*SPOILER WARNING*
Wow, what a show!
It is like a cross between the show In Treatment (shared characteristics: both shows revolve around therapy where you get insights into both patient and therapist) and The Fall (shared characteristics: both shows gives a realistic and gritty feel and revolves around a murderer). If you like both those shows, you might like this one too.
I really appreciate the stellar performances by Domhnall Gleeson and Steve Carell. They are excellent.
The show moves at a slow pace, which helps make you itch a little extra inside through increasing the discomfort. Why isn't this fast paced and entertaining all the time? Because life isn't like that, and the pacing gives a realistic feel to these extreme circumstances.
It's a complex show and explores relationship dynamics between parents and children, as well as between an extremely antisocial patient and therapist. I really like how the therapist realises his own shortcomings in his relationship with his son, through the treatment he is forced to give to the killer.
It also explores many other topics, like power dynamics and integrity to mention just a few.
It's not a show that glamourises the killer, and I appreciate that. It shows him as an emotionally and socially stunted person, extremely egotistical and cold in his actions, who has taken it upon himself to serve as judge, jury and executioner for those he deems unworthy to live. He is very unhappy and unfulfilled in his life, and he recognises that there is something really wrong with him, as he says. He wants to stop killing and that is the reason why he seeks help, through kidnapping a therapist he wants to receive help from. Apart from this wish to change, he is an extremely unlikable person, who has no trouble kidnapping a therapist and essentially robbing this person of his life and freedom, traumatising him horribly in the process and eventually killing him, purely to serve his own needs. Granted, there is no other way for him to seek help, because in order to get help he has to speak truthfully and if he speaks truthfully the therapist has to turn him in to the police. The only regard he has for other peoples lives is that he wants to stop killing people who he feels offended by. He blames his behaviour on his childhood, which was bad due to a violent father and a submissive and enabling mother, but his mother says he was always like this, or "always Sam", and besides, many people experience horrible things and do not end up murdering people.
In the end, the murderer realises that his unwilling therapist is right, in that the only way to stop himself from killing is to be physically restrained, and chooses to restrain himself in his mothers house. This is after he has killed his therapist, which proved his therapists point; he couldn't stop killing just because he was able to stop himself from killing his father.
So, that concluded the therapy, and the progress the killer made through his journey, was that he realised that he couldn't stop killing unless he physically restrained himself, and so chose to physically restrain himself.
There is so much more I could have mentioned because this show is so rich in nuance and has many layers, like a very delicious and disturbing cake with existential filling. But I'll leave it at this and say I don't think this show is everyone's cup of tea, but for me, this is a 10 out of 10!
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