstanding and the character basically never comes up again except for a shot of him publicly smiling in a dress in the epilogue.
But there was this whole thread where like, men keep being murdered, and we see their naked or seminaked bodies all laid out like female murder victims usually are, and then it turns out each guy was an absolute asshole with lots of people, especially women, with motives to murder him. And so it's like oh god did one of the mistreated women snap and start killing.
BUT THEN
They realise the serial killing didn't start in the small town. It started with killing female sex workers in Sydney.
And the killer turns out to be the male love interest of the other detective, who always seemed implausibly into her from first sight and was nice to everyone in a Bland Love Interest Without Much Inner Life way. He gives this whole speech about how he met one of the mistreated women, and heard her horror stories about the shitty country town she grew up in, and learned about Feminism, and went Ah! I will be an Ally to Women, and murder Bad Men. And they will think this is great!
They do not. When they try to explain this to him he's like ah but you're just victims of the patriarchy who don't know what you need :(
Like the show makes you think it's someone motivated by Specific Personal Trauma or whatever but no, he's just a serial killer. His current MO is killing men he can tell himself he is Bettering the World by killing, but before that it was killing women he thought he was Bettering The World by killing cos he has some fucked up weird christian issues with sex.
It felt like a metaphor for people who are consistently assholes, but change their assholery to seem more progressive when that turns out to be an effective way to justify it. When his girlfriend has the killer at gunpoint he says she should calm down so they can "snuggle and watch some Buffy" lol. The show has a long line of people (mostly men but also an "antiracist" white woman etc) who justify doing whatever they hell they want as Helping Others while being bigoted and self serving. (in the final episode the racist white woman gets randomly bitten by a snake and dies after attempting to murder two aboriginal girls, which was a bit on the nose but this was not always a very subtle show)
The show felt like it was written by people very involved in queer social spaces who have maybe Seen Some Shit. Specifically, white cis lesbians who maybe have not entirely unpacked some of their own biases, it was not a perfect show by any means.
But the ending with that guy ranting about what a great ally he was, covered in blood, including of a woman he'd just stabbed (he apologised for that, but she was trying to stop him escaping) and then 'escaping' into a river while the detectives were like don't do that you'll drown and he's all lol I swam around hiding bodies for all these years I'll be fine but it's a very fast river and he goes over waterfall and gets impaled on a log. That was all very satisfying.
His now ex-girlfriend detective asks the lesbian detective if lesbianism is something you can learn and then the next time you see the two of them they are plausibly in a throuple with the detective's wife.
Oh also like, this obnoxious sexist dude who wanted to be mayor gathered all the men to be safe from what he assumed was some Evil Lesbian Serial Killer. And of course it was A Trap.
Serial killer is cheerfully telling the drugged dudes (including a bunch of guys we know are gay, into crossdressing, etc) that they just have to be killed for the greater good
and then the gay police officer in town is like wait I know how to quickly help this, and gathers all the women (including two medical professionals) remaining in town to help rescue them and save them. Which was an enjoyable reverse damsel moment. If again a bit heavy handed but sometimes I am into that!!
And I liked that it was like yeah sometimes men are assholes but plenty of men deal with heavy shit too and ultimately we have to all be in community with each other.
And also some women are assholes and deserve to be killed by snakes. But not murdered. Murder is bad. Just, you know.
Friend: hahahaha
If they happen to be killed by a snake.
Friend: IF A SNAKE HAPPENS TO BE PRESENT
Maybe that's not so bad.
She'd been using the presence of the snakes as an excuse to keep Aboriginal people off her land. It's just not SAFE you see...
Also the two detectives were hot, and even though it refused to have any Sexy Dead Ladies there were a few excuses to have attractive middle aged women show their boobs for (in universe) artistic reasons, and the Tasmanian Tourism Board Funding Mandated Shots Of Pretty Trees were pretty and not too distracting.
Thinking about it after I went to bed, I did feel a little weird about how the killer gave off Weird Dude vibes, that had previously pinged me as a little autistic coded. Also in the end the two obnoxious, vocally sexist dudes had their tongues cut out before they could be rescued, and the show is very "obviously cutting people's tongues out is terrible" but also at the end there's a shot of one of them sitting sadly and silently by himself and it did feel a little "karmic justice, now he literally can't talk over women". Which is pretty mild as Problematic Murder Mystery Endings go, but still.
I had some other thoughts, hmm...
The skewering of sexist incompetent male police officers was a bit heavy handed but I enjoyed it, the show gets around the uncomfortableness of revelling in The Police Force Saving The Day by having the leads get kicked off the case at the last minute by an obnoxious male higher up who struts around being sexist and incompetent and assuming the problem is Evil Man Hating Lesbians.
Some of the final episode scenes don't make a lot of sense if you think about them for very long but worked for me in the moment as a way of tying everything up in a satisfying way.
The show did a great job of setting up a sequence of kinda sexist/transphobic etc red herrings that totally had me and Cam going "Is it X? That's a bit of a cliche but it all fits" then lampshading that it was Definitely Not That, Geeze.
Still like my idea of a trans guy being one of the men in the final episode, so the killer can be all "I'm such a great ally I respect trans people which is why I am killing you too :)"
I liked the way the show wrote the Dumbass Conservative Shrieking White Woman. In the end she is both perpetrator and victim of the problems in the town, who has been abused by more powerful men since she was a kid, and once she finds out her son is gay she decides to be a somewhat annoying but mostly well meaning ally. And in general the ending makes a point of showing all the women who the killer said he was helping have worked together with each other and the remaining men to save themselves and each other.
They played around with "detective whose wife Just Doesn't Understand (and is maybe the murderer???)" tropes before settling on "the wife and detective just need to work through their problems but are ultimately ok" which...mostly worked for me? I think? Their marriage is still kinda messed up but one of the themes is that people are all messed up but can still make things work, so, sure.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-12 03:29 pm (UTC)I confess that I spent a lot of the show fearing that it was all going to go off the rails because, as you say, "people very involved in queer social spaces who have maybe Seen Some Shit" can poke fun at those spaces in an informed way, but it hewed a bit close to deriding so it made me anxious.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-15 10:06 am (UTC)Yeah, same. I've been burned before!