American culture is steeped in melodrama. The stories we tell follow a familiar pattern, always including a victim, a villain and a hero. Dekalog 5 slyly sets up this same pattern, giving us three characters in the beginning who represent these stock characteristics.

But Kieslowski plays with these stock characteristics at every turn. Jan, the taxi driver victim, is also a creep. But he’s not enough of a creep that we believe he deserved his fate in life. Piotr, our hero, is deeply conflicted about his work. He has the soul of a priest trying his best to make the world better through secular work. Even from the start, however, he knows that his work is doomed, that the system is rigged against true justice.

And then there’s the villain of the story, Miroslaw. From the beginning of the episode, we are given conflicting glimpses of him. At one moment he is expressing a combination of sorrow and joy at the sight of young girls, the next he is acting in a completely anti-social manner. He doesn’t seem at all like a classic villain, just someone deeply out of place alone in a big city, someone who could have gone another way in life.

As Piotr arrives at Miroslaw’s jail cell for their final meeting, we know that Piotr is dreading the meeting somewhat. Even though he is staunchly opposed to the death penalty, we never had a sense from earlier scenes that he had any real understanding of the person he defended. But now Miroslaw is willing to be vulnerable with him.

He starts by asking about his mother. Piotr says that he saw her, but she didn’t say much, she mostly cried. Miroslaw asks if he can see her again and ask if he can be buried in a funeral plot she owns — and had planned to keep for herself — so he can be buried next to his father.

Miroslaw now talks about how Piotr called out to him from the window as he was taken away, and how moving this was to him, making him tear up. Up until then, he had zoned out during the trial, feeling that everyone was against him. Piotr says there were against what he did, not him, but Miroslaw says it’s the same thing.

A guard interrupts and asks if they are finished. Miroslaw says not yet.

As the story continues, we are back to the funeral plot, and Miroslaw provides another detail — that his sister Marysia is buried there as well. He talks about how she was in sixth grade when she died, just 12 years old. Then he recalls the tragic circumstance of her death. Miroslaw and a friend were drinking that day, some wine and vodka, and then they decided to drunk drive a tractor. Miroslaw says his friend was driving the tractor when it accidentally ran over his sister, killing her.

When I was seven years old, my family lived across the road from a farm in semi-rural New Jersey. There were twin brothers who lived on that farm, the Cronces, and one Saturday afternoon, the teenaged boys when out pheasant hunting. One brother, Ted, accidentally shot and killed his twin brother Tommy. I have always despised guns since hearing that news in my youth. I wonder how Ted has gotten along in life, having killed his twin in such a horrible circumstance.

Miroslaw tells Piotr that since he’s been in prison, he’s thought a lot about Marysia and wonders how his life would be different if she’d lived. While he has three brothers, she was his only sister. He was her favorite and she has his. Had he lived, Miroslaw said, he likely never would have left home, none of this would have happened. This is a regular theme in Kieslowski’s work, how random acts end up creating a causal chain of events beyond our control.

The guard interrupts one more time and says the prosecutor wants to know if Piotr is finished. Piotr tells the guard to respond that he will never be finished.

But despite these heroic words, Piotr knows that he is powerless to stop what is coming. The melodramatic apparatus of life must be validated. The villain must be punished, if for no other reason that to preserve the illusion that we all have free will and by submitting to the state and the law, we are allowed to preserve our lives.