The Killing TV Show - The Jungle - The Killing Recaps, The Killing Reviews, The Killing Episodes | TWoP

Recapped by Jacob Clifton · Aired 2013-06-02

It's been at least a year since the Rosie Larsen case was closed. Jack's been living in Chicago with his dad, freeing up Linden to perfect her impersonation of a human person: Lives in a house, doesn't smoke, jogs, keeps it tight, has a crazy hot boyfriend that I still remember from this one insane episode of Saving Grace from like five years ago, the whole thing. She's got the whole thing on lock. Works for the Transit Authority. I guess just constantly taking people back and forth to that shitty hell casino and having suspicions.

The tree drawing Linden was so obsessed with before, if you recall, came from a murder in which a man sawed his wife's head off and locked up his son for a week or something. That man is Peter Sarsgaard's Ray Seward, and Linden wasn't sold on the official story: Either way (presumably at the end of the season), he's going to be put to death. It is clear that he's going to be a major character, based on the actor, the time we spend with him and how the first thing that happens is that he beats a priest unconscious through the bars of his cell. He's crazy and angry and violent and an utter Sarsgaardian delight.

Investigating a similar throat-slashing murder, Holder runs into some mean street kids who quickly prove to be main characters as well, centered around a mesmerizing and very fucked-up young lady named Bullet.

You're going to be hearing a lot about Bullet over the few months, I think. She's like if a razor blade were a person.

What Holder's been up to is his old tricks of looking amazing and wearing clothes like he's doing them a favor. He's about to take the Sergeant's test (again, I'm guessing at the end of the season), his new partner is the always charming Gregg Henry as Detective Carl Reddick and they like to share milk right out of the carton, like you know how normal people are always doing that.

Holder gets some kind of intuitive hit off this latest prostitute murder, and brings that shit to Linden's door because of some seemingly circumstantial connections that -- because it's this show, obviously -- will turn out to be central to solving the case. One day. Just a quick cup of coffee and a few rounds of "remember that one murder" are enough to turn Linden back into her old robot self, and before you know it, she's lying to everybody she knows and stealing evidence from the police and eventually shooting a sick cow in the head.

At the close of the first hour, Bullet's stressing about her crush -- another homeless girl, whose boyfriend is also homeless and also they are all hookers -- with no idea that her best friend is about to be serial murdered. Holder has just about had it with "business as usual" and Linden's self-conscious portrayal of what she thinks apathy looks like, while Linden is firing her gun into the heads of creatures in the rain. So... yeah, The Killing is back.

PREVIOUSLY

A major case from Linden's past involved a lady who was decapitated and whose son was left with her body for going on a week, resulting in some major psychic damage and connecting the boy with Linden in a visceral way that played on her own childhood stuff. Eventually she and her partner put the woman's husband away and as our story begins he's a month from execution.

But Linden's retained doubts about his guilt -- for this particular crime -- and has held onto the evidence, even upon leaving the force after the Rosie Larsen case nearly destroyed what little life our feral heroine had managed to build for herself. The Larsens have moved on, the entirety almost of the first two years' casts has moved on.

It's been a while. Not sure how long, but since the first two seasons were a day-per-episode, it could be as much as two years? Linden's got a job working with the Transit Authority, riding the boats to Vashon Island. Jack's still in Chicago with his dad. Holder is a month away from taking the Sergeant's exam, having built a steady string of successes with his new partner, Gregg Henry. They don't seem to have spoken since she walked away that day.

ASHLEY KWON

Is 16 and she is none too excited about getting into the guy's car, but she puts on a brave face. The camera -- and thus our unsub -- lingers on her jewelry. He's a collector, he likes souvenirs.

Unsub: "So like are you ready to have sex with an adult for money?"
Ashley: "What's that song on the radio? It's kinda creepy."
Unsub: "It's called 'The Rains Of Castamere.'"

DAY

Holder and his partner, Carl Reddick (Gregg Henry), arrive at a warehouse the day, where bits and pieces of Ashley Kwon are just everywhere. Reddick is fairly gross and I believe what he is telling Holder -- while drinking directly from a carton of milk at a bloody crime scene -- is how his vice bust turned into actual fucking?

Reddick: "So it's dress blues, extra starched, white gloves, spit shine, whole nine. Knock knock, she opens the door. Nothing on but the radio. I haven't even touched her yet, it's already Niagara Falls. Had to break some laws."
Holder: "At least in a couple of months that foot of glass between you won't affect your chemistry."

Stephen Holder, you and I both know that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. This man cannot be good for your inner beauty. On the other hand, Gregg Henry is the greatest, so maybe there's a trade-off. Wait no, because also he hands the carton of milk to Stephen Holder, who also drinks out of it, which is a strange thing for a person to do, but most especially for a vegan person. Reddick complains about how the milk they are sharing is skim milk, and Holder says something about cholesterol, and follows that up with something about breast milk, and I kind of envy Ashley Kwon right now.

By Jacob Clifton

Police: "A homeless man found this girl here in a trash bag, and if you notice over here you can see that he nearly cut her whole head off."
Holder: "I did notice that. It was the first thing I noticed."

What the scene is like: Holder will describe it in about an hour as a "bouillabaisse." Still not as gross as everything that has just transpired between Holder and his new partner Carl Reddick.

A BRIDGE

Kallie is another teen hooker of the Jungle, and what she is doing is climbing up over the side of a bridge with her backpack still on. She is rescued by Bullet, a teen dream of a person -- 20% Mitch Larsen, 80% Esperanza Glass -- only to protest that she wasn't even going to jump, just wanted to look out over the water:

"Come here. Look at it. Before the boats and garbage and people and stuff mess it up, it's so smooth and clean, you know? Like glass. It's perfect. I just wanted to look at it."

One of my favorite poems of life is Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" in Songs Of Innocence, where a kid wakes up from a dream just like that -- this clean heaven -- and then has to remember that he's just a grubby orphan chimney sweep.

...And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

It's very sad and very fucked up, this idea that once everything was okay and now nothing is okay, and the cruelty of remembering when things were okay. And that in the absence of God or comfort of any kind, you might as well just go to work. In this case they are teenage hookers and not chimney sweeps, but from what I know about the world back then maybe that's not a huge difference. Anyway, we'll meet Kallie's mother in a little while and it will make more sense, that Kallie is fixated on the time before the garbage messed everything up.

By Jacob Clifton

Bullet: "Let's focus on the now, see if we can get beds at Beacon House."
Kallie: "First of all, no thanks Jesus. And second of all, they're always full."
Bullet: "But they'll give us breakfast. Eggs and bacon today."
Kallie: "I hate bacon!"
Bullet: "That is a goddamn lie. Come on."

You get the mother hen thing with her right away, this sort of rage-in-protectiveness that defines Bullet most of all. Peter Pan among the lost. She reminds me of Regi, of course, but really it's just another layer of what we share with Linden: By saving other people she thinks she's going to save herself. And because that is futile, a wall she beats her head against, the world is going to keep educating her about why and it is going to be dreadful.

THE MORGUE

Is lit every bit as dark and atmospherically as, say, any given location on Hannibal.

ME: "Cause of death is multiple sharp-force injuries across the neck region. Cut marks are visible on the cervical vertebrae. Vaginal bruising is present."
Holder: "Leave a calling card, too?"
ME: "Nope, used a condom."
Reddick: "We have by far the worst job."

Carl decides that they should -- given their seven-for-seven arrest record -- fob this one off on somebody else, a Detective Jablonski, so they don't get stuck on Pedophile Mile for months, chasing weirdo leads and bashing hobo heads. Holder is of two minds: On the one hand he's got the Sergeant thing coming up in a month and he doesn't want to be in a cold case at that point, but on the other hand he's Stephen Holder.

ME: "She fought back. Defense wounds; broke her finger. Your Romeo used a weapon with a serrated edge. Held her from behind, nicked her spinal cord several times. It takes a lot of strength to do that while the victim's fighting."

I mention this not because I love the details -- nobody could love the details as much as this show, which has redefined its third existence with a Criminal Minds sort of baroque flair after watching Mitch cry for two years -- but because they are actually important and we are solving a killing because this show is called that very thing.

By Jacob Clifton

BULLET

Kallie: "You jacked a ring? You are a souvenirist of jewelry?"
Bullet: "Lyric was telling me about this blue ring her grandmother used to have, she'd always try to steal it."
Kallie: "Gonna give it to her? You should. Because you LOVE her!"
Bullet: "That may be, but hush."
Kallie: "Twitch will kill you for moving in on his woman."
Bullet: "She's not his woman, she's his mark. Just because they're squatting in that hotel doesn't mean they're together. He's using her!"

It comes off, this early, as a sort of sad gay/straight thing where she's deluded about the facts of the Twitch/Lyric dynamic -- but as we'll see, Bullet is right about basically everything all the time, so yes. He is using her. They both think they're a couple, but they are both wrong. Kallie loves it, loves Bullet's vulnerability and the fact that she actually has a way of getting at her, so she presses her and they scuffle; eventually she models the ring for Bullet, laughing all the while. Her smile is very beautiful.

JABLONSKI

Will, in fact, be taking the Jane Doe -- if Reddick and Holder will do a drug bust for him in the projects. Jablonski is not as happy in "banger land" as one would assume they all assume Holder would be. At the last moment, Holder has an intuitive spark of some kind and hangs back with the Jane Doe paperwork, promising to bring it back soon. You've seen what it looks like, when he goes internal; you know what it means.

IT MEANS LINDEN

Minimum wage ferry work for the Transit Authority, alongside her incredibly hot and pretty young boyfriend Cody. After work she drives her car to a real live house with a real live kitchen that has food in it and furniture, and he surprises her. We get very intimate with their very intimate relationship, and that's the first thing we see of Linden.

The question you're asking is, has she actually been tamed? Did it happen, somewhere between putting Rosie Larsen to rest and sending Jack to Chicago, that Regi's advice finally helped and Sarah Linden has become a person? That's a good question. It's the wrong question, but for now the answer is: Yes. She's created a world and peopled it, with Cody and minimum-wage work.

By Jacob Clifton

But minimum wage means minimal effort. And so does Cody. When he asks her to go out, to have fun, she invents another shift without the smile leaving her face. And that's when you know then that somewhere, in that house, is a room.

RAY SEWARD

If atomically/structurally speaking the street rats are the Larsen nucleus of the story -- the sprawling interconnected family representing those in mourning -- then Ray Seward (Sarsgaard) is the other side of the show, the Darren Richmond nucleus: The third player in the show's triangular structure that has Linden and Holder constantly mediating between the bereft and the reavers.

Ray was the husband of the woman Trisha Ann whose death was one of Linden's main inciting incidents, when the little boy Adrian was left with her body for nearly a week and came out drawing the same trees over and over. The original Killing. She and partner Ed Skinner put him behind bars and he's getting executed soon, but she's still not sold on the truth behind it all. Today, he's going to Death Row.

THE ISLAND

Maybe it's something in the air, maybe she felt him go Linden somewhere across the city, but she hardly seems surprised when Holder turns up at her door. They look at each other appraisingly, once inside: They both look hot as hell, she's been jogging and he's started dressing like a fucking supermodel. They dig it; they dig each other's happiness, they fall immediately into old rhythms.

Stephen: "Do you still smoke?"
Sarah: "I gave that up a while ago. You?"
Stephen: "Nicotine free! It's been a year."

They were always so furtive about it, with it, this objective-correlative to the idea that solving Killings is what Kills you: They always thought of themselves as non-smokers who smoked a secret cigarette now and again, because they couldn't define themselves that way, as smokers. If you looked at your justice addiction in the light of day, you'd know just how crazy you were.

What he means is, "How are we doing with the infection you gave me?" And what she is saying is, "Happy as ever to pretend we're safer than we are."

There's a DOC letter on the foyer table, certified. Unopened.

She pours him some coffee and listens as he speaks: The Sergeant thing, the seven-for-seven thing. She's proud, not that she shows it.

She loves it, too. She's laughed more in this one scene, seeing him, than she did in two years of this show.

It's so rare, she'll say later, A person who sees who you are at your core, who sees what you're good at -- what you love to do more than anything... who you really are...

Stephen: "How's Little Man doing? Heard he got himself a sweet little piece."
Sarah: "You mean a girlfriend? Since we're talking about my child?"
Stephen: "We text every now and then; he keeps me in the loop."
Sarah: "Me too, essentially. He always did like you. For some reason."

But they both know why. They are sitting in why. Things go silent long enough that she gets nervous and cuts the bullshit immediately. She turns it back on.

Linden: "So why are you here."
Holder: "Working girl got her head almost cut off this morning..."
Linden: "No connection. Killer's on Death Row. What do you want."
Holder: "The case file. I just want to make sure..."
Linden: "Go for it. You know where they keep the evidence."
Holder: "Thing is, it's missing and they don't know where it is."
Linden: "Yeah, you know them. Keep looking, you'll find it."

He knows -- and she knows he knows -- that she's lying. But he doesn't know why, and neither does she. He's sitting in a house with a room upstairs and a letter on the foyer table and he knows her better than almost anybody, but he doesn't know that.

It's because she's ashamed. This little life is purposely little, manageable; even Cody is another Little Man. And he comes in here with his suits and his glory and he's saying, without meaning to, "That thing you are so good at that you are bad at it? I am crushing it. I have learned to be human." Pushing his balance in her face, it's offensive. When all she is doing is her small duty.

And when he asks for the files, he's saying, "We're both nonsmokers, sure. But in this house there is a room and in that room there's a pack of cigarettes. We could just smoke one. Cody doesn't have to know." For a second he looks like temptation, like the very Devil, and he does know that.

She invents a reason for him to leave. Neither of them wants him to go.

"Hey, Holder? Not every victim's worth it. You know, you start caring... you'll end up like me, working minimum wage on a ferry."

But it's neither his need, nor his own addiction, that is appalled by that. She agrees, privately, but she stands by it. This little life, this doing her minimum duty. When he's gone, she picks up the certified letter from the DOC: Stephen brought the smell of Ray Seward into her house; it was already there.

By Jacob Clifton

She invents a reason for him to leave. Neither of them wants him to go.

"Hey, Holder? Not every victim's worth it. You know, you start caring... you'll end up like me, working minimum wage on a ferry."

SEWARD

In the transport to C Block there's a strange line: "Should we get stopped by somebody trying to remove you from state custody, we will shoot you first right where you sit." I'm not sure if that's standard procedure or whether Ray is some kind of celebrity or what, but it stuck out as basically the entire point of the scene, besides watching Sarsgaard look out at the world for the last time.

In C Block we meet two more characters on this side of the story: Death Row hacks Francis Becker (Hugh Dillon) and the new guy, Evan Henderson (Aaron Douglas). Becker is the boss, a hard-ass and very scary fellow; newbie Henderson gets the crazy-eyes right away that say Seward's going to be working some kind of insane charisma game on him. Once Becker's got Seward in his cell, he whispers menacingly that Seward's doom is upon him; Seward whispers back a request to see the chaplain.

One thing I always loved about this show is its focus on the way that the enormity of death causes our toothpaste to squeeze out of the tube in strange ways: That the entire program of mourning, start to finish, is a bloody battle to find meaning in the meaningless. Not just meaning for death, but for everything: Solving the Killing is a way to regain control over the assertive ugly world.

And now we get to see how far back that goes: For a lot of reasons, some of which we'll learn tonight, Seward's death is the answer to a question, but it's the wrong answer and the wrong question. Whatever we end up calling this Killing, it circles round and envelops everything that happened to Linden before and during the Larsen case, and why she's as obsessed with Adrian's pictures as Adrian is, and why she is crazy: Because solving the Larsen case, or the Seward case, or the Kwon case, could never solve the problem of being Sarah Linden.

OR BEING BULLET

The homeless kids chatter about a rumor, that some girl got her head cut off, but Bullet's not buying it and she doesn't want Kallie to worry about it. They continue their conversation about finding a place to stay, and Bullet promises to steal her some cigarettes so she doesn't waste her money.

The costar I was most excited about this season, Ryan Robbins, drives by menacingly in his cab, and Kallie abruptly drags Bullet away from the street so he won't see them. It's a quick moment, something you might barely register if you weren't looking out for references to this character (Joe Mills) that we don't even see yet, but interesting in the fact that it flies right by.

Holder appears, buys some cigarettes, and tries to do his "I'm just a cool kid like you" shtick; he finds it more difficult in his grownup clothes and having learned to enunciate. Bullet and Holder face off -- the Little Man and the Big Boy -- like an Eminem convention about to riot, and she continues to mostly worry about Kallie. She gives him tons of shit and when he tries to get info out of Kallie, about this case he's not working on, Bullet jumps between them both literally and figuratively. Soon enough, and after another mention of Holder's imaginary health-food habits, she chases him away.

The degree to which he fucking hates her on contact is beautiful. (The way he loves her, too.) He's used to getting attitude from bangers and homeless kids, it's not that: Her entire existence is almost like a critique of his, his ridiculous pose and he meets her ire with hackles raised so immediately you might think they'd met before. I mean that it gets physical. But once she's chased him away, he takes a call from his girlfriend Caroline, and stops paying attention.

But I hate that it got physical, that he got so irritated by Bullet putting herself between him and still-nameless Ashley's killer, because it is so very, so sadly and horribly, easy to see the world through her eyes: Predatory men on the street, men coming after her and Kallie and Lyric all the time, Joe Mills driving by, Goldie limping up, and the sickening way Kallie shrinks up and looks down at the street the second a man starts talking to her. You could look at the tough angry lesbian man-hater kid a bunch of ways, but always remember that Bullet is never wrong.

Men -- cops -- and there's Holder, the tallest man in the world. And Bullet's so tiny you can barely see her. Lyric watches from the sidelines and knows what it's costing her, but she can't do anything: She's smaller even than Bullet in the ways that count. I hate that he proved her right and he threw her to the ground. They're all around, just looking for a reason to make your life hell; waiting to remember they never needed one.

On the phone he looks back at her, still irritated, and she bucks at him one last time, but Lyric's getting in a strange car and Bullet can't watch that.

"You were everything she wanted. She knew it the minute she met you. And she just couldn't shut up about it, ever."

REGI'S WEDDING

Sarah gets through the first sentence of her speech -- on Regi's boat, of course; with Jack by her side -- without breaking up. Almost through the second one, too.

"Regi and Ellen, you have found your best selves in each other. And I just couldn't be happier for you two. Because it's so rare that a person who sees who you are at your core, who sees what you're good at -- what you love to do more than anything. Who you really are."

Well. They're touched. They think she's breaking down out of love for them, and that's mostly it. But it's not all of it. Regi's less moved than the rest of their small party, because she alone among them knows how seldom Sarah gets this way, and she's used to standing very still when she does.

"...I hope you're ready to spend a lot of time on the open sea. Congratulations. Cheers."

LATER

Jack makes fun of her, catching her smoking out on the dock, after the party. She rolls her eyes, and laughs; somewhere a bell tolls.

Sarah: "Have you had a nice trip?"
Jack: "Absolutely. And you -- are you going to be okay, when I go home?"
Sarah: "Uh, I think I can handle it."

She changes the subject -- to logistics of his return, to homework -- but when he asks what's keeping her here, what's she got here that she wouldn't have in Chicago, closer to Jack, she doesn't have an answer. He stands very still, for a moment; she packs him up and sends him home.

JABLONSKI

Is not moving at the speed Holder would like, when it comes to the case he's not working on. He tells stories, he drinks his diet sodas and he jokes around. Holder's in a pissy mood when Carl brings him a burger, and can't even grin when Carl protests that he brought him fries, too.

By Jacob Clifton

On the phone he looks back at her, still irritated, and she bucks at him one last time, but Lyric's getting in a strange car and Bullet can't watch that.

"You were everything she wanted. She knew it the minute she met you. And she just couldn't shut up about it, ever."

REGI'S WEDDING

Sarah gets through the first sentence of her speech -- on Regi's boat, of course; with Jack by her side -- without breaking up. Almost through the second one, too.

"...I hope you're ready to spend a lot of time on the open sea. Congratulations. Cheers."

LATER

Jack makes fun of her, catching her smoking out on the dock, after the party. She rolls her eyes, and laughs; somewhere a bell tolls.

Sarah: "Have you had a nice trip?"
Jack: "Absolutely. And you -- are you going to be okay, when I go home?"
Sarah: "Uh, I think I can handle it."

JABLONSKI

"Not our case anymore, man. You need to be making upward moves, not lateral ones. Homicide's either a way station or a crypt. Look at Jablonski. So hit the books. Quit being a bitch."

He's a good partner for Stephen Holder. Holder tries so hard to hide the fact that he's half-dreaming all the time -- that he's like Linden, he barely remembers what he's eating when he's eating it -- and then you have Carl Reddick, the anti-Linden, saying "Eyes on the prize, focus on your life and not death, focus on where it's taking you and not how it trips you up." Any grossness of Carl is wiped out, I think -- for Holder, for us; even the puerile sex stuff is courageously anti-Linden and sweet in context -- by how quickly it becomes clear that the best part of Holder-as-future-Sergeant is in fact Carl Reddick, who thinks he's a bitch but absolutely knows he can do it. Join the real world.

They share a moment looking at a makeup catalog, discussing their shared complexion and beauty, but when Kallie asks tentatively to spend one night at home, it goes to hell again. In the usual way: "You're not gonna ruin this for me, not this time, he's good to me, he's good for me, just let me have that..." And Kallie abruptly leaves, of course.

And as worn-out (if well-acted) Danette Lutz the character is, knowing what's going to happen makes it a lot more interesting to watch (and if Joe Mills is the man in question, which would make sense, then Danette is automatically my favorite storyline). Mitch wasn't a great mom, but she wasn't a fucking monster, you know what I mean? She had simple enough regrets; Rosie was never actually a whore at all.

C-BLOCK

"Do they ever clean these windows? It makes everything out there look murky, like you're looking through a shower glass. It's gonna be this way the whole time I'm here, isn't it. They got two alpine larch right there, see? I had a tree like that out my window when I was a boy. Slept on the fold-out. TV room. The thing never had any leaves on it. It's like coming home. There's just nothing to look at except those trees."

Adrian knows.

Seward: "So I don't believe in Jesus and all that shit, and I'm not confessing either... absolving my sins, so I can see my Maker. God isn't listening anyway."
Chaplain: "Maybe, maybe not."
Seward: "You people just never give up. Never give it a rest."
Chaplain: "I sit with a lot of men, Ray. Men like you. And I guess whatever relief I can bring them, in their final days, is why I don't give it a rest."
Seward: "Are you gonna be there? When they kill me?"
Chaplain: "If you want me there, yes."
Seward, sniffling: "If I wanted -- oh, man -- if I was gonna ask for forgiveness... how would I do it?"
Chaplain: "Start with why."
Seward: "For what I did to my wife... and my son."
Chaplain: "Start there, Ray."

He does not. What he does instead is grasp the chaplain's head, through the bars, and beat him bloody, and as they're calling in the medics, he smiles. Covered in blood. Is this what he is? When he was a boy, sleeping on the fold-out, was this inside him waiting to come out? He's been in jail for a long time. He's been heading for death even longer. Maybe he didn't even kill his wife, maybe he wasn't born this way: Either way, this is what was made.

LINDEN RUNS

In the absence of a case, DOC letter burning a hole, secret room upstairs, Linden runs. She's not a smoker, but she smokes. And she runs. And in this particular case, when the rain comes down too hard, she takes shelter in an old barn, an abandoned farm. The bodies of sick, starved cattle lie everywhere in the yard, in the rain, decomposing. If you counted them, I bet there would be sixteen of them, all told. And then, in the creeping darkness and the storm, as her breathing returns to normal, she hears the last one. Groaning in pain, readying for death. Suffering, dreadfully, all alone.

C BLOCK

Seward's lawyer is none too impressed; pissed off -- like Regi, like Bullet -- by the self-destruction and abject carelessness of his charge: "The last execution was two years ago. This is what these guys live for, and you want to give them more of a reason to make your life in here hell?"

Seward: "They don't need a reason. They never did."
Lawyer: "I know why you passed on your appeals, you're not gonna drag things out, I get it..."
Seward: "-- No. You don't get anything, you're on the other side of this glass. There's very little that you get."

As happens on TV, there's a single appeal left -- the Governor -- and the lawyer appeals to Ray's fatherhood: "Adrian's ten, right? There's still time to be a father to him." But that just pushes him further back into his cage, and -- not all that different from what he did to the chaplain -- Ray suddenly demands an odd, old right from the Washington lawbooks: He wants to be hanged by the neck until dead.

BEACON

The staff at Beacon, which is run by Pastor Mike whom we'll meet episode, hands out tickets for the nightly bed lottery: Numbers will be called, filling the last of the beds. Kallie's more and more desperate to find something; Lyric and Twitch have been tossed out of their hotel squat by Animal Control, which perks up Bullet's ears in several ways and she starts spouting off animal facts.

Kallie: "Bullet's gonna be a veterinarian!"
Lyric: "Yeah?"
Bullet, in sudden paroxysm: "Giraffe's got four stomachs! They have to digest their food a bunch of times! Which is why they're always chewing! They're even-toed ungulates!"

Even Kallie is amazed by this neuro-atypical download, but Lyric likes it. "Kinda cute when you go off like that, B." Bullet reaches into her stuff for the ring, suddenly overwhelmed with longing, but of course right then Twitch shows up and Lyric runs to him.

Pastor Mike: "Hey! Eyes up front. Anybody see Ashley? Unless someone has, I'm gonna have to give up her bunk to someone else tonight..."
Kallie: "Do not worry about that girl. Let me hold onto the ring, just until you want it back."

(Look at it. Before the boats and garbage and people and stuff mess it up, it's so smooth and clean, you know? Like glass. It's perfect.)

Pastor Mike calls out three numbers, including Bullet's, and reminds "all those living off the land" that "our thoughts and prayers are with you." Of course, Bullet can't let Kallie leave so she offers her ticket immediately, but -- knowing how Bullet works -- Kallie holds onto that for her, too. She lies and says she can stay with her mom. Knowing better than to believe everyone is safe, even for one night, Bullet eventually accepts. It's the last time she'll see her best friend; the last time they'll take care of each other.

TONIGHT

Kallie's seemed so worried all day, stressing quietly about this one moment when she'd have nowhere to go. But she's happy at least to protect her friend. She heads out with the rest of them, to find something else. To do her duty. With Bullet's ring on her finger, keeping her love safe until she's strong enough to feel it again, she heads out into the night.

Appears in her home like a ghost, wet and wild-eyed. Cody sits at the table, flipping horrified through the Kwon casefile Holder left there, in desperate need of answers. As if there's a room in her house he never even knew was there. She doesn't speak, she barely registers him: Up the stairs, dripping everywhere. Back down again, silent, with a gun in her hand. There aren't any words, so she doesn't give him any. Just heads back out into the rain.

Holder is grasped again by a feeling, that Linden feeling, and remembers how Trisha Ann Seward's finger was broken, as though by a souvenirist who wanted her rings. Ashley Kwon, in every picture her parents have of her, wore jewelry, but she was naked too. The ME checks up for him: No rings, when she was brought in.

Linden pulls up at the old farm -- the bodies everywhere -- and heads in under the dripping ceiling. The cow only gets one final lowing out, before she shoots it dead. Suffering ended. Upstairs, cow and Cody long forgotten, there is a room in her house. Full of boxes: Ray Seward, his nearly headless wife. The smell of cigarettes.

Kallie Leeds is 16 and she is none too excited about getting into the guy's car, but she puts on a brave face. It's warm inside the car. Warm, and dry. The camera, and thus our unsub, lingers on her jewelry. He's a collector, he likes souvenirs.

By Jacob Clifton

(Look at it. Before the boats and garbage and people and stuff mess it up, it's so smooth and clean, you know? Like glass. It's perfect.)

TONIGHT

By Jacob Clifton

EPISODE

We get a peek at the current and no-doubt doomed home lives of Stephen and Lyric, Linden jumps right in the hole, and more shitty things happen to Bullet.

JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps The Killing, Pretty Little Liars, Mistresses, and Defiance for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as a regular column for Tor.com, Geek Love. A new short story, "This Is Why We Jump," appeared in the June issue of Clarkesworld Magazine.

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