Unpacking 'Killing It' Season 2's Brutal Finale

By Chris Revelle | TV | August 31, 2023 |

By Chris Revelle | TV | August 31, 2023 |

Killing It, currently streaming on Peacock, is a deranged sitcom about the real-life phenomenon of the python hunting season in Florida. Craig (Craig Robinson) and Jillian (Claudia O’Doherty) were two people at the end of their ropes and as close to rock bottom as one could imagine to be. Jillian was a hopelessly hopeful gig-economy victim who scraped together a semblance of a living by being a ride-share driver with a mobile billboard that she also lived inside to save on rent. Craig was a recently divorced man without steady work and with a daughter to help raise. Craig was a dreamer and an idealist, someone who believed he was a good person and that good people could get ahead in America without compromise or predation. The two met as python-hunting partners competing with other teams for a much-needed pay-out and suffered a string of qualified partial victories and full defeats including the schemes of Craig’s brother Isiah (Rell Battle) and the hare-brained but lucrative machinations of local business predator Rodney LaMonca (Tim Heidecker). By the end of that first season, they land in the less dire and even somewhat optimistic place of co-owning a saw palmetto berry farm with plans to fly straight.

Season 2 begins in a flash-forward that shows us Craig getting profiled and photographed as a wildly successful businessman. The journalist wants to know if this wealth sprang from the corpses of pythons, but Craig refutes this. Meaningfully, Jillian is not by his side in this scene and we spend the rest of the season filling in how things got to this point. The world of Killing It is too brutal for Craig’s rise to have come easily, let alone painlessly. The main arc it traces is how Craig became rich and what became of his relationship with Jillian in the process.

On the other side of this gif are spoilers for season 2 and its finale.

What begins as an earnest effort to treat workers well and make money ethically goes off the rails with frightening speed. Craig has named the business Henry’s Farm, after his grandfather, and tries to honor him. Alas, an infestation of giant land snails kicks off the conga line of disasters. They carry meningitis, which means that if they’re discovered on the farm, all the saw palmetto berries are compromised. All farms in the area are placed under quarantine and cannot sell anything.

Without being able to sell their harvest to a very eager supplement manufacturer, Craig and Jillian enter into a partnership with the Boones, a family of hicks who own Carpets, the local dingy strip club. Jackie Boone (Dot-Marie Jones) has led her adult kids to illegally pick saw palmetto berries on private land and agree to give their harvest over to Henry’s Farm if they’ll give her and her family medical benefits. This arrangement is challenged when roadblocks are set up to prevent any contraband berries from leaving the state, and then again when Rodney LaMonca buys the farm and cuts the Boones out. The Boones kidnap Jillian to get their benefits back. Craig and Jillian run the gauntlet of absurdity wherein they meet various victims of American capitalism who debase themselves just to get by. Jillian holds firm to her values and consistently advocates for altruistic action. She works to avoid laying people off, even at personal cost to herself, and manages to connect with the Boones when Jackie gets a scary medical diagnosis. Craig wavers and pushes Jillian to think more about herself. He sees Jillian and himself as victims of a shitty system who finally deserve a break after everything they’ve been through.

This comes to a head in the finale. Finally, the quarantine is lifted. Craig and Jillian bring their shipment to a buyer who’s eager for their stock. They take the lid off a crate to discover … a giant land snail. There are snails in all their crates, so the whole harvest is compromised. Jillian and Craig are crestfallen. Despite the chance that the snails have infected the berries with meningitis, the buyer is still willing to go through with the deal. Craig and Jillian discuss it. For Jillian, the answer is easy: no deal, it’s not worth risking hurting people. Craig is more conflicted and he talks himself into taking the deal. This is how he made his money and it becomes clear it’s why Jillian isn’t with him anymore. It’s not clear where she’s ended up, but the season concludes with news footage of a wave of meningitis sweeping America.

Craig’s decisions have led here, but the magic of Killing It is in how it complicates the idea of individual responsibility. He’s responsible for his decisions, but the show leads you to question whether those decisions were forced by the ridiculous realities of late-stage capitalism. In a system that values ethics, Craig and Jillian’s goals wouldn’t be challenged in the same way. Neither of them would’ve likely made half the dubious decisions they did if they weren’t driven to it. As absurd and heightened as the show is, it paints a tonally accurate picture of America, where people are driven to demean themselves and each other to get by. It makes you wonder what anyone’s choices might’ve been without capitalism. Would Jackie feel compelled to extort the farm for medical benefits if America’s healthcare system were not a profit-driven meatgrinder? Would Jillian need to sacrifice so much of herself and her happiness if she weren’t forced to choose between having a car or firing an employee? Would Craig have chosen to expose millions of people to meningitis if he wasn’t backed into a corner by business predators like Rodney? Capitalism spins many myths to make our collective suffering for the benefit of the wealthy few seem natural and good for us. Killing It understands this, and while it doesn’t exonerate Craig, it asks you to wonder whether capitalism is the ultimate villain of the story. We act as if it’s the only way to live, but as Killing It will show you: capitalism destroys us.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.