The bizarre ethics of Season 4
The entire season is almost a celebration of murder and corruption. Not in a noir-like way, that views it as depressing but ultimately realistic, but instead present it in a positive light.
- Navarro got away with killing the wife-beater and goading Clark into suicide. Both shown as something empowering. 1 clear-cut murder and 1 in the gray-area. You could also add several cases of assault.
- Peter got away with killing another officer in a police-shooting. It's just written off as a missing person.
- Hank in turn got away with murdering Otis, partaking in the Annie K-cover up and possible attempted murder at another police-officer, among other things. At least 1 murder and 1 accessory to murder.
- Lynch-mobs are shown as something positive and powerful, as long as it's the right group doing it. The climax of the show are the main-characters covering up an additional 6-7 murders. The perpetrators themselves confess, but added it was "hypothetical" and the detectives just roll with it and starts the cover-up due to one of them belonging to the same ethnic group. This is the darkest levels of nepotic corruption and racism.
- Rose got away with 2-4 cases of accessory to murder depending on how you count, based on her being friends with the detectives.
- Media in general seem to be non-existent, even social media. No one cares about grizzly murders on women or large-scale disappearances of scientists. No journalist ever asks any questions and there's no press-conferences in the entire season. Same goes for politicians or the police internal affairs-investigations. No one is held accountable to anything.
Incredibly odd thematic and writing in a show that's supposed to center around actual police-work and bringing truth into light. The moral seem to be, let your anger and impulsiveness get the best of you and gamble on corruption bailing you out. It could almost be read as offensive to people actually living in rural-areas, that they are indeed a lawless land so you might as well go nuts.
Combine this with the romanticization of suicide in the final episode and there's some truly dark stuff going on in the show. The imagery around the ice melting as a symbol of revealing hidden truths is almost completely reversed. The season is ultimately about covering up crime due to the truth being inconvenient and troubling to individuals. What an ending to a detective story.