Welcome to my viewing diary for the two-season Danish miniseries The Kingdom. Every day (except Saturday) I will offer a short review of another episode. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.
Story (aired on November 22, 1997/written by Tómas Gislason, Niels Vorsel & Lars von Trier; directed by Morten Arnfred & Lars von Trier): "The sun turned so red, mum/And the night so black./Little Brother's dead, mum/And Mona can't come back./Aage's roaming out there, mum/So we lock our doors./There's a draught upon my pillow, mum/Will the Kingdom be as before?"
Sigrid's elevator is dropping down many levels beneath the ground floor (the numbers on the display are all negative). She has already discovered a Satanic cult worshipping deep down in the hospital, and identified Camille - the sleep technician whom we've hardly seen since season one - as a member of this cult. Now she's plummeting into Satan's realm, but then so is the entire hospital. Jørgen's "hook" has become homicidal; if the character's misanthropy once had some charm, since his resurrection he has become an irredeemable fascist, nearly exterminating Mona (until the blocks she plays with on her bed spell out something about Helmer, which he thinks he may find useful). His eugenicist urge finds a more drastic outlet at episode's end; as Christian prepares for his blind Falcon run, a worker rushes off to watch the monitor (a month's salary rides on Christian's fate) and leaves Jørgen in charge of a switchboard that holds the power to the hospital's machinery, and thus the lives of many of its patients. An elderly, gentlemanly figure of Death (Ingolf David) rides in the back of Christian's ambulance, warning, "It's going to be a busy night." And that busy night will begin in the very vehicle he rides in, with some of the ensemble's youngest characters. As the power goes out at the hospital, Christian can't receive commands from the dispatcher and he crashes into Mogge and Sanne. Little Brother is finally dead too, his belly distended, his gigantic limbs and fingers limp, his head resting on the floor. His own mother, after his endless pleas, cut the strings holding him in place while singing him a lullaby. Now, however, she has second thoughts, screaming into the night for the baby's father, consenting to give him what he wants - power over and through them - if he will bring her child back. The frame is engulfed by a flash of light, an almost atomic explosion...and The Kingdom ends, forever, right on the cusp of its biggest moment. Of course!
Well, there is a little more. Helmer has already had quite an episode - he is elevated in the Lodge, married to Rigmor (who, after all the roundelays, acquired the Mona report herself and now uses it to keep the sour Swede in her clutches), and forced by Mogge's desperate blackmail - mentioning an official Helmer knows back in Sweden - to give the student a passing grade on his exam. Meanwhile, even without the anesthesiologist's report, Mona poses a threat. When Helmer finds out she can deliver messages via her blocks, and that his name is featured among these messages, he kidnaps the little girl in a laundry basket and placing her on a circular conveyer belt to avoid detection. When her box returns, it is empty - where has she gone??? And that brings us to the final button, placed after the von Trier outro, as Helmer flushes some more incriminating material down the toilet and mutters that the only thing to make his night worse would be for Dr. Jönsson, the Swede whom Mogge dug up, to show up at the hospital. And sure enough, this new character (Philip Zandén), introduced over the show is over, appears in the darkened, candlelit building in the middle of the blackout. "I bring greetings from Dr. Helmer," he says to the official who stumbles across him, "from his wife and seven children in Borĺs."
My Response:
