What does a show about serial killer fantasies say about you?
As many of my fellow Swedes know, our country’s primary export is timber, hydropower, iron ore, vodka and crime dramas. I was sick this friday and between falling asleep and hugging the toilet I had nothing better to do than binge-watching a 2015 TV-show called ‘The Hundred Code’, created by Robert Moresco (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) with Michael Nyqvist(Millenium series) and Dominic Monaghan (LotR, Lost) and decided to figure out what it says about me.
(Small spoilers ahead)
The plot is based on Tommy Conley (Monaghan), who plays the stereotypical NYPD cop. He’s hard, he’s rule-bending, got a bit of darkness in him but has the underlying goal of bringing all those who would harm other people to justice, where his definition of justice varies from time to time based on his mood that day.
Michael is an older cop with an adolescent daughter and a recently deceased wife who died of leukemia. He’s sick of his job and would like nothing better than to retire from the police force and figure out a way of repairing the strained relationship with his daughter, who secretly blames Michael for her mother’s death due to the stress caused to him by his job. He also fulfills the stereotypical role of the Swedish cop by sticking to the rule and refusing to do things considered immoral and sometimes necessary in order to extract information from a potential lead. As usual, two opposites who doesn’t like each other are forced to work together and a bromance is born soon thereafter.
Conley is hunting a serial killer in New York that’s targeting young, blonde, blue-eyed girls. The serial killer has a greek mythology fantasy based on the story of Hades and Persephone and the origin of our seasons. Hades kidnapped Persephone to the Underworld, which her parents didn’t like very much for some reason, so they convinced Hades to let her go. Hades tricked Persephone into eating a Pomegranate from the Underworld, which in the end caused her to have to spend three months in the Underworld every year, during which time nothing would grow and the trees would lose their leaves.
The serial killer adapted this fantasy into kidnapping two women. One of them he would bury underground, with only a breathing tube to keep her alive. The other he would rape and kill. Then he’d go back to the first girl and put some asphodel’s in the breathing tube, stopping the flow of air.
Given that the mythology/satanic cult plot is commonplace in Swedish crime dramas and that this happened in the pilot, it turned a lot of people off from the show and they missed out on the fact that this plot was only relevant for two episodes before new killers with weirder fantasies were introduced. The mythology killer turned out to be part of a larger deep web forum called “Temptations” where people with twisted fantasies would post about them and if a forum admin called L.H deemed them committed enough, he would help them to fulfill these fantasies, turning them into killers. The rest of the show is instead about finding L.H while stopping new psychos every other episode.
The storyline was only half as much as interesting as asking myself what kind of sick fantasies creeps into people’s minds over the years? Into yours? Have you ever wanted to act on any of them? Would it include hurting other innocent people, and how would you justify hurting them?
The way of one killer was to figure out a very binary way to determine if two people’s lives were filled with beauty and happiness (according to his narrow metrics), and if they weren’t, they could become his targets. I don’t remember the exact plot point of the episode, but I remember that the killer was a piano teacher who would educate rich people’s children to play the piano. The piano teacher loved music and seemed to loathe parents who would want their kids to learn to play piano not for a love of music, but as a symbol of status and superiority. Ergo, their lives were not beautiful and they had to die.
I’ve never had those kinds of thoughts, because they’re too extreme and I have no desire to hurt other people. However, I live in an apartment with a balcony on the 12th floor and I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to just step off the edge. To feel the wind soaring next to my ears for a few seconds and then it would all be over. A friend of mine who lived with me for some time had the same thoughts, so I think it’s bound to happen if you live in a place that’s higher above the ground.
Another one I’ve had has been while I was standing on a cruise ship on a cold winter night in the Stockholm Archipelago. If I fell in, how far would I be able to swim? If I could see an island 500m away, would I be able to swim there or am I left to the mercy of the wind? What would I do once I reached land? While walking around in a store I’ve also been wondering if I could get away with stealing stuff.
I’d also like to state that I have no desire in the world to find any of this out. I have a working moral compass and a love of life that stops me before I even get close to doing any of these things, but it’s interesting to think about why I have these thoughts from time to time. The laziest option was to simply Google it, but that mostly pointed me towards help and support for kleptomaniacs and people with suicidal fantasies that are in need of help and support.
To steal something for me is to show somebody (that hopefully won’t know it’s me) that I can take what’s his without repercussions. Taking something by force in plain eyesight would just be a posture of physical dominance and power over somebody else and his belongings, which doesn’t appeal to me at all and there’s no skill behind it. Shoplifters frequently say that they’re stealing to experience a rush of adrenaline and to live on the edge, which would align well with my personality. I love climbing and the risky moves that comes with it.
I’ve invested (on a crazily long-term basis) in the stock market and sometimes I can feel my mood being affected by how the market is doing on that particular day. If it’s going well, I’m feeling a rush of excitement and hope for the future, and similarly I can feel a bit of anxiety if it’s not. Even though I have no intention of withdrawing the money for any reason and no reason to be worried about it, it still affects my mood and I should only look at it from time to time and make sure the monthly/yearly average growth I want is being achieved.
To round this off, the best thing I can say is that thinking about all this just confirmed to myself that I’m a normal adrenaline junkie with a light concern for my financial longevity who watched a semi-decent show on HBO because I was sick. Oh well, at least I got to see Merry again.
