Summary
“Black Water” unmasks the true killer, who is closer to home than anyone thought, and Jimi’s real fate is revealed.
This recap of Deadwind season 2, episode 8, “Black Water”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words. Read on to have the Deadwind Season 2 ending explained.
Check out our spoiler-free season review.
Check out all our recaps in the episode archive.
Across its first seven episodes, Deadwind Season 2 delivered plenty of twists and turns. It built up two overlapping cases and cleverly tied them into character-driven personal subplots and remained deliberately tight-lipped about who, exactly, was responsible for which crime, and more importantly why so many people – particularly young drug dealers – were turning up dead. Deadwind season 2, episode 8, “Black Water”, contained the biggest revelations yet.
But let’s lay out the shape of things. This was a more complex season than the freshman outing and had many more working parts, so it makes sense to get an idea of who was who and what was what. The central question of the season was, really, what happened to Jimi Aho, as his fate, while tying together everyone from his vengeful birth mother Mari Routa to Tapio Koskimäki, who wrote his name in blood as he died, remained nebulous throughout. It was only in the final moments of “Black Water” that we even learned he was alive.
That makes sense, though, since the season relied on us – and many of the characters – believing Jimi was dead. Routa believed he was killed aboard the Meelika and his murder was covered up to protect Mayor Sara Tulisuo’s secret meeting with Kaartamo Nordic. This turned out not to have been true, which put a big question mark over Routa’s entire vengeful crusade. When, right before committing suicide, she confessed to Karppi that she didn’t kill Koskimäki or his daughter, Kerttu, that was the confirmation that another killer was on the loose, one who was targeting young drug dealers. Jimi fit that description, so even if he wasn’t thrown overboard, he was probably killed for smuggling Subutex. Still, we believe he’s dead either way.
But he isn’t. In the dying moments of “Black Water”, one of his confidantes aboard the Meelika revealed that he was hidden away in the ship’s cargo hold and has been alive the whole time, which has resulted in countless deaths. Deadwind season 2 ends with him embracing his adoptive father on a windswept bluff – one of the show’s few happy moments.
That left Deadwind season 2, episode 8 to spend most of its time identifying whoever was killing the dealers, which, after some twists and turns which were all too obviously pointing towards Kulju, turned out to be Sten (savvy readers will recall I predicted this in the last recap.) This was discovered by Karppi, who recognized a ring he was wearing in a photo in Kulju’s home as being the same one drawn by Kerttu during her therapy sessions. Nurmi discovered the same thing, but quite by accident when he went to visit Sten about the case and found Kulju’s body in the trunk of his car.
Sten, it turns out, had been at this for years, beginning with an attempt on Kerttu’s life back in Estonia. She had managed to escape, and he’d left her alone until she turned up at the precinct looking for Koskimäki and recognized Sten’s ring. Hence Sten sending Koskimäki off to City Hall so that he could execute Kerttu – but when Koskimäki returned home, Sten was forced to kill him too. Most of the case had proceeded with the idea that Koskimäki was the target and that Kerttu had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it turned out to have been the other way around.
Again, Jimi ties into all this. He was never one of Sten’s victims, but Koskimäki wrote his name on the floor; he had been involved in signing his death certificate and avoiding the autopsy of his stand-in as a favor to Sara since Jimi was a witness to her daughter Lida’s attempted suicide. In this roundabout way, Jimi Aho led Karppi and Nurmi to a serial killer who had killed many young dealers just like him, both for the pleasure and as some vague way of cleaning up society.
In some sense, this was a happy ending. The culprit was brought to justice, the truth was uncovered, and the “good guys” came out of it okay. What’s more, is that there are plenty of threads left dangling for a third season: Karppi’s psychopathic son and her step-daughter, Henna, whose murder of Sasha she’s privy to, were subplots never properly resolved; Nurmi remains the father of a son he doesn’t know; and Sara is now a killer herself, having pushed Henri into the Baltic. Perhaps this Deadwind season 2 ending wasn’t quite so happy after all.
