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“One day you find out that your brother has been murdered, and you decide you have to know what happened. You feel sure that when you do find out, you’ll get closure. But it doesn’t work like that. When you find out the truth, it just leaves you cold.”
Truer words, Zoe Walker. Truer words.
White Lines‘ head-scratcher of a finale delivers on the show’s inherent promise to the viewer. Who killed Axel Collins? We find out—no Twin Peaks–style delays or supernatural obfuscations here. It’s made as plain as day in a series of herky-jerky flashbacks to the night in question, as Axel struggles Rasputin-like from one near-death experience to the next at the hands of his killer(s). In the present, Zoe receives a full confession from one of the participants. She discovers she was right to suspect her Ibizan friends of lying to and manipulating her, though she had the wrong men when she thought Boxer and Oriol were behind it all. Even David, whom I’ve suspected for most of the season based primarily on finding him annoying, is in the clear. (David and Oriol shot up and had sex that night, providing them with an alibi.)
No, the answer is that Axel Collins was killed by…Anna? And Marcus?
Lovely, free-spirited Anna, so full of advice and guidance and help? Marcus, the lovable loser who even in this very episode stumbles bass-ackwards into more murderous intrigue at the hands of the wives of the Romanian drug dealers Boxer killed a few episodes ago? That Anna? That Marcus?
Yes, the very same. It turns out that Axel nearly had sex with Anna again, like they’d done just after her wedding. But he then turned on her and began berating her and Marcus, threatening to reveal to the latter what she and he had done behind his back—and also admitting he’s burned all their money. When he starts having some kind of drug-related seizure, Anna, terrified to lose her future with Marcus, holds Axel under the water, appearing to drown him. But he wakes up in the boot of Oriol’s stolen car and slips out, so Marcus, who’s driving, runs him over to help out his wife. And when that doesn’t kill Axel, Anna brains him with a monkeywrench. And when that doesn’t kill Axel, she stabs him to death with a screwdriver. That about does the trick.
So. There you have it. It was Anna (and Marcus), with the pool and the car and the wrench and the screwdriver, in Ibiza. You’ve won this very weird game of Clue.
But has White Lines? Judging from how lost I’m feeling right now, I don’t think so.
Look, obviously someone we’d met before had to have been responsible for the murder, or this wouldn’t be much of a murder mystery show. And there was certainly no shortage of candidates. But something about choosing Anna and Marcus feels…I dunno, like a cheat, somehow.
Take Marcus, for instance. He’s been our tertiary protagonist throughout the season, ranking behind only Zoe and Boxer—and quite possibly ahead of the latter—as the character whose actions drive the story and whose plight elicits our sympathy. Remember him retrieving his drowning dog out of the pool? That sure takes on new meaning after watching him lug Axel’s waterlogged body around. Remember him disposing of the Romanians’ bodies with Zoe in that comedy of errors? Suddenly seems a lot less like endearingly dark comedy and a lot more unforgivable given his similar experience with Zoe’s own brother. Remember all the fits and starts he goes through as a result of his waning relationship with Anna? Surprise—they’re co-conspirators in a goddamn murder! Suddenly it’s a lot harder to care that they used to have a torrid sex life, you know?
As for Anna—well, it just strains credulity for me that such a person would run the risk of exposure inherent in basically becoming Zoe’s new BFF. Their heart-to-hearts about love and sex and romance and parenthood and music and Axel—it all now feels shitty and ugly and fraudulent. Which is maybe the point, as far as Zoe’s concerned, but it more or less rips the heart out of the story, rendering much of what we’ve witnessed effectively meaningless. Like, who cares if her new husband George is kind of a shit, now that we know she’s a goddamn murderer? The revelation renders so much of the preceding drama inert.
The asskicker is that in staging the initial phase of his death in a swimming pool, White Lines gave itself the perfect out. It could have all just been an accident, and a simple failure to intervene could have been the cause of death. That’s the kind of thing she could be effectively guilt-ridden about throughout the season without ever outright lying about whether she murdered him or not. But having established the gorier details of the trauma that befell his body early on, the show had to show someone inflicting those wounds. The result: a body blow to the integrity of these characters, in a way that makes it difficult to trust the show to deal you a fair hand.
Did I mention this all takes place on Anna’s wedding day, and that she actually goes through with the wedding? Like, just a couple hours after she watches Zoe run over and torture Boxer for information, then confessed to the crime herself?
(Additional lies noted for future reference next season: Boxer lies to Zoe that Clint died in a pure accident rather than as a result of a struggle with Oriol, whom he’d admittedly kidnapped; Oriol lies to Andreu and Conchita that the Martínezes kidnapped him, rather than Clint. Now back to our regularly scheduled kvetching.)
The answer to whodunit threw me so completely that I’ve started to take stock of the show and find it wanting in other ways. Like, this is supposed to be a series at least in part about the Manchester-to-Ibiza dance music pipeline. But since our primary window into that culture is the awful behavior of Axel, this undeniably attractive cultural scene just seems tawdry and thrill-seeking. You don’t really hear very much music, even, and though I’m willing to cut any show that uses both the Happy Mondays’ “Hallelujah” and A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray” as music cues some slack, that only gets you so far. And what about the titanic talent of Axel, a guy who went from literally nothing but the clothes on his back to running four or five nightclubs and having a successful recording and DJing career? Do we ever even catch so much as a glimpse of what made him so talented? Why is the loss of him and the era and scene he represents a tragedy?
White Lines‘ first season tried to do a lot of things, and that kind of ambition is worth praising. Zoe’s midlife crisis, her romance with Boxer, the Calafat family drama, Marcus’s third-time loser routine, David and his spirituality and drugs, Anna and her sexuality and drugs, raising teenage children, the sideplot about Zoe and Axel’s dad, Ibiza, house music—it’s all in there, and all of it is handled more or less well. But the whole isn’t so much less than the sum of its parts as it is a jumble of them thrown together, all of them prominent but none of them truly emerging as what this show is about. Its hedonistic pleasures are undeniable. But like many of its questing characters, I want more.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
