When AMC’s “The Killing” started three seasons ago, it seemed like a miniseries more than a long-running series. And at its low points during the Rosie Larsen case, it felt like a padded miniseries, as Seattle Police Department detectives Holder and Linden followed red herrings.
There was always something to “The Killing” beyond the mystery, though, as the deliberately paced, rain-spattered show explored the grief of Rosie’s family. The Larsen household practically echoed like a morgue.
After the outstanding third season (and second case) wrapped up on Sunday, “The Killing” has established that those often pain-drenched character moments are what can — and should — make it a long-running series rather than just a lineup of padded cases. SPOILER ALERT for those who haven’t watched the Season 3 finale yet: In the incredible final scene, Linden kills her boss and lover Skinner (Elias Koteas, showing character-actor chops that date back to his role as Casey Jones in “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”), who was shockingly (yet plausibly) revealed as the serial killer of street-dwelling girls. In cold blood. With Holder in the background begging her not to pull the trigger and muttering “no, no, no” as the season faded to black.
In the penultimate episode, we saw a wrongfully convicted man, Ray Seward (Peter Sarsgaard), hung by the state of Washington. He was in prison in part because the corrupt Skinner made sure he took the fall. Early in the season, I had assumed Seward would be exonerated in the nick of time, just as our heroes caught the real killer.
However, about halfway through the season, it struck me: “The Killing” was going to show Seward to be innocent, and then have the state kill him. (Still, having Seward’s neck fail to snap, thus leading to six minutes of torture as he suffocated to death and the screen faded to commercials, was pretty damn powerful stuff — and no doubt difficult for the writers to go through with.) After enduring criticism for making the Larsen case two seasons rather than one, there was an air of devil-mayt-care daring to Season 3. (Admittedly, the writers hedged their bets a little, establishing that Seward was a brutally violent man who happened to be imprisoned for the one crime he didn’t commit.)
It was also about halfway through the season that I realized we’d never see Callie again. She was a major character in the first couple episodes, which explored Seattle’s semi-homeless community, then she just disappeared, and we followed her despondent mom’s hopeless quest to find her. We were able to sympathize even more with the mom because even we, the viewers, didn’t get the closure of seeing Callie’s corpse (as we later did with Bullet, who also got a funeral). Unlike a series set more firmly in “TV land,” the rule of “If you don’t see a corpse, they’re still alive” doesn’t apply here: “The Killing” wanted us to sense just a smidgen of the pain and regret that a parent of a long-missing child goes through every day.
While storytellers sometimes have “innocent man on death row” yarns end badly (see “The Green Mile”), they never have the armed hero kill the defenseless bad guy. Well, OK, “Under the Dome” had Junior kill an unarmed rapist the very next night. But Junior’s not a good guy, and that’s a ridiculous show that I watch for ironic reasons, so I won’t count it. And probably there are some Clint Eastwood movies that feature the scenario described above. But this was Sarah Linden, for crying out loud! She has her share of problems, sure. She smokes cigarettes and puts her job above her family. But she’s not a killer.
Unfortunately, I think these daring, compelling episodes might have emerged because “The Killing’s” writers knew the show was going to be canceled for good this time, and they wanted to go out in memorable fashion. I hope I’m wrong, but in a year that has seen the cancellation of outstanding shows like “Bunheads,” “The L.A. Complex,” “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” and “Futurama,” I get a sense that “The Killing” won’t be back for Season 4.
If it does come back, what a must-see character-driven season it’ll be as Linden and Holder struggle over what to do in the wake of Linden’s horrible act. Linden will no doubt want to turn herself in, and Holder will no doubt try to stop her from doing so. The show could continue to delve deeper into moral ambiguity, as is the trademark of cable dramas: Linden killed a human being in cold blood, just as the killers she had brought to justice had done. Heck, even an innocent man was put to death in part because of Linden’s failure to catch the real bad guy in time, so surely Linden deserves the same fate. And yet, just as clearly, she is a better person than Skinner, and even Seward, and not at all a threat to society. Her killing of Skinner was as personal as it gets; she’s not about to go on a spree.
While Season 3 barely referenced Seasons 1 and 2 at all, there are connections. First of all, it was a great nod to the Larsen case when Skinner tells Linden that Adrian is locked in the car’s trunk. But more than that, the Larsen case left character arcs dangling — in particular, the headspace of Terri, who killed her own niece, thinking it was a stranger in the trunk. While Terri will never be revisited, Season 4 could give us something even better with Linden’s story. Perhaps she could be in the Seward position of going through legal troubles while Holder (perhaps with a new partner) investigates a new mystery.
“The Killing’s” third season was ignored by most of the mainstream entertainment media, most of which openly despised the show for not being upfront about the Larsen case’s length (two seasons instead of the assumed single season). But it was a heck of a ride, albeit a harrowing one. And if AMC allows it a fourth season, it’s only going to get better.