Summary
Land of Sin has a surprisingly hopeful ending for a show so determinedly bleak, with “Queen Bee” offering a glimmer of redemption for Dani instead of allowing the cycle of misery to continue.
For such an unrelentingly bleak show, the ending of Land of Sin is probably a bit happier than anyone was really expecting. While it’s impressively devoted to the visual and thematic hallmarks of Nordic noir, Peter Grönlund’s series veers away from the standard ultra-grim climax to instead offer a note of bittersweet redemption. Sure, there’s still a lot of awful business in Episode 5, “Queen Bee”, but the parting note is one of hope rather than misery.
This is on a personal level, anyway. For Dani, she reaches a very important personal juncture where she realises that she’s willing to endure the fight for Oliver, despite his difficulties; her inability to do the same for Silas was, after all, in large part the inciting incident of the entire plot, with him having been left to the mercy of his addiction, his community, and the exploitations of grim criminal figures like Jarven.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s break this finale down, shall we?
The Stakes Are Personal
At its core, Land of Sin is a whodunit. Dani is summoned to Bjäre by Ivar, the father of Silas, a difficult boy who had been removed from his family and fostered by Dani after intervention from Social Services. However, when caring for him became too difficult, especially given his relationship with Dani’s similarly drug-addicted son, Oliver, he ended up back in the wild. When Dani is told he has disappeared, she’s driven to find him by a sense of guilt and personal responsibility.
These feelings are only intensified when it turns out that Silas was murdered. As if that wasn’t close enough to home, when Oliver’s DNA is found under Silas’s fingernails, he becomes the prime suspect.
While suspended from the police force for crossing one line too many, Dani has to not only grapple with the potential that both of her young charges were ultimately beyond saving, but also work, alone and with her new partner Malik, to figure out the precise circumstances of Silas’s death.
Who Killed Silas?
This is the big question of the series, and it has a relatively complicated answer. In the simplest possible terms, Silas was killed by Jon, Elis’s son.
But this isn’t the half of it. Elis was fighting with Silas’s father – his own brother – Ivar over a land dispute. The government was happy to hand out sizeable grants for arable land, life-changing money for a family of humble farmers, and the titular Land of Sin was particularly lucrative.
When Silas came knocking for the money that was supposedly “owed” by Elis and his wife, Katty, on account of Elis, the older brother, inheriting the land, the matriarch decided something must be done. She put Jon to this purpose by manipulating him into a confrontation with Silas. When Silas made a particularly uncouth remark about Jon’s disabled brother, Harald, Jon killed him, and Katty helped to cover it up.
Elis Kills Jarven
Throughout much of the series, Jarven, a notorious local drug lord with a menacingly scarred face, is the prime suspect. He had most of the youth in the area working for him, and his operation extended beyond drugs and into blackmail.
Elis was determined to protect his family at all costs, which meant taking out Jarven himself. This was problematic for Dani, since she needed Jarven alive to exonerate Oliver, but no such luck. In the most brutal scene of Land of Sin, Elis beats Jarven to death, which is really the least he deserves if you think about it.
Sacrificial Lamb
Despite Elis being more willing to get his hands dirty, it’s really Katty who’s the most deplorable string-puller in this series. Her worst move is a late-game play to try to protect Jon by convincing Harald to confess to Silas’s murder in his stead. Despite the fact that everyone knows he wouldn’t hurt a fly, his substantial physical strength makes him a viable suspect, and since he’s too naive to realise what’s going on, he confesses to Dani.
Elis sees through this, though. At the first opportunity, he knocks Dani half-unconscious and legs it with his boys. In the woods, Dani and Malik eventually catch up, as does Kimmen, Silas’s vengeful brother. Sensing an opportunity, Elis goads Kimmen into shooting him by claiming it was him who killed Silas. He’s willing to sacrifice his own life to protect Harald and Jon.
Dani respects this gesture enough to tell Malik – she’s still suspended, remember – to treat Elis’s “confession” as the end of the matter. The sons shouldn’t pay the price for the sins of the mother, or at least that’s the logic, though I’m not sure it necessarily applies to Jon, who seemed to go quite far out of his way to kill Silas. Sure, he was upset about it afterwards, but I’m not sure that’s the point. Harald, though, was totally innocent, and I’m relieved nothing bad ends up happening to him (the death of his father notwithstanding, obviously.)
Redemption
The ending of Land of Sin is really about Dani feeling as though she has done the right thing by Silas, to hopefully assuage some of the guilt she feels about having given up the fight for him the first time around. This also inspires her to make more of her relationship with Oliver, who is exonerated by the crime being pinned on Elis.
It won’t be easy, of course. But the finale leaves us with a note of positivity, as that process of healing and reconciliation has at least begun. It’s better than nothing.
