The end of The Kingdom’s original run. Season Two delves further into the mysteries and goings-on in the hospital and takes the characters in new directions. I did find this season to be slightly less tight than the last one, but still generally great overall. However, considering how it all “ends,” I can’t imagine what Danish viewers at the time would have felt. I’ll get more into my thoughts, and what that last sentence means, later. As always, let’s talk about the story first.
Continuing on from the last season, Helmer plots to give a Haitian zombie poison to Hook in order to zombify him and make him a non-threat. He actually succeeds in doing this, but he has to give him an antidote in seventy-two hours or else he’ll be permanently dead. Unfortunately, the hospital is taking Hook through the standard funeral and cremation procedures, with Helmer narrowly missing chances to give him the antidote (and narrowly missing some lawyers who are trying to get him to sign a court identifier for the Mona lawsuit). It comes down to Helmer having to pull the coffin out of the cremator while the conveyer belt is pulling it inward. We never actually see him administer the antidote, but Hook does come back to life, though now he’s acting much colder and self-involved than he was before (scarily close to Helmer, in fact). Meanwhile, Rigmor has had enough of Helmer’s weaselly ways and shoots him in the leg. Helmer emphatically wants nothing to do with her after this, but Rigmor isn’t letting Helmer off the hook so easily. Meanwhile, Judith is taking care of her newborn baby boy, a humongous, deformed, progeria-meets-polio spitting image of Aage Kruger whom everyone affectionately calls Little Brother. Kruger wants to use Little Brother as a vessel for his own soul, but L.B. rejects him, not wanting to give in to the evil of his ancestry. However, things become harder and harder for L.B. as his body is incredibly weak and virtually unusable (he’s essentially bedridden in a harness that at least allows him to look out the window). For a while, he plays pretend with Judith, living out a normal life as her son in this fantasy back-and-forth they come up with, but the emotional strain becomes too much for the both of them. Eventually, it comes down to this: he wants to die and he wants Judith to be the one to do it. Meanwhile, Christian, Mogge’s friend, has a thing for Sanne, the squeamish student nurse, but she finds him frustratingly boring and clearly has a thing for Mogge instead. It turns out that some of the lower-level staff and the students host this sort of “chicken” game in which one of them drives an ambulance into on-coming traffic and the rest bet on it. Christian disapproves of this at first, especially after the driver crashes into another car, sending its occupant to the Kingdom permanently maimed and not long for this world. However, after spending time with the man, and to prove his own bravery, he asks the driver if he can go with him on a run. The driver ends up panicking, suffering from PTSD after the crash, so in the heat of the moment, Christian fills in for him and actually comes back unscathed. He starts doing this on the regular, and still tries to pursue Sanne without directly telling her what he’s doing. He thinks he’s made some progress after confiding his worries with her, but sadly, things don’t turn out quite the way he’d hoped. Meanwhile, Mrs. Drusse continues her investigation into the supernatural forces within the Kingdom. While Mary was successfully put to rest, many other spirits still roam the halls and now Kruger is showing back up again as well. As she pushes further and further, she comes to the conclusion that there is a secret cult of devil worshippers stationed somewhere in the bowels of the hospital (this is why Kruger has been able to show up there). Bulder is concerned with how deep she’s trying to go with this, but she’s determined to quell both the ghosts and the demons that haunt the Kingdom. Other side plots include Dr. Bondo, who’s health deteriorates after leaving the tumor in too long, resulting in him needing a marrow transplant from a brother he didn’t know he had; Moesgaard, who gets involved with this odd therapy group to try and figure out what’s holding him back, but he mostly just ends up frustrating the therapist and his other clients; and Bob, the DG, who is trying to expose and eradicate the “nonsense and inefficiency” going on in the hospital, but always seems to either miss the evidence or can’t push further with his tactics due to circumstances. Now that we have the general plots laid down, let’s talk about my thoughts on this season.
While this season definitely keeps up the quirky oddness of the first, it also focuses on more dramatic elements in the show, like Judith and Little Brother’s situation, or Christian’s attempts to try and be braver. This does help to push the show forward, but I think the number of storylines going on at the same time can make this season feel less smooth and more disjointed. I did feel at some points that the episodes started to seem longer than they were before, which could actually be the case (I haven’t compared the runtimes yet), but longer timespan or not, the show did start to wear on me after a while. It’s not to the point of the show becoming terrible, it just felt a little harder to get through the episodes sometimes. I did still enjoy the show on the whole, and I especially appreciated the weird supernatural moments, such as when Mrs. Drusse spiritually sends Bulder into the “heart of the Kingdom,” or the sequence when she discovers the satanic cult in the hospital which is all shot in night vision. There’s also a recurring element that the characters seem to call “the eyes,” in which the camera gets this distorted shadowy filter over the shots. Considering that the camera is already hand-held most of the time, this gives off the impression that something in the hospital is watching everyone, which is clearly what they are going for (they call it “the eyes” for a reason). Something I definitely need to bring up is how this season ends. I won’t tell you the details, as I always try to avoid spoilers, but this season ends on a cliffhanger (several concurrent cliffhangers, to be exact). Keep in mind that this was the last season of the original run, and it took over two decades for there to finally be a season three. I can’t imagine what Danish audiences must have felt at the time. Granted, it’s not uncommon for European TV shows to be much shorter than ones over here, and for there to be several year gaps in between seasons (there was a three-year gap between the first and second season of this show, for example), but still, to not even have a real conclusion at the end of it all must have been annoying. It really makes me wonder what Von Trier even did in this long delayed third season, especially considering where a lot of the characters and storylines leave off here. Hook has basically become a different person entirely, several others end off in life-threatening events, and there’s a full-on devil cult in the bowels of the hospital. Adding to that is the fact that several actors died either soon after season two or within the time gap between then and now, so several characters must have been written off or killed or something. It’s a really weird scenario, but final season or no, this one is still worth watching. You might not even find some of the episodes to be dragging like I did, so I definitely recommend that you stick with this series. I’ll wrap things up here for now.
So, yeah, I still enjoyed the second season of The Kingdom despite some of the issues I had with it. I’m going to try and figure out a way to watch the third season if I can. Apparently, all three seasons are on MUBI, so if any of you had a potential interest in that service, this could be a good reason to check it out. Also, from what I understand, a character from Von Trier’s film The Idiots plays a big role in this final season, which frustrates me, since that was the one film of his I wanted to see but couldn’t find a way to. I guess if any of you manage to find a way to watch that film too before the next entry, give it a shot. For now, look forward to The Kingdom: Exodus, if I can actually get my hands on it.