Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
PREVIOUSLY
A year off after the Larsen case has put both partners into healthy new life situations, but we'll see how long that lasts. A fifteen-year-old hooker got her throat slashed, which led Holder and Linden in two directions simultaneously: Linden began following up on an old case that has defined a lot of her choices over the last several years, while Holder got embroiled in the lives of the monster's future victims. Solving the case could mean a pardon for the original suspect, the soon-to-be-executed Ray Seward; solving it quickly could mean salvation for Kallie Leeds, a missing homeless girl. In the end, a bunch of intuitive leaps and new info from unlikely places led Linden to the killer's dump site, where seventeen victims in total were found floating.
THE SWAMP
Holder: "Have you been standing here staring into space since last week?"
Linden: "I have been standing here staring into space, metaphorically speaking, since the day they found the body of Trisha Seward."
Holder: "PS, thank you for secretly taking over my high-profile murder case and not informing me and then breaking this latest thing and not informing me."
Linden: "I am just a civilian, human. A simple ferryman who has been thrown out of the police and into a mental hospital no less than eleven times for being simultaneously too good and too terrible at being the police. Basically I called the police so nobody would yell at me. And now you are yelling at me."
Everybody: "How did Sarah Linden find this place? Was it magic?"
Linden: "The magic of drawings."
Skinner: "Is that really all you have to say?"
Linden: "I am leaving out the part where I keep harassing a child to solve a murder we already solved. If that is what you mean. Adrian added a building to the drawing and since I had already memorized it due to being a crazy person, it created crazy-people GPS inside my mind."
Holder: "And the part where I came to your house to ask you for a box of evidence, including these drawings, and you lied and said there was no box?"
Linden: "I am leaving out that part, too. Have you not seen this show before, human."
DEBRIEF
Skinner is heading up a task force, which is how Linden will get back onto the show we are watching and, more importantly, will be able to form her spiritual Voltron with Stephen Holder that is 100 percent of the point of this show. This is the download: Seventeen bodies in an old retention pond west of the I-5 near SeaTac [which is an airport I think]. Always the same knife, because when you're this much of a creep you tend to go hard. Possibly other dump sites, but that seems like overkill. All females, twelve and up, because yikes. The warehouse where they found Ashley Kwon's body was like half a mile away.
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
DEBRIEF
Skinner is heading up a task force, which is how Linden will get back onto the show we are watching and, more importantly, will be able to form her spiritual Voltron with Stephen Holder that is 100 percent of the point of this show. This is the download: Seventeen bodies in an old retention pond west of the I-5 near SeaTac [which is an airport I think]. Always the same knife, because when you’re this much of a creep you tend to go hard. Possibly other dump sites, but that seems like overkill. All females, twelve and up, because yikes. The warehouse where they found Ashley Kwon’s body was like half a mile away.
Skinner: “If you think this is going to be like Hannibal Lecter, lose your romantic profiler ideas immediately. The Killing is not one of those shows where interesting things happen…”
And thank God for it. Anybody who watches Criminal Minds should be put in jail.
Skinner: “We’re not gonna be finding any skin suits, he’s not gonna be sending us some lady’s head in a box. My guess is this guy’s killing hookers and runaways because no one’s looking for them. The end. His narrative is not important.”
Holder: “What about Kallie Leeds? She is missing and I am obsessed with Bullet, her best friend.”
Skinner: “The truly awful part is that the season’s opening sequence — Ashley getting into the mystery car — actually happened a few days before the rest of the episode. So he is an abductor and a jailer as well as a murderer and rapist. Kallie could right now be down a well. But not putting lotion on her skin, because this is not that kind of story.”
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
Linden is supposed to be doing the victim-identification things with the ME and Coroner — NB, I don’t know the difference, if you didn’t already catch that — until she is hired back into the police force for the thirty-seventh time, but you know that won’t stop her.
Skinner: “Also a clue, the red bags we found the girls in are biohazard-grade. Medical/institutional use.”
Somebody: “And how did we find those bodies, exactly?”
Skinner: “Nobody knows. Anonymous tip.”
Linden: “As much as I hate getting attention for my psychic powers, I also hate not getting attention for my psychic powers.”
SIDEBAR
Skinner: “Linden, don’t bug me about that. First of all, I can’t very well tell them that you stole evidence from a solved case and harassed a fucked-up child to get to this break in a whole other case, because that is the Lindenest thing ever and you’re already the most embarrassing cop. And second of all, that particular closed case is not something we can talk about because the execution is coming up, and Seward’s decision to be hanged — the first hanging in twenty years — makes it an even huger media circus. Add serial killer to Death Row celebrity, and obviously that will fuzz up any leads we could ever possibly hope to have. Just act normal.”
Linden: “I am going to want to bother that fucked-up child more.”
Skinner: “Did I not just say act normal?”
Linden: “As much as Trisha Seward and Ashley Kwon’s murders have nothing in common, they also have one thing in common. A serial killer that did them.”
Skinner: “Based on…”
Linden: “Based on I found seventeen dead bodies with matching wounds. Based on I got that location from the drawings.”
Skinner: “Even though all of this is obvious, I cannot hear you because I want the Seward case to be solved. Not necessarily because he did it, but because he is the worst and because getting back into that case would ruin my marriage and my life. I can’t even think straight about the Seward murder, is how much of a bruise it still is for both of us.”
Linden: “Pushing on bruises is 99 percent of what I am about.”
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
Skinner: “First of all, Adrian’s doctor told us he won’t remember that night, which is a good thing because that’s how you get Dexter.”
Linden: “It’s how you get me though, too.”
Skinner: “Sure, and I know you’re going to talk to the kid anyway, and I’m not going to stop you. I have Regi amounts of compassion for your compulsive behavior, interestingly enough, and I know that you need to make this right for yourself, if nobody else. But we can’t give Seward ammo for an appeal. That’s what I’m saying to you.”
Linden: “I didn’t realize you get me. I forgot that part. Thank you for setting my mind at ease, human.”
Skinner: “You can always go back to your normal little life.”
Linden: “Good one, former lover. That was a funny joke.”
He hands her the paperwork to get back into policing, because it’s as simple as that, and then just to fuck with us he says, “Simple as that. Welcome back!” I like it when The Killing has a chip on its shoulder.
C BLOCK
That blabbering person that is always around Ray Seward, he is blabbering some more while they take their showers. It happens in a cage, like chainlink fence around a showerhead, but since it’s this show, it also takes place in almost complete darkness. I don’t know that much of the blabbering matters besides giving the scene some color, but they do talk about how Ray’s got a tattoo of an “A” on his chest, which relates to Adrian and which the mean guards use to make him feel bad about everything as usual. Oh, and then somebody has slipped him a razor blade in his soap, because of his dubious celebrity I still don’t quite understand.
JOE MILLS!
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
Joe Mills, finally. Getting a blowjob from a child, of course. From Lyric, in fact. There is a small amount of patter once the job is done, and he gives Lyric some McDonald’s breakfast and tells her to stay warm and also not get her head cut off if she can at all avoid it. His concern for her welfare and that of her compatriots is somewhat compromised by his predilection for having sex with homeless children, but you know. I don’t wanna judge. (Oh, and Kallie was terrified of him, that still remains in the ether as well.)
All I know is, I’ve been waiting ten years to recap a show with Ryan Robbins in it, because I love him to death, and I’m not going to stop loving him just because this one character happens to be a… um, a job creator.
Lyric: “Well, I just blew Joe Mills so my day’s going pretty great. You want some hash browns? It’s early enough there are hash browns. Taxi drivers have weird hours.”
Twitch: “I am groggy because of probably drugs. Or ignoring you, because you are one of the more pointless people of all time.”
Lyric: “Joe Mills was warning me about how being teenage hookers will end up with our heads getting cut off. What a nice guy for being not at all a nice guy.”
Twitch: “[Still not responsive.]”
Lyric: “So I’m not just being a clingy dumb girlfriend when I reiterate my desire to relocate with you to Los Angeles, where nothing bad ever happens to hookers.”
Twitch: “[Is in fact one of the only homeless kids with his name in the credits, so it's a good bet he's just resting right now and not actually in anaphylactic shock or whatever.]”
Lyric: “[Stance belied by the fact that she drapes herself across his tiny body, as needy teens have been doing since blow jobs were invented.]“
THE BEAT
Reddick: “We are the best cops in all of Seattle and yet we are chasing pimps and hoes, because that’s all this show is now, just Special Victims and serial killings.”
Holder: “It’s fun. I like being mean to the people who question, and nobody’s going to judge me for being mean to people that like to have sex with homeless children.”
Reddick: “Did you know Linden and Skinner used to sleep together? When they were partners?”
Holder: “That’s only weird to you because you think it’s the most inappropriate relationship she could have with a partner. Trust me, whatever goes on between us is like, sex squared. You don’t even have a word for the boundaries we cross.”
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
Holder: “Man having sex with a homeless child! Get out of the car!”
John: “But why? We were just hanging out. And I’m pretty sure she’s 18.”
Hooker: “He wasn’t paying me! We were just having consensual sex for free, in the middle of the day, under this bridge. Why, what do you take me for.”
Holder: “I don’t care about your exploitation or righting the ways our society has failed you. I just want you to look at this picture of Kallie Leeds.”
Hooker: “Cheek piercings are the most hateful piercings you can have above the neck. Face tattoos of the piercings world.”
Holder: “And yet I’m still looking for her. Identify her or I will take you on a ride-along and you won’t get to do any childhood hooking today at all.”
Hooker: “Fine. No, I do not know this girl. That’s so racist that you think all of us homeless hookers know each other.”
Holder: “Do you know Bullet?”
Hooker: “Everybody knows Bullet. She is the greatest. But I have no info.”
Holder: “Fine, you are arrested.”
Hooker: “Fine, she’s probably skateboarding on Front Street.”
Holder: “Thank you. Hey, stop being a hooker, okay?”
Hooker: “Do you really care?”
Holder: “I do not. Bye!”
DANETTE
Trashy Lady: “[Trashy things.]”
Danette: “[Trashy things.]”
Linden, knocking: “[Robotic things.]”
Danette: “[Trashy things.]”
Linden: “[Well-meaning but robotic things.]”
Danette: “Fine, go talk to Bullet. Just find Bullet, everybody revolves around Bullet because she is a black hole of gravity and also kicks ass.”
Linden: “Was that so hard?”
Danette: “Fuck you.”
Linden: “Did you not understand that I’m a homicide detective? This isn’t really about your piss-poor motherhood skills, it is about crimes. Serial killers raping kids. Enjoy your daughter dying because you won’t answer my questions, okay?”
Danette: “Sometimes being unhelpful trash is something you really have to commit to.”
BULLET
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
Is pulling it together, post-Goldie attack, and it’s sad and messy and gross; later, she is skateboarding directly at fences on Front, jumping off the board just before she hits the fence.
Holder: “Hey, Bullet. Don’t run, I am trying to find Kallie. I want to talk to you specifically.”
Bullet: “This choad again. Today’s not a great day for men in positions of authority. Not there is a great time for that, generally, but…”
Holder: “I am here purely because of your plight. If you had any idea how many conversations I’ve crammed Kallie into, over the last few days…”
Bullet: “Nobody can know I’m talking to you. I can’t talk to cops, it’s not something I we do. Any subversive ideas I had about speaking truth to power were recently suppressed by Goldie, by design. I am not feeling strong today.”
Holder: “I will protect you, and any secrets you need me to protect.”
You can see him change, over the course of this, as she reveals more and more of the stuff she’s not telling. He respected her even when he disliked her, but this — this brittle, wild, angry bravery — is something he knows intimately, and he knows you don’t push. When they pretend they’re unbreakable is when they feel most broken; he’s no different.
Bullet: “There is a room in Goldie’s house, a closet off his bedroom…”
Holder: “Who is Goldie?”
Bullet: “Nothing and no one.”
Holder: “How do you know he keeps girls in there?”
Bullet: “I broke in, and I heard somebody. Maybe her, it sounded like her. It was locked. He has a knife. A big one.”
Holder: “A knife, you say. That’s interesting on at least two levels. Here’s twenty bucks for the address…”
Bullet: “I’d feel a lot better going with you. Um, which is to say, Fuck you and fuck your money, where’s the car.”
GOLDIE’S PAD
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
Holder and Reddick bust into his apartment where trashy cookie-monster music is playing, and there are a million TVs, all playing kiddie porn. It’s an overwhelming scene, going down in there, made all the more confusing/uncomfortable by the fact that we can’t actually see anything that’s going on, or else we would be the ones watching the kiddie porn. If you see what I mean.
Eventually they get Goldie; he lives, unfortunately, through the experience.
THE STREET
Lyric is hanging out with another friend, Rayna, who has gender stuff going on, who loves cigarettes and has a whole family story and all kinds of awesome things. Lyric’s yelling at her mom on the phone — “Whatever, I used up all my minutes!” — when Linden walks up.
Linden: “Hey you guys, is what a person would say to a person. I’m looking for a human girl named Bullet.”
Rayna: “Can I get a cigarette?”
Lyric: “Rayna!”
Linden: “It is true, person. I do have the look of a smoker in my haunted eyes, and so you may have one. Where is the human girl Bullet. I do not wish her harm or ill.”
Lyric: “She already got arrested.”
Linden: “By a law enforcement official, is that your meaning.”
Girls: “Saw her driving off with some Eminem wannabe with a molester ‘stache.”
Linden: “I know the man of whom you speak. Farewell, humans.”
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
GOLDIE INTERROGATION
Ugh, the whole Goldie thing. I tried to watch this scene like six times and my eyes kept sliding off it like an egg yolk you don’t want to pop. So gross. Under discussion are, of course, his kiddie porn collection — which is clearly a business venture of Goldie’s — and the pubic hair situation of the young ladies versus ladies of Goldie’s acquaintance versus Goldie’s own preferences — not talking about that — and his child-rape arrests, and then also the fact that Bullet took some righteous chunks out of his face while he was raping her, which was a nice part of the conversation, all things considered.
Outside — as Goldie is explaining to the good-copping Reddick and Holder that yes, in fact he does consider the pornography as a loss leader for his prostitution business, a “menu of services” as it were — Linden is stressing.
Linden: “It is not that they are not good at this. It’s disconcerting how easily they slip into the mind of a little child who rapes and sells the bodies of other little children, in our unforgiving and bleak wonderland called Seattle. But he will not agree that he is a murderer. Firstly because he knows the system, and secondly because he is not a murderer.”
Skinner: “He has a history with young girls, access to an apparently endless victim population… But this knife of his is not the ritualistic knife of The Killing. And yet too, his films are full of the bodies of young girls, just like the swamplet. And neither you nor Holder seems to be concerned about much else beyond Kallie Leeds at this point in the season.”
Linden: “I spoke with her mother. An unpleasant woman, with much on her mind.”
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
Reddick: “What if instead of putting him in jail for distributing child pornography, and getting a dangerous predator off the streets, we were to… Do the opposite of that?”
Skinner: “I just want to say I have solved this case, much like before.”
Reddick: “But what if we silently watch him as he goes about his business? If he has this girl imprisoned, he will eventually visit or kill her. And that will be exciting!”
Skinner: “Fine, and in the meantime we can watch thousands of hours of kiddie porn and try to identify the young people involved. And then we can all commit suicide, because that is the worst thing that has ever happened.”
Skinner: “Linden, you go deal with the clusterfuck that is the coroner’s office. Oh, but first, tell me if you are crazy yet.”
Linden: “Thanks for asking. I am not crazy yet. However, your wife knows that we had an affair. I did not mention it earlier, because it is weird.”
Skinner: “Well, thanks for mentioning it at all.”
Holder: “Yo, Linden. What is with your cold and unfriendly affect?”
Linden: “That is simply my face. However, I am angry because you had the human girl Bullet and I wasted time looking for her, when I could have been dragging little Adrian down into total darkness.”
Holder: “I guess we’re even, except you still owe me like three more points because you’re not acting like partners and you called the cops instead of me and no man is an island.”
Linden: “I was. You came to my island. You broke it.”
Holder: “And now you’re going to visit little Adrian, on top of everything else?”
Linden: “You know that is how I found the swamplet. You must know that.”
Holder: “Just because there’s that obvious connection doesn’t mean there’s a connection, Linden!”
Linden: “Or does it. Plus, the broken fingers of the whores.”
C BLOCK
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
Alton, the babbler, babbles: Mostly about how Ray is the boy Adrian’s only parental figure — by definition, since his mom got her head sawn off in front of him — and that the child shan’t survive without the likes of Ray Seward to educate him in the ways of being an upstanding member of society. Perturbed, Ray turns the conversation to Head CO Becker’s family once again.
Seward: “How’s the wife and kid, Francis? I’ve seen them, waiting for you in the parking lot. That’s so sweet. Your boy looks like you…”
Becker: “Let us not play that game, because it ends up with me pointing out that your son is only going to become more of an orphan over the month or so.”
Seward: “Damn. That was mean. That really hurt my feelings. I suppose I must cut you with a razor blade. Or do something even scarier with it.”
ADRIAN
Linden: “Hi. You are Adrian. I am Sarah, but you can call me Stranger Danger.”
Adrian: “I remember you from that awesome day I no longer had to hang out with my mother’s rotting headless corpse. How’s it been going?”
Linden: “Not well, little Adrian. Not well at all. Can you tell me, though, more about these warehouses you added to your psycho drawings you keep drawing over and over. For they led me to a serial killer’s dumping ground.”
Adrian: “I want to see my father.”
Linden: “A reasonable request, young man. You’ve been of no help as usual, but I shall see what I can do.”
STAKEOUT
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
Linden: "Nobody reported them missing or even noticed they were gone. Throwaway kids..."
Holder: "-- Not Ashley."
Linden: "Didn't help, did it? Where's Reddick?"
Holder: "Needs his beauty sleep. Me, I'm already beautiful, so..."
Linden: "That was comedic. I enjoy your company."
Stephen stretches out across the desk toward her -- a best-friend move, sleepy head on crossing wrists, flowing out like water -- then leaning back to look at the ceiling.
Holder: "What about little Picasso?"
Linden: "I couldn't even tell if he remembered me."
Holder: "It was a long time ago. Especially in little kid years."
Linden: "It was interesting, though. He asked to see Ray. Why would you do that? If you thought he killed your mom, or saw him do it, why would you ask for the guy?"
A cop brings in the tape then, though. The Kallie one.
AT THE POND
They're giggly, all bravado and tough talk, as they get closer: The whole place is lit up like it's daytime, these bright lights illuminating everything. "Are those graves?" Lyric whispers, and though Twitch can hear the panic in her voice it's Bullet that closes ranks. I can't tell which one reaches out first, but they're both a lot stronger once they're touching.
As the C Block night guards rally around Ray Seward, calling Code Blue, Stephen and Sarah pop in the disc: Kallie, disgusted and a little sad, staring into the camera. Is it Goldie? It should be Goldie, but maybe it's somebody else.
Man: "So what's your favorite subject?"
Kallie: "I like Reading, I guess..."
Man: "Are you a virgin? ...Come on, now. Why don't you take off that shirt?"
You don't see her do it, but you can see her go quiet inside. Whatever she doesn't want to do -- whatever part of this is not the Kallie she thinks she is -- she's less afraid of that than whoever else is in the room. Whatever man terrifies her enough that she'll shut down and just do it. But that doesn't really narrow it down either.
WEEK
Stephen brings Bullet in to consult on the video, and they raid another apartment; Holder siding more actively with Linden on the Seward case can only mean more stress in the task force, presumably, and more time away from Caroline. More sad weirdness along the Ray/Adrian axis, I'd imagine -- and if I'd had to guess, we'll see Sarah flip polarities about that sometime soon, when she goes from identifying with Adrian to understanding just how far Ray's willing to go to keep his own child clean.
Holder's bothered at first by the fact that Linden is "working his case," but once Adrian's painting -- now with identifiable landmarks -- leads her to the dumping ground for the sixteen victims of the killer, he's willing to join Skinner's taskforce to bring the guy down.
Skinner -- who confirms the affair we expected with Linden, although he seems surprised that his wife, along with the entire precinct, knows about it -- gives a great speech about how serial killers are never as interesting as you think they're going to be, and of course the whole thing has to stay quiet for now, since Ray Seward is about to be executed.
Not that we all work together perfectly, at first: Holder and Reddick spend the first half of the episode tracking down various hookers to find the missing Kallie Leeds, which brings them eventually to a post-traumatic Bullet, while Linden -- working on her own, of course, but now with a badge -- spends the day looking for Bullet on her own.
She meets Kallie's shitty mother Danette, who is of course no help at all, but mostly spends the episode staring into that uniquely Linden space we've come to know so well. She visits Adrian, the son of the killer's possible first victim, but only gets a few nowhere clues in response.
In the end, Holder's bond with Bullet helps them nail Goldie the pimp, who attacked Bullet last week, which yields an impressive amount of kiddie porn... But not an arrest that sticks, as far as putting Goldie away. In fact, the entire raid -- which takes most of the episode to conceive, set up and execute -- honestly just results in a chance for Holder to take up Bullet's cause and hope that it redeems them all. (Which of course it doesn't.)
In the end, Holder and Linden do discover a tape that puts Kallie at Goldie's house sometime after her "disappearance," but doesn't necessarily mean she's still alive. But without much trust in anybody, Bullet and Lyric (and a new, also gender-complex street kid) accompany Twitch to the swamplet where the bodies were found, which is suitably gruesome and sad to end the episode. Oh, and we finally get a half-decent look at taxi driver Joe Mills, whose connection to Kallie and general fascinating-ness belies his seemingly "benign" current role of "gross guy that get blowjobs from children but also wants them to dress warmly."
The ME confirms that the dead girls share broken fingers and the jewelry thing -- some of them, in fact, had their fingers cut off with that same decapitating knife -- but in some ways that just complicates things, considering everybody who's lost a daughter in the last three years is now showing up at the station looking for relief one way or the other. Mostly it just means Holder and Linden sitting around saying shit we already knew to each other, so we'll remember it moving forward.
Meanwhile, Ray gets slipped a razor blade in the prison shower, which he uses to seemingly attempt suicide but is almost assuredly another piece of drama bullshit. He's a joy to watch -- as is, always, our girl Bullet and obviously the leads -- but it's a quiet and unconnected situation that only seems intended to further cement his place as everybody's favorite thing in C Block.
All in all, a staid episode even by this show's standards, in which Holder's intuition about Bullet's personal connections to Goldie -- as her rapist and her friend's possible kidnapper -- seems like more of a step forward than anything that happens with the case. Somewhat lacking in the personal moments that are the show's high points, it seems mostly like moving pieces around. Which is always fine -- especially for a show that has trained us to expect very little excitement, over the maudlin and the meditative -- but means especially here that, by comparison, we'll see more fruit from these seeds week than we've come to expect on average. All you really need is somebody looking at Linden like she's crazy, while doing exactly what she says, and this episode offers even more of that than usual.
Week: Holder's connection to Bullet once again dubious at best, the thin hope that Kallie Leeds is still alive somewhere keeps everybody from focusing on the project of identifying the sixteen dead girls we already know about for sure, which seems more and more likely to connect the dots for Linden than the Leeds case ever will. But the chance of getting forensic on the kiddie porn recovered from Goldie's house means another chance for our three leads to get ever deeper into each other's heads, which is after all while we are all here.
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 this month's Clarkesworld Magazine.