If you’re anything like me, you probably went into season three of Crime Blood Kingdom wondering just how much more cinematic TV could get for undercover serial paedophobe anti-hero detective Billy Whiteman. His morally ambiguous mission to do crime with the bad men before the impending bad thing happens has taken us down the rabbit hole and back on a twisted, jaw-dropping tour de force of roller coaster-like tropes and mind-bending clichés. Never before have themes that are really more suited for the big screen been conveyed so suspensefully through a cable TV drama about a man doing somewhat bad things for complicated reasons.
With the close of the season, we are all left wondering: Is Billy the right amount of bad to not be a bad man but still be a bit bad such that we want to see what other bad things might happen to him in the next season? Are the crimes he’s possibly doing too unrelatably bad, or disturbingly just relatable enough?
Looking back, this past season gave us the sort of immersive, washed-out footage one could really only even imagine being displayed on a much larger screen and in an approximately 90- to 120-minute, uninterrupted window of time. And if CBK were a feature film, which—again—it isn’t, we would probably be too absorbed in the action on the screen to give any of this any thought. Such as it is, the entire Overhead Compartment staff (except for one intern who claims he doesn’t see what all the fuss is about) has inundated the water cooler with obsessive debate and speculation about what exactly we can glean from the finale. Let’s review some highlights.
As longtime CBK fans will remember from way back in season one, the identity of Mr. Blood is known only to Billy’s sister-in-law Claire—a freelance interior cake decorator who, we NOW know, is doing crime and sex stuff with one of the baddies. The big reveal at the end of the finale points to only one conclusion: the possibly too bad thing happened at the drug casino! Does this mean that the entire Lucky Ed scenario was a ploy? Maybe.
But the by-now-infamous 23-minute long, uncut scene of 23-year-old prostitute Hope Chastity’s hope chest also hopefully resonates with most viewers as a denouement to two parallel narrative arcs of which we kept abreast in the titular cliffhanger of season two’s cinematic “Cliffhanger” episode.
So, in trying to understand the true meaning of the bad thing that maybe did or didn’t happen, us hardcore CBK degenerates are left with quite a few loose ends. I came up with five.
Five Unanswered Crime Blood Kingdom Questions:
1. How did Billy Whiteman find the Chartreuse Harlot’s duvet cover AND get the stains out in time?
2. Could Flip Toothbane have returned to the North Norminghamptonshire Inn BEFORE stealing the keys to Billy’s 1996 Subaru Forester?
3. What was it that the Woman With No Eyes didn’t see?
4. WHY was Hank even in Big Brish’s prostitute sex brothel in the first place? Maybe we don’t want to know.
5. “Harken Moths”—the cross-stitched novelty seat cushion in the place where the bad thing happened—is an anagram for “Hank’s Mother”! Could this suggest what we’ve all been thinking???