The Valhalla Murders and the crisis in conspiracy theory

Warning: spoilers galore

Stories, among other uses, help us to navigate reality: to make sense of complicated situations and to understand people not like ourselves.  And because stories are written within a culture and at particular junctures of time, they’re also shaped by their relationship to historical events and political movements.

This brings us to The Valhalla Murders.

The Valhalla Murders is, most fundamentally, compelling drama. Like a lot of current crime series, it excavates injustices in the past to understand seemingly unmotivated crimes in the present. Its Icelandic setting—the bleak winter scenes and lonely isolation of the landscape—accentuates the brooding anger at the heart of the story.

But the ending takes a strange turn that undercuts the series’ dramatic logic. It’s worth examining why, because it may reveal something about how narratives are affected by realities beyond their fictional universes.

The story begins with seemingly random people being ritually murdered (stabbed and eyes slit post-mortem). Research quickly determines that all of the victims were employed at Valhalla, a boys’ home, decades earlier—and a group portrait of the staff and boys together was sent to each victim prior to the murder. Valhalla was shut down after only a few years’ operation because one of the boys in its charge disappeared. Interviews with former wards reveal Valhalla to have been a savage place, and the boys report being raped by a stranger in the building’s basement.

The questions that drive the mystery are multiple. The most crucial is, who is murdering the former Valhalla staff? To solve this, the detectives also need to uncover what actually happened there: who was sexually abusing the boys, what happened to the boy who disappeared and to what extent state authorities may have been complicit in the abuse. 

The two lead investigators, Kata and Arnar also have their own mysteries which provide context for, but also threaten to impinge upon, the primary narrative. Kata’s son may have been involved in a sexual assault at a party, and her inability to confront him about this incident, coupled with her willingness to destroy what she fears may be incriminating evidence, may hint at the motives for the cover-up at Valhalla. Arnar has been working in Norway, at least partially, it is implied, because of his alienation from his own family.  His father is dying during the investigation, and he needs to examine the roots of his anger at his father, his relationship with his sister (who has remained participant in his father’s faith community) and also his relation to Magnus, his foster-father and the Reykjavik police commissioner who asked him to join the investigation. His interrogation of the older generation—their failed leadership and possible tolerance of child sex abuse—provides a significant context for the primary investigation, and his own simmering anger at his treatment could have some bearing on the motivations of the murderer.

The whole thing is a heady brew.  And, for the first six episodes, it ferments nicely.

The resolution, however, is odd. The murders of the former staff are solved, but, like all compelling drama, there are complications. The modus operandi of one of the victims does not match the others. This, coupled with the revelation that Magnus has concealed his involvement in the original Valhalla investigation, lead Arnar and Kata to suspect that there is a larger subtext for the crimes. They eventually discover that Petur, the chief prosecutor who exonerated the home in an official report, was the rapist at Valhalla. He had been paying the staff to facilitate his crimes, and he has continued to rape boys in Reykjavik.

Why is this odd? It is because the roles that the accomplices play don’t hold up to scrutiny. They’ve apparently gone along with the crimes because they’ve been paid off. Raping young boys, however, is obviously a terrible crime—in fact, it’s hard to imagine many things worse. Allowing these crimes to continue is truly monstrous. However, the list of those who turned a blind eye includes a successful financier, the Reykjavik police commissioner and a medical doctor, all of whom, moreover, seem to be otherwise responsible and well-meaning in their professional lives. Two of them have even provided Petur with their own children! Their rationale for cooperating with the rapist is baffling.

The only convincing explanation for this degree of collusion would be if the collaborators were all part of the child abuse ring. This idea would work thematically.  For the first six episodes, The Valhalla Murders is a story about generations: generational frictions and the troubled relationships between parents and children. A child abuse ring is the ultimate form of generational betrayal, and so provides a powerful metaphor for analyzing these issues. 

Such rings do exist. Going from the thirteenth-century aristocrat Gilles de Rais to Operation Cathedral to the recent Catholic Church scandals, numerous examples have been documented. One particularly complex case in Belgium in the 1990s, never resolved to anyone’s satisfaction, includes the possibility of interference at high political levels that would exceed anything in The Valhalla Murders. The story-line is not improbable.

Why then, after seemingly inexorably leading to this resolution, does the series suddenly depart expectations?

Obviously, we can never know why the creators conclude the story this way.  One possibility that intrigues me, however, is that it might be because of the political implications that conspiratorial narrative has assumed recently.

This is where current politics may be relevant, particularly QAnon conspiracy theories.  QAnon—and, for anyone not familiar, the link needs to be read, because otherwise the scope of the theory and the excitement it generates beggars imagination—presupposes a vast network of child abuse and corruption involving virtually all Western mainstream politicians, as well as many celebrities and prominent businesspeople.  More to the point, however, belief in QAnon is largely seen as facilitating the rise of extreme right-wing populist politicians (fill in the obvious names here) who, adherents believe, will expose and destroy this elite cabal.

This is where the intersection between fiction and culture gets interesting.  It’s not much of jump to argue that constructing a fictional narrative that validates the presuppositions of QAnon could now be seen as intellectually irresponsible and as contributing to political radicalization.

Do considerations like this actually come into play during production meetings, or is it rather an unconscious instinct away from those kinds of narrative resolutions?  I’m genuinely curious.