Compared to the beautifully photographed, rain-soaked blues and greys of greater Seattle that give “The Killing” its brooding texture, what remains of the sickly pink biohazard bags of 17 decomposing dead teenage girls stands out even more.
The chilling discovery in a dismal swamp near the Seattle-Tacoma airport, with its vividly contrasting colors, was the climactic moment of last week’s two-hour season three premiere, a shocking, visually striking moment of mass murder right out of “Dexter.”
Somewhere between the closing minutes of last week’s episode and the start of Sunday’s, Mireille Enos’ character Sarah Linden called the cops. So as the episode begins, the black and whites are pulling in, lights flashing.
Her old partner Stephen Holder, so well played by Joel Kinnaman, is a little miffed that she didn’t call him first. Already he had asked her about the death of a teen girl since the case was reminiscent of a murder she investigated that resulted in a guy named Seward on death row (to whom we keep cutting – Peter Sarsgaard is that compelling).
She denied she ever had it, but Holder states the obvious: “Looks like you found the Seward file.”
Though she doesn’t get credit for the discovery (it was an “anonymous tip,” maintains Skinner ((Elias Koateas), head of Seattle’s Special Investigations Unit), she’s back on the force as a detective, even though she was warned away from the Skinner by his wife (apparently the two were having an affair, which may or may not have caused her to quit).
Suddenly everybody’s looking for answers, though Skinner warns cops that they’re not part of some NBC drama named “Hannibal.” Specifically, he says, “I’d like to disabuse you of any notion that we’re going to find Hannibal Lecter.”
That is to say, it’s not some psychological investigation they’re launching but a straight up police case with evidence and a conviction. Obviously the guy doesn’t know “The Killing.” If he were honest he’d say: This investigation will be fraught with dead ends and dropped suspects. It will take exactly the length of the season to get the guy, so they might as well just tune on Aug. 4 to find out with the rest of us in the finale.
Nevertheless, this launches investigations on many fronts, among them, Holder and his sad sack partner park under a bridge to await street girls “bobbin for apples,” in Holder’s colorful phrase. Had they seen a missing girl?
The toughie known as Bullett (Bex Taylor-Klaus) wants to know what happened to her friend Kallie (Cate Sproule) so badly that she suggests it may be a loathsome pimp named Goldie (who might have just given her head to toe bruises).
There’s enough child porn at his home (playing to speed metal) to put Goldie away for a while, but thy release him in hopes he’ll lead them to the missing kid. It’s a kind of Fast and Furious for missing kids.
Linden is engaging in her own investigation – the missing kid’s mom and conducting a terrible room of officers looking at piles of DVD child porn to look for missing kids’ faces.
Meanwhile on death row, Seward has obtained a razor blade in a bar of soap and keeps it in his mouth. He doesn’t use it on the sadistic guard who’s taunting him, though. Instead, he tries to swallow it.
They panic when they see the blood – nothing worse than a guy trying to kill himself on death row; it’s all about who gets to kill him.
And as the electronic music amps up to signal the end of the episode we switch to the climactic scenes on all fronts: A couple of kids go out to the site where the bodies were found, like the morbid thrillseekers they are (how different are they from audiences who watch such murder scenes for entertainment at home?). Seward is messed up but not dead. And one of those child porn DVD warrants up an image – the missing girl Kallie, being interviewed.