The Killer (spoilers)

I enjoyed this series and would love to see more like it, but I also thought it wasted a lot of potential. Particularly, for what is essentially a tribute to giallo and slasher films, I was really disappointed with Wakefield as a character and as an antagonist.

Did anyone else find that the show really jumped the shark when Wakefield was revealed to be alive and behind the murders? There were plenty of moments that strained credulity before he stepped out of the shadows, but from the moment he appeared things got far more ridiculous. Surviving being shot and falling off of a cliff after the original massacre is perfectly cliche. But it wasn't just his backstory. He was a walking cliche the entire time he was on camera. The actor that portrayed him wasn't believable as a threat, either. Callum Keith Rennie always gets these smug villain roles because...well, he's been typecast as a smug villain. But he just isn't impressive enough to be believable as an all-powerful madman with superhuman strength and speed and all the trappings of a cliched slasher villain.

I know that the invincible villain is a staple of the slasher genre, but Wakefield often felt more like some kind of dumb action hero with all of those fight scenes and what not. It's one thing to suspend disbelief for all of the traps and off-screen kills. But on screen it was too obvious that he simply had the best plot armor money could buy. He was too good at everything, and too lucky in every situation. Everyone on the island has a gun by the time he's on screen, yet every time they see him they shoot once while he's some distance away - miss egregiously - and then are utterly shocked to find that they are out of ammunition. It doesn't take much special training to count objects. Then when he's finally ACTUALLY hit with a shot, he's barely injured for some reason and almost immediately recovers. This is not to mention the innumerous times where someone goes for a gun, or swings a weapon at him, and he just catches their hand or clears an entire room and grabs their gun before they can swing it in his direction. This is one of the worst horror cliches, because it is so obviously staged that it immediately shatters the fourth wall. The actor has to purposefully and obviously swing in a way that no one ever would in order to allow him to catch the weapon at a convenient angle and placement. It's stage-fighting at its most obvious and jarring, and there's no excuse for that kind of cheese on camera.

All of these tropes and dumb cliches show up in horror films, both in and outside of the slasher genre. But it's just worse here. Maybe it's just the fact that the extra running time caused them to revisit all of these cliches multiple times that made it so grating. Or maybe it's the fact that I expected more from Jeffrey Bell.

But at the end of it all, of course, as soon as Wakefield's plot armor recedes Henry just walks right up to him and stabs him and he promptly dies within 5 seconds just to keep the plot moving at a healthy clip. I know the twist with Henry was a whole thing, but it seemed like a lazy move to so quickly write Wakefield out as soon as the "real" final villain stepped in. It made his previous omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence that much more impossible to believe.