The Killing - Recap: Bullet With Butterfly Wings
Recap video and review of The Killing - Season 3 Episode 9 - Reckoning:
As peculiar as it might be to say, more shows should get canceled if it means they come back from the dead as strong as The Killing. The series was all but dead in the water before a last-minute reprieve (and it wouldn't surprise me if the Seward storyline was a sly comment on the show's original fate), and it's as if the save served as a kick in the ass to showrunner Veena Sud, who took a show with tons of potential and fully realized it with an episode that marks the show's best hour.Credit: AMC
This isn't to say that the Larsen murder wasn't tragic in itself, or that it didn't catalyze a story that ultimately proved compelling, but that the death at the center of the investigation is far more deeply felt this time around. Of course, part of the problem in killing off Bullet is that we lose our most meaningful connection to the story of the transient youth of Seattle. Lyric (Julia Sarah Stone) and Twitch (Max Fowler) are alright, I suppose, but there isn't really as much depth to them. That said, with Bullet gone, I don't really know that we need to follow their plight anymore, since it was mostly used to provide a context for the Pied Piper murders. We got to know the victims, and the ways in which these kids lived. With that story told, and Bullet gone, we can focus more intently on the crime at hand. It's a smart storytelling tactic that "Reckoning" utilizes well. We get to spend more time following Linden as she begins to close the loop of the investigation, and we also get to spend more time with Holder as he deals with the psychological effect of Bullet's death. Yes, Bullet's death is a total knife to the gut, but it's handled so effectively that it's hard to complain about the choice, even though I wanted to throw my hands up and call it a day after that reveal.
Credit: AMC
And that reveal is numbing in its effectiveness. After Linden and Holder track Joe Mills (Ryan Robbins) down to a storage facility, they split up to give chase after realizing he's still in the building. Mills cuts Linden off and gives her a beating until Holder catches up and intervenes. While the cops go through Mills's storage locker, they discover the rings from the seventeen victims in a cigar box among his other things. However, while the cops are celebrating the case-closing discovery, Linden is disturbed: among the rings is one curious artifact, Bullet's necklace. As Holder goes to open the trunk of Mills's taxicab, Linden races as fast as she can to reach Holder before he makes the tragic discovery. She reaches him just as he's gotten the trunk open, and pleads with him not to look inside. "You don't need to be here," Linden pleads, fighting back tears. Holder slowly pieces together who's in the trunk. I'll admit I was duped, as I expected it to be Holder's little-seen girlfriend, Caroline (Jewel Staite), though I have no idea why I would have thought so, since it wouldn't have been in the killer's M.O. I suppose the biggest reason I assumed it would be Caroline is because I didn't think the series would have the guts to kill off a character as central to the season's narrative as Bullet. Yet that's exactly the way things played out, with Holder discovering the body of a kid with a "Faith" tattoo on her wrist.
Naturally, Holder falls to pieces. His downward spiral is the best element of the episode. Initially, he responds with cold, raw-nerved stoicism. When Caroline attempts to offer her condolences, Holder snaps at her over what he perceives is her implication that it was somehow Bullet's choice to live in constant danger. He lashes out at her for not really knowing the real Holder, saying that she doesn't even know what his "Serenity" tattoo means (other than a cute, if coincidental, Firefly nod). It's a marvelous scene for Joel Kinnaman, as Holder reveals that the tattoo is a personal reminder that he was once a meth junkie, a "tweaker". He shouts at Caroline to get out of his car, and I presume that would be the end of the relationship. Yet Holder's grieving doesn't stop there, as he beats himself up over his failure to call Bullet back. When Linden tries to comfort him by assuring her partner that it's not his fault, he tries to kiss her -- a moment nearly as shocking, for me, as Bullet's death. But it's played beautifully. Linden immediately understands that it's the byproduct of his grief, and assures that it's okay. However, the partners then sit in silence, allowing their miseries to sink in as silence envelopes them like a cheap blanket.
Credit: AMC
Linden, for her part, is doing her best to solve the case, but for slightly different reasons: she's still trying to prove the innocence of Ray Seward (Peter Sarsgaard). To this end, Skinner (Elias Koteas) sends in Danette (Amy Seimetz) to speak to Mills, as she's the only person he'll willingly speak to following his arrest. He hopes Danette will be able to secure a confession, but things don't actually play out that way. Although she gets Mills going with a (possible) lie about his mother's condemning of his actions, Danette eventually loses her cool and demands to know where Kallie (Cate Sproule) is. But Mills confesses to...well, I'm not really sure if he's confessing to the killings, or if he's simply confessing to raping the girls. I would assume he's talking about having murdered the girls, as he talks about taking away their pain, adding that they come to him, not the other way around. He says they have a "sweet, sweet ache" in their eyes, and he makes it "go away." It's a peculiar bit of business that's well-performed on both sides of the interrogation, and if Mills is the resolution to the serial murders, I'm 100% okay with that. It's rare on shows like these for the killer to actually be the most likely suspect. As for now, Mills is looking pretty good for the killings -- however, to Linden's disappointment, he can't be the one responsible for the murder of Seward's wife.
Credit: AMC
As Linden interviews Seward's son, Adrian, she gets the lead she's desperately been searching for, as the boy identifies Mills from a photo array as the man he saw on the night of his mother's murder. However, Linden's elation quickly melts away once she learns from Danette that Mills wasn't actually in Seattle the night of the murder. With this last blow to her efforts, Linden resigns herself to the inevitability of Seward's death in less than twenty-four hours. She considers using Adrian's positive ID to get a stay of execution, but it's all too little, too late. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Holder has completely flown off the handle. While viewing Bullet's body in the morgue (and learning her real name was "Rachel Olmstead"), he learns from a colleague that his partner, Reddick (Gregg Henry), had actually spoken to the girl the night she died. Upon learning this, Holder races over to Reddick's house and begins beating his partner's ass right in the middle of dinner. It remains to be seen what motive, exactly, Reddick had in concealing from Holder the little tidbit about having actually spoken to the victim (unless he simply thought Bullet would continue to lead Holder on a wild goose chase like last week -- but even then...). Holder is coming apart at the seams, and he's not the only one.
Credit: AMC
Seward is completely unraveling as his execution date hits the less-than-24-hours mark. In his desperation, he succumbs to the preachings of his adjoining cellmate, a man who offers religion as a salve on Seward's current predicaments. As his options run out, and Becker (Hugh Dillon) grows more mutually-antagonistic towards him, Seward crumbles and falls to his knees to pray, even though he admits to his cellmate that he doesn't know how. When his sympathetic cellmate tries to coach him, he can't do it -- the cellmate simply breaks down laughing. This was all a game for the cellmate, an amusement in which he goes about trying to "break" other death row inmates with religion. And he's disappointed in the ease with which he's broken Seward. It's the one part of the episode I didn't really care for, if only because it's cartoonishly evil in an episode that deals with relatively understandable, identifiable evil. Which is not to say that people like this don't exist, but it was a jarring moment in an otherwise tonally consistent episode. There's also some drama surrounding Becker's wife that doesn't really fit with the rest of the episode, although I'm interested to see where it goes. But then, even that isn't as weirdly jarring as our check-in with Lyric and Twitch, who seemingly get over Bullet's death awfully quickly, putting a deposit on one of those government-funded apartments and then taking in their new digs with goofy grins and declarations of love -- only hours after learning that a person who'd been important to at least one of them had been brutally murdered. Then again, was Bullet ever that important to Lyric or Twitch? I'm guessing not, ultimately. And that just exacerbates the tragedy of her death. Holder is the only one who cares, and the only other person who might is presumably another victim of the Pied Piper, the still-missing Kallie Leeds.
"Reckoning" is the best episode of The Killing to date, encapsulating the best of what the series is capable of doing, between the abilities of its cast and the deftness of its scripting. With only two episodes remaining this season, it'll be hard to top this. But I'm looking forward to seeing the show try.