The Killing - Recap: On the Edge of Seventeen

Recap video and review of The Killing - Season 3 Episode 3 - Seventeen:

As The Killing grows darker, the story actually gets more focused, strange as it seems. "Seventeen" takes the depravity of the case's trappings and mines it for all the narrative momentum it's worth. This helps the series to set itself apart from your standard, rank-and-file procedural by establishing a foreboding sense of atmosphere. The show was often lampooned in its first and second season for its pervasive bleakness, as represented by the never-ending rain and persistent fog of Seattle. Yet that same environment helps the series immensely on this go-around. Not only does the cinematography, which plays on the shadows and the flashlights cutting through nighttime fog, help further solidify the tone and mood of the piece, but the performances are wonderfully reactive to this environment. The cold and the rain is a point of origin for the misery of the transient teens who have become the victims of the serial killer who's amassed seventeen victims, and the kids playing these roles are allowed to embody that discomfort, that weariness from constantly being wet and freezing. This is without even getting into what actually happens to them, which would be enough to do in any kid, much less kids who've seen as much hardship as Bullet (Bex Taylor-Klaus) and Lyric (Julia Sarah Stone). "Seventeen" keeps up the momentum of the premiere by plunging headlong into an investigation that is immediately fascinating, and unquestionably urgent.

Linden (Mireille Enos) learns that the bodies she discovered in the former retention pond have all the ear-markings of the serial killer she thought she'd put behind her once Ray Seward (Peter Sarsgaard) was arrested, convicted and sentenced to die. The coroner tells Linden that the seventeen victims, all girls, were killed over a six-month period. Some of the girls were as young as 12 or 13, and only their bones remain -- and even then, some are missing their fingers. Skinner (Elias Koteas), Linden's former partner/lover, is the lieutenant in charge of the investigation, and he insists on focusing on new evidence, stating that it's best not to go looking back into the Seward investigation. Skinner has his own motives for this directive, since the Seward case is implied to have made his career. Things are complicated by the knowledge of Skinner and Linden's past affair going public: not only does Reddick (Gregg Henry) tease Holden (Joel Kinnaman) about it, but Linden also reveals to Skinner that his wife knows about them, making things considerably more awkward than they already were.

Credit: AMC

Linden and Holder each take their own trajectories in the investigation, as Linden visits Adrian Seward, Ray's son, at a local playground. Adrian, traumatized by the loss of his parents, has begun drawing again. Linden asks the boy about his latest sketch, which is a new version of the drawing that tormented Linden for over three years. In this new take, Adrian has apparently added a factory. Linden is convinced that this factory holds the key to the investigation, but Adrian has no answers. He simply tells Linden that he wants to see his dad. Things go a little better for Holder, however. He tracks down Bullet to talk to her about Kallie (Cate Sproule), and she tells him that Goldie, the weirdo that raped her last week (though she leaves that little detail out of her conversation with Holder), might have her imprisoned in his apartment. Holder bursts into Goldie's apartment, yet though he fails to find Kallie, he discovers a trove of child pornography. They now have Goldie on possession charges, but Skinner wants the creep released so they can tail him to Kallie's location, since the assumption is that he's the killer they're looking for. Holder and Reddick stake Goldie's place out, but Bullet arrives on the scene, calling Holder out for taking the information she gave him and using it to lock Goldie up. Word will now get out that Bullet is a snitch, which is bad news, on the streets. However, while Bullet's info didn't lead to Kallie, it led to a substantial lead in the investigation. While combing through Goldie's sick, sadistic tapes, they discover that Kallie is one of the girls videotaped. We see Kallie as she answers unsettling questions such as “Are you a virgin?” Kallie's sad, desperate eyes tell the story, and it's as heartbreaking now as it was last week.

Less heartbreaking is the continuing story of Ray Seward, who might be innocent after all, though he has a funny way of showing it. He spends much of the episode pestering, and being pestered by, a prison guard named Becker. Seward recounts how he gouged out the eye of Becker's cousin at his last prison, a monologue that goes into disgusting detail about the slipperiness of the eye, and the amount of pressure and dedication it takes to dislodge it. In response, Becker taunts Seward by saying his son, Adrian, will end up in the exact same circumstances, locked behind bars. He tells Seward he should have just done the kid a favor and killed him the way he killed the boy's mother. Perhaps out of shame, or out of a desire to cut all emotional ties to his past life, Seward takes a razor he'd hidden in his mouth, and turns it on himself, cutting off the tattoo of Adrian's name that he has on his chest. It's a gruesome scene, though the lighting thankfully spares us the full measure of the carnage. Seward continues to be the show's most complex character, and while it's hard for me to get invested in whether Linden and Holder are able to clear his name before his execution, Sarsgaard continues to do tremendous work in the role.

"Seventeen" keeps things moving, and that helps in making this investigation feel more urgent than the Rosie Larsen case, if only because we're dealing with a live girl here. Kallie Leeds might still be alive, slim though that possibility may be. The added tragedy of how little she's cared about by her own mother, in comparison to how Rosie was loved, only increases the hope that Kallie can be found before it's too late. Goldie is likely another in The Killing's notable series of red herrings, but there's already a considerable sense that we're closer to the answer than we were before. Whether that answer leads to a dead or living Kallie remains to be seen, but we know enough now to suspect that Seward is not to blame for the current killings, and that alone adds a wrinkle to the narrative that both heightens the mystery and keeps viewers on their toes.