The Killing - Season 3 Finale - Recap: They're All Children

Credit: AMC

Yes, there's a mystery at the heart of it all, but it's merely a mechanism to move the story forward, providing us a window into a set of characters who grow and develop under a shifting set of circumstances. The characters inform the mystery, not the other way around. Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) and Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) will have a life beyond this case, just as they had a life before. The mystery isn't all there is. And yet, our attachment to that duo is what fuels the tension once the payoff to the mystery comes and s*** officially gets real. Not unlike the solution to the Rosie Larsen case, there's a false twist to distract viewers from the true identity of the killer, yet once that reveal drops, it enriches the journey of the eight weeks it took to get there.

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You could probably quibble about the believability of a police lieutenant somehow having the time to commit 21 murders over the course of a highly-visible police career, but it was about as plausible a solution as that of the Rosie Larsen case, so I didn't really have any complaints there. What matters is that the solution mostly stands up in the face of scrutiny. Here is a guy, in Lieutenant James Skinner (Elias Koteas), who spent the better part of his police career encountering what he considered to be society's garbage. It's not exactly a unique opinion among the men of questionable character we've met this season, all of whom view the young vagrants as broken things. Yet Skinner's contempt for the street kids is elevated to murder all because one crack-addled vagrant made him miss his daughter's softball game. As Skinner reveals, the first victim spit in his face, he reflexively struck her, and, upon realizing she would tell on him for doing so, decided to take her life to keep her from destroying everything he'd worked for in his life. Whether or not it's a believable turn for the character is for the viewer to decide, but I felt that Elias Koteas did outstanding work in selling the transition from warm, but flawed, father/husband/lieutenant to self-justifying serial murderer. At no point did Koteas chew the scenery. In fact, he barely spoke above a whisper for much of "The Road to Hamelin," and yet it's just as chilling as if he'd been in Linden's face, threatening to gut her from stem to stern.

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One of the things that makes "The Road to Hamelin" such a profoundly chilling, unsettling episode is how laidback "From Up Here" is. Part one of the finale is essentially a sojourn in happy territory, which is very un-Killing. Linden and Skinner officially resume their romance once it becomes clear that Skinner intends to get a divorce from his wife, while Holder learns that Caroline (Jewel Staite) still wants to be with him, in one of my favorite little scenes across the entire two-hour bloc. There's an uncharacteristic amount of sunshine as well (or, at least, brighter skies), which adds a significant visual aid to the more poignant scenes of the episode, such as Danette (Amy Seimetz) developing a friendship with Lyric (Julia Sarah Stone), as if to make her into a surrogate Kallie; Twitch (Max Fowler) overcoming his drug addiction and embracing a clean life (well, cleaner -- he was still smoking, but hey, one step at a time); and Holder attending the funeral for Bullet (Bex Taylor-Klaus). The picture on the easel by her closed casket is one of those beautiful, heartbreaking things where we're given a brief window into who this person was, even while you know it's not the same person we knew. And all we're left to wonder is how Rachel Olmstead went from that picture to "Bullet," as her parents obviously seemed to have cared about her (assuming that was her father who was utterly prostrate with grief over her casket). Lack of closure is a big recurring theme across the two-hour finale, as we never really learn what happened to Kallie (Kate Sproule). Her fate is simply something we're meant to infer from the wealth of evidence we're given. For a show that has made an artform out of dashing hopes (such as with Bullet and Seward's grim ends), it's strangely appropriate that we don't get closure on Kallie.

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If I go through the particulars of the case, we'll be here all day, but here's the long-and-short of it: Linden takes on the case of a charred female corpse found in the back of an old car, and it's this decision that ends up setting the chaos of the finale in motion. When she recognizes that the victim is missing her left ring finger, she realizes it's Angie Gower (Laine MacNeil), the one victim who'd actually escaped the clutches of the Pied Piper. All of a sudden, Linden and Holder start piecing together the facts of the Piper's long and storied career, pointing them back to the first victim, who'd had ties to a mentoring program in the police academy, apparently studying under Holder's former partner, Carl Reddick (Gregg Henry). This is the false twist meant to reel the viewer in, and it's a good one. Linden concludes that Reddick isn't just responsible for the Pied Piper murders, he also killed Trisha Seward -- but not because he actually intended to kill her. No, he intended to kill her son, Adrian (Rowan Longworth), but she simply got in the killer's way. Thus, we get a cat-and-mouse game in which Linden and Holder attempt to capture Reddick before he can kill Adrian, never minding the fact that through all the scenes in which Adrian is being stalked by a car being driven by "Reddick," we never once see the man's face clearly.

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The reason, of course, is because Reddick is being framed -- not unlike Holder, who is detained by Internal Affairs for assaulting Reddick. This separates him from Linden, who discovers that Skinner is the real killer when she notices that his daughter is wearing Kallie Leeds's ring. For such a seasoned killer, giving a souvenir of your handiwork to your daughter is an uncharacteristically clumsy move, but we later learn there's a reason for this, even if just a subconscious one. Skinner may say he had every intention of making a getaway before Linden found him out, but it becomes clear after a while that he's tired of pretending. His own murderous lifestyle has exhausted him, and he's prepared to have it over with already. It's a fantastic piece, as the episode shifts from being a white-knuckle, life-or-death search for Adrian Seward, and instead a rumination on what makes a regular man a killer. Not unlike what made Batman and The Joker what they are, the difference between a sane man and a crazy person is one bad day, as he explains with the first victim. Mireille Enos is outstanding as she listens to Skinner explain his story, as he drives her to "Adrian" at a location he refuses to reveal. The internal conflict between loving the false Skinner and hating the true one is terrifically depicted through Enos's performance, and there are few moments in this series as raw as Linden lashing out at Skinner once he implies that she knew something was wrong with him, and yet chose to love him anyway. He never exhibits joy in what he did, but Skinner certainly doesn't show any remorse for having killed all those people, or for having let the innocent Ray Seward hang, or for stuffing "that girl" into the trunk of a taxicab in order to set up Joe Mills. "Her name was Bullet," Linden poignantly tells Skinner, in one of the most beautifully understated "hoo-rah!" lines in recent memory. As they approach the area where Skinner claims to have kept Adrian, Linden interrogates him about Kallie Leeds, whom he claims not to remember. It's almost meta that the mystery in which we've been so invested matters this little to the person who set it all in motion, yet it doesn't go without comment from Linden, who reflects on the lost Kallie, "It's the loneliest thing in the world, waiting to be found."

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Skinner brings Linden into the woods where there's no Adrian to be found. "He's been with us this whole time," Skinner tells Linden, motioning to the trunk. A horrified Linden refuses to believe that Skinner really went through with it, particularly after he'd insisted earlier that he didn't kill Adrian because "I don't kill children." Of course, Linden called him out on the hypocrisy, saying of his victims that they all were children. But Skinner is at a point where he just wants it all to be over. So he continues to egg Linden on about how he killed the boy, refusing to hand over the keys to the trunk so she can see for herself. This is because there's actually nothing to see: he didn't kill Adrian, as Reddick discovers the boy hiding out at his mother's gravesite, safe and sound. Holder races through the woods to reach Linden before she does anything rash, but he's too late. She shoots Skinner in the ribs and then, over Holder's protestations that Skinner wants her to do this, shoots him in the head. This entire scene, bathed in moonlight amid the monolithic trees, made for a series of exquisite-looking shots. And this climax itself was a wonderfully intense capper, with Holder nervously losing it after Linden kills Skinner: she just shot a police lieutenant, and now lacks the evidence, with Skinner dead, to prove that any claim she makes about him is true. I really hope the show isn't canceled again, but if it is, it might just serve as a fitting parallel to the end of Sarah Linden's police career, if not her life as a free woman. If nothing else, the series pulled out all the stops at the end.

Credit: AMC

Veena Sud deserves all the credit in the world for actually taking the feedback she got over the course of the first two seasons, and making sure she made the most of the show's second life. Hell, the cast and crew deserve a ton of credit too. It's no small accomplishment to right what many critics considered a sinking ship, yet the concerted efforts of everyone involved have made this one of the best single, contained seasons of television I've seen in a long time. Ratings are pretty low, but if AMC is ever in the business of handing out renewals on quality, I'd say The Killing has more than earned a fourth season.