Dublin Murders's first season concluded this week with another double-serving, leading to the resolution (mostly) of the three cases it was dealing with, while also remaining pretty open-ended character-wise, in case a renewal profiled itself on the horizon.
Killer Cassie
The mysterious (life and) death of Cassie's doppelganger: Lexie was finally explained after an intense showdown between Cassie and Daniel. So intense in fact, that he doesn't survive it and it throws Cassie's life completely off track. Granted, her life wasn't all that stable even before these events. As it turns out, Lexie wanting to leave the house and sell her share provoked Daniel's murderous rage. His little cult-ish house of "broken children", as Cassie put it, was about to implode and he wasn't having it. Who would've thought that soft-spoken, shy, Justin would be the one to get it over with?
Especially, and eerily, in the same way Cassie (undercover as Lexie) was stabbed.
After initially going along with Frank's (insane) plan of infiltrating the house, new and
In any case, Cassie's undercover days are over. On the bright side, the end of the Lexie case does allow her to come back to Katy Devlin's murder, however, since she's specifically been invited to the confession.
Hiding in plain sight
In a rapid turn of events, and all from Rob eating (and then choking on) a chocolate biscuit of all things (which looked like a Digestivebiscuit, which would appreciate being excluded from this narrative), Katy's murderer(s) were quickly revealed to be: 1. Not a supernatural element 2. Or any of the old crew involved with the initial children disappearances back in 1985, so pretty much all the leads so far were barking up the wrong tree (quite literally). Damian, bumbling, blundering, caring for his mother Damian, turned out to have been under Rosalind's orders to get rid of Katy, with his understanding of Katy's "crimes" being severely impaired by Rosalind's own psychopathic lies. Rosalind didn't hate Katy, but she did hate her parents. Being the unwanted child and source of a forced, loveless marriage, led her to eliminating the only thing bringing joy to Jonathan and Margaret's lives: Katy. Brilliantly played by Leah McNamara, Rosalind doesn't stop there, as she seems determined to take everyone down with her, and reveals that Rob is actually little Adam, all grown-up.
Rob's career is over, and all the cases he (and by proxy, Cassie), worked on can now be considered compromised. The first episode's opening scene indeed turned out to be the closing one, with Rob wanting to reconnect with Cassie but her fleeing back to Sam. As it turns out, Rob did love someone, and it was Cassie all along. Pushing her away meant losing her, and everything that mattered to him, both as a partner and a lover.
Out of the Woods
Rob's story, having begun long before Katy's body was found in the woods, doesn't wrap up quite as neatly as the other two cases. His mother puts into question his memories, telling him he's remembering it all wrong and that Jamie and Peter weren't his friends but constantly taunted him and he was miserable. Rosalind insinuates that he wasn't special, just like her, and that's why he wasn't taken. In the end, we will never know what happened, but the show had frequently referred to a supernatural element and that something not quite human was going on in those woods.
All in all, the finale did a decent job at concluding these different threads, but I wonder (having read the books) how non-book readers followed the cases, since things could be quite confusing (even for book readers) with them being mixed and honestly, not meshing well together. Adapting books can be tricky, and in this case wasn't particularly well handled despite a promising presmisce. In spite of the stellar cast, the leads' chemistry, & a few inspired scenes, I'd rather not see the next installments of the series be combined into a rushed depiction that loses a lot of its depth and uniqueness.
What did you all think of the show, and final episodes? Were you satisfied by the resolution or did you think the show meandered too much before speeding into an explanation that didn't feel earned? Sound off in the comments!
