The true-crime moral reckoning of ‘Making a Murderer Part 2’: Review

A few years ago two true-crime sensations took over our culture like a fever.

First it was Making a Murderer, whose popularity that not only led Netflix to become the go-to home for true-crime docs, but also launched a thousand Reddit threads of amateur sleuths debating the innocence of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey. Only a year later, our obsession was exacerbated by Serial Season 1, which launched even more voracious internet sleuthing.

But while both of these sensations allowed audiences to delight in the murder-mystery of a real-life victim, their subsequent seasons in 2018 feel more like a moral reckoning.

Serial Season 3 is now no longer just one murder case, but an entire courthouse’s worth of cases, ranging from minor crimes to major ones, explored week by week. Similarly, Making a Murderer Part 2 is a  more sobering, measured look at the bureaucracy involved in trying to free two potentially wrongfully convicted men.

But by the very nature of what that looks like — an inarguably more boring story than the original — Making a Murderer Part 2 feels like a meta commentary on the ethics of true-crime phenomenons overall.

Why do we love true crime? Countless podcasts and docs like to claim it’s because we are a people seeking justice in an unjust and corrupt system. But after watching over ten grueling hours of the painstaking lengths that Avery and Dassey’s legal representatives must go to try in their attempts to correct that alleged injustice, you realize something.

That’s a bunch of bullshit.

In Making a Murderer Part 2, the veil drops, but not only on the flaws of our legal system. The veil drops to show our own unkind reflection.

We’re not in it to hear endless re-litigating of exactly when Teresa Halbach’s car was found, or whether several different courts of appeals can agree that Dassey’s confession was coerced. We’re also not, as both the prosecution and the earnest-seeming lawyers of the Innocence Project suggest, doing any of this out of a duty to find justice for Halbach’s gruesome death.

In Making a Murderer Part 2, the veil drops, but not only on the flaws of our legal system. The veil drops to show our own unkind reflection.

Parts of this follow-up feel like the filmmakers wrestling to reconcile with the phenomenon they started. The first episode lists the numerous criticisms the original doc received: namely, that the filmmakers failed to include evidence that made Avery look guilty, and that it failed to be considerate of the victim who lost her life, and of the loved ones who survive her.

Most awkwardly, there’s heavy usage of the breathless news coverage that has followed the case since the Netflix show took off. There are scenes of rallies organized by Avery and Dassey supporters, and interviews with on-the-street sleuths offering their own predictions on their innocence or guilt like they’re talking about the outcome of a big sports game.

It is telling that one of the most chilling moments in this documentary happens in the background of a news interview with Ken Kratz, the controversial and disgraced district attorney who acted as prosecution during the original murder trial that found Avery guilty of Halbach’s murder.

He’s at CrimeCon, the reporter says, and as Kratz is delivering his emphatic story on why Avery is a cold, unfeeling psychopath, you see an attendee of CrimeCon in the background taking advantage of the convention’s photo opp. As Kratz disingenuously summons the poor, unfortunate specter of victim Halbach, the woman in the background happily lays herself out on a fake police outline of a dead body — presumably for the ‘gram.

Whether or not the filmmakers intended it, it’s a sickeningly self-reflective moment. Are we her? Are we the ones gleefully giving men like Kratz a platform (who wrote and sold a book on Avery, after resigning his position following a horrifying sexting scandal with a client), while simultaneously delighting and reveling in the deaths of real-world victims?

Objectively, Making a Murderer Part 2 is a less well-told story. 

But maybe that’s being too uncharitable to fans of Making a Murderer and true-crime in general (myself included.) 

Objectively, Making a Murderer Part 2 is a less well-told story. Unlike Season 3 of Serial, which still finds the human story even in the most litigious courthouse cases, the follow-up to the deeply affecting Making a Murderer often fails to communicate the enormity of its human stakes moment-to-moment, especially for most of the first seven episodes.

The reasons why are not hard to understand. This is not the coherent story of carefully doled out information, taking advantage of this case’s countless twists and turns. The filmmakers clearly had less time and footage to work with, especially when it came to access to the devastating and heartbreaking affect these cases are having on the convicted men’s parents.

Overall, there is less of a human tether for audiences to connect with, which would make it easier to care when the legalese becomes a bit much. It relies heavily on title cards that summarize legal failures and successes in this journey to overturning their convictions, rather than allowing audiences to experience it and watch as the action unfolds in real-time.

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with Making a Murderer Part 2 is that it feels obligatory. 

We feel obligated to watch it, as people who’ve become obsessed with every minor detail of the case. It feels like the filmmakers felt obligated to show a more “neutral” (though I’m dubious about even that) perspective, and return more cognizant of the ethical criticisms raised by the original documentary. 

And you can’t help but sense that Netflix had a vested interest in seeing one of their biggest hits return ASAP, no matter the hit to quality that might entail. Does Part 2 need ten episodes that often run over an hour long? Absolutely not. On the level of pure entertainment, it only really starts grabbing attention in the final few episodes, when Avery’s star attorney (and arguable season protagonist) Kathleen Zellner turns to making the case for who actually killed Halbach instead.

We again return to the original uneasiness of Making a Murderer as a phenomenon.

But now we again return to the original uneasiness of Making a Murderer as an overall phenomenon.

The first season positioned watchers almost as amateur jurors, showing in its first few episodes how susceptible we can be to a prosecution’s compelling narrative toward a guilty verdict, despite very little substantial evidence. But it combated this story – like a defense attorney would – by supplying us with an equally seductive counter-narrative of gross injustice and institutional corruption from the cops.

I don’t know how comfortable I am with saying Making a Murderer Part 2 only really gets good when it turns the tables on blaming another man for Halbach’s murder. Even if the evidence is compelling, isn’t that what started this whole mess in the first place?

It’s sickening to try and judge the entertainment value of a story that deals in the real-life stakes of people’s lives and deaths. 

There are far fewer binge-worthy twists in Making a Murderer Part 2. But when you’re talking about the ruined lives of two potentially innocent men, should we need to have that story told in a way that forces us to care, or ignites the mob-mentality kind of justice that characterizes amateur internet sleuthing? 

It shouldn’t. But we do.