Team Linden circles Pastor Mike all episode long, trying to figure out exactly how the Shepherd serves his flock. After a fight with Twitch, new couple Bullet and Lyric crash at Pastor Mike's residence, narrowly missing a visit from Linden and a swiftly losing-it Holder. (Whose bro-down with Bullet about taking care of one's lady is directly responsible for putting them there in the first place, ironically enough -- especially considering he was talking to himself more than Bullet anyway.)
One of the kids from Beacon Home alerts the cops -- and Danette -- to some inconsistencies in Mike's story, and the cops realize that he's living under a fake identity. Turns out in his old life, Pastor Mike was arrested for kidnapping a girl who later OD'd. Bullet accidentally warned Mike of their investigation while trying to manipulate him out of a bed, so by the time the cops get a warrant and swarm the house, he and Lyric are long gone. Bullet and Team Linden race to the train station separately, discovering a bloody-backseated rental car that fits with the other kid's story, but no Mike and no Lyric.
Ray Seward accidentally causes strife among the hacks after a blind guess about "somebody" sleeping with Becker's wife lands between the eyes, but in more important news the sound of Ray's gallows being built pushes him over the edge and he finally breaks. Terrified, he garners a certain amount of sympathy from Henderson, but perhaps all these sudden changes of heart will mean nothing and he will just get hung, the end. (Hanged.)
It's a bravura performance, as we've come to expect/already expected from Sarsgaard, but put up against the little bit we know about Pastor Mike, it's very interesting indeed: For a guy this obsessed with saving children, is it really out of the question that his "kidnapping" might not be such a bad thing? Could he, like Ray Seward, be so over fighting a perception of guilt that he chose another way out?
It doesn't explain his wonky whereabouts during Angie Gower's amputation and near-death experience, but if so, kidnapping Sarah Linden in the last seconds of the episode is probably the sanest possible response he could have to this sudden influx of police interest in his doings. (Plus, the parallel with Seward means it's even less of a red herring than usual.) Assuming they both make it out of this little hostage situation alive, it's my guess that his redemption will be something Sarah understands even if the state does not. (The state which, in this episode, we find out has a database of tattoos that is tantamount to a fingerprint database, somehow.)
In personal news, Sarah gets a post-breakup creeping from a suddenly less-adorable Cody, and everybody seems very interested in Holder's style changes of late. When she finally explains -- first to Cody, then to Stephen himself -- that it's happening again and they are transforming into wild animals, she seems a lot more upset about it than Holder (who is exceedingly on edge all day), which we can all agree spells trouble for the entire universe. Oh, and she and Skinner nuzzle like when Dwight Schrute was on Six Feet Under, and he is now convinced that probably Ray Seward did not cut off his hooker wife's head in full view of their son. So that's a plus.
Week: Probably Pastor Mike is the Killer of the Killing and after an hour of Holder losing his mind trying to get Linden back from this insane murderer of children and the occasional wife, they are finally reunited and they fall in love and have albino rabbit babies and then it's just three episodes of that, like the strife of babies, before the big two-hour finale of my big gay wedding to Darren Richmond where Bullet is my best man. That's probably how it's gonna go. Or no wait, the opposite of that: An hour of running around to no real purpose, and then Mike is like, "I kidnapped that girl because they were raping her!" but he goes to jail anyway, and is beaten to death for things he did not do, and Linden's like "You win some you lose some meep-morp-morp."
PREVIOUSLY
The Pied Piper will sometimes cut your head off, often with vague religious overtones, but all we know about him is that he isn't Ray Seward, who is otherwise occupied: On Death Row for cutting off a head, off which he did not in fact cut. Pastor Mike was very dedicated to Beacon Home, where some children might find refuge and others, sometimes missing fingers, might end up turned away. One child in particular, we still don't know where she is or what she is up to, making this season of The Killing different from ones in which the only thing we knew for certain was that Rosie Larsen's ass was dead, dead, dead.
BEACON HOME
Pastor Mike: "It's terrible how these girls are getting their heads cut off! I provide them with home and safety from that, but only in limited numbers."
Linden: "Can you tell us more about them?"
Pastor Mike: "I try not to pry. Especially the girls, who are just innocent angels."
Linden: "Do you have pictures and in-depth dossiers on them, though?"
Pastor Mike: "Maybe. Maybe that, I do."
Holder: "Why are you so obsessed with helping these kids?"
Pastor Mike: "I guess because I'm a nice guy. Or, like everybody on this show, because I am driven to do so by a fucked up history and a need to solve the world's problems in lieu of my own."
Team Linden: "That does sound very fishy!"
Pastor Mike: "If Angie Gower comes by here I will make sure to call you. Hopefully still with all her fingers she has left."
Rayna, aka "Gay Ray," a.k.a. Tariq from LA Complex, the best show of all time, hides in the shadows. For once, not smoking. Just being afraid because of secrets.
TWITCH/LYRIC SQUAT
Twitch: "There is a bisexual vibe in here! That's two problems!"
Lyric: "Maybe we did get gay a little bit, but please don't get weird about it."
Bullet: "Probably it stresses you out in part because you are gay for pay."
Twitch: "I cannot possibly deal with y'all tweaking me about that, after my recent rape."
Bullet: "If only I knew about that, we could maybe find some common ground. Instead, though, I am going to steal your girlfriend. Perhaps already I have."
Fisticuffs. Tiny skinny malnourished babies, beating on each other the best they can. Eventually Bullet and Lyric scram, leaving Twitch to what is rapidly becoming one of the sadder lives on this very sad show about very sad lives.
SPDHQ
The Computer: "Pastor Mike Sheehan barely exists!"
Holder: "All the better. There is something about his altruism that is making me act completely like you, Linden. I am just Lindening the fuck out this week."
Linden: "You think it's his haven for victims, like a personal sex shopping mall. But you can get a homeless hooker literally anywhere on this show."
Holder: "Unrelated, I think all religion is claptrap! This is about my addiction issues!"
Linden: "You are completely Lindening out. You need sleep please, honey. When I am the one giving you indulgent smiles because you're being too intense, sleep is the first and best line of not losing it."
Holder: "What if I out-Linden you! Who will save us then?"
Linden: "Bullet, one imagines."
VASHON ISLAND
Cody: "Welcome home to your house which is no longer a safe space. I am here in the dark to stalk you, because I guess I was not that cool with you dumping me."
Linden: "You are a young man, I do not take you seriously. I cannot discuss your dumb hurt feelings with you right now. Or why you know I haven't been home in three days."
Cody: "I am going to get creepily aggressive, then! I am going to validate everything that causes you to withdraw into your fantasy world of constant blood and beheadings!"
Linden: "Okay, listen. You're not wrong. I was pretending to be something that I wasn't with you. That is over. The validation of being correct is the best that I can give you. And if you touch my body again, I will do you injury. Hurt that pretty little Ed Snowden face. And then we're both jerks."
It is skillful because first of all, her breezy lack of care about his feelings early on was played like she wasn't turning back into her wild animal self -- just getting him out of her messy life for their both sakes. But now it's gone even further into validating her wild animalness because if this is what dating is like and being a human? Fuck that, no thank you. Also, the last person to physically threaten Sarah Linden was Chief Nicole, by far the worst goddamn person on the show, so we're meant to take it seriously because you do not fuck with our Linden. And finally, this perforates the safety of her intimidatingly blank craziness and being-a-copness, presaging the episode's final moments:
If you ever let anybody find out your name or see your heart or where you live, Sarah, you will be abducted or murdered or worse. Better to live in your car. Not even an island is safe.
THE JUNGLE
Holder: "Wait, are you smiling now? Where did you learn to smile?"
Bullet: "Through sex with a young lady."
Children: "[Snotty with cops, just young enough that it's innocent, just silly enough they know they won't get into trouble for it.]"
Bullet: "Why are you dressing like your former wild-animal self again?"
Holder: "My Versace suit and my Bugs Bunny hoody are both costumes, so nobody will ever really see me. That, or I'm already so far down the Linden rabbit hole I won't even notice when I start to smell weird."
Lyric: "Cops make me nervous. Giant men with authority make me nervous. My life has not been very easy."
Bullet: "It's just Bugs, he's wonderful. Do not worry about him."
Holder: "Two questions. First of all, why do I hate Pastor Mike?"
Bullet: "That's mysterious to me too. You should cut that out, he's one of the good ones."
Holder: "I still haven't received the memo that you are always right, and therefore will continue to be weird about him."
Bullet: "I will also make mistakes having to do with this, later. But trust me, he is the only other adult male on this show who isn't secretly a pedophile."
Holder: "Question two, is this the young lady you are dating?"
Bullet: "She is my weakness."
Holder: "She has been mesmerized by you! She has good taste."
They have a very mortifying gangsta conversation about sexual prowess and general swag that I can't even watch again, much less recreate for you, but you already know anyway. It's exactly how you think it went.
Holder: "...You can be as smooth as Velveeta, but at the end of the day, you got to take care of your girl. Protect her, you know? Keep her safe. This ain't no kind of crib. You be safe, Bullet."
What he means is, your own sense of self-preservation isn't doing the trick, so I might as well blackmail you with some girl's boobs. What she hears is, she will never hold onto this girl -- this dream girl, this not-straight-but-not-Bullet-levels-of-gay girl -- without doing something dramatic. Building a home. Now, I hate to throw gendered norms around, but as a gay person myself I know sometimes it's easier to just think in the dominant paradigm, and this -- earned, actually, by their awkward conversation about the "shorties" -- is one of those times: Don't just be her little girlfriend vacation, he's saying. Be her man.
C BLOCK
All through the episode, you can hear them building the gallows for Ray, constructing it perfectly. It's music to Becker, he calls it music, but Ray's in no mood. He pushes on some bruises -- Alton's suicide, etc. -- before finding the right one: Becker was taking a personal day that day because of something going wrong in his marriage. Maybe something huge, like actually walking in on somebody with her.
I don't think that's Henderson, I think that little come-on was a red herring/flag to show us what the wife was like, so that when Becker cuts her head off for cheating on him eventually, it'll trace back there and we'll remember that she is the kind of lady who doesn't mind getting cozy with another guy just so her husband will get violent.
On the other hand, with this show you never know. Some fans of the show are suspicious of Henderson's baby, even. Like, that the baby even exists. I say we're halfway through the season and you don't cast Aaron Douglas to be that kind of a person, you cast him to be Henderson as he seems: Genuine, a little soft, a little tired, a little smarter than -- and a fair amount of skeeved out by -- the people he works with.
Becker: "Did you know that if the length of the rope is off by even an inch, you'll strangle to death instead of snapping your neck?"
Ray: "Rude."
Becker: "Either way, you shit yourself. Either way, you're dying in a diaper."
Dale, the guy with the girlfriend on the outside who has stepped up to be the person that talks to Ray, tells Ray some stuff about how it's "up to him" how he goes you. "You decide how to exit this world." Which was supposed to be the whole point, wasn't it? Making them build this elaborate thing, with the rope and the measurements and the diapers and everything. Throw him a little party. But that was before he walked Alton through his own hanging, and everything changed. Alton had the choice, too; and Ray saw what it was like, up close, first hand. All alone, in the night.
BEACON HOME
Pastor Mike: "The reason we don't let grownups in here is because they might act erratic."
Danette: "Joke's on you, motherfucker! I am already acting erratic!"
Mike fills Danette in on how her underage daughter spends her days -- bleakly, in a twilight world of blowjobs and mean boyfriends and fingers getting cut off -- and they bond for a moment over how Kallie's favorite classes were to do with cosmetology, which Danette's narcissism (probably correctly) relates back to her own home-employed vocation. I just like the idea that even though kids are being constantly turned away from this place, even when missing their fingers, once you get inside it's all community center cake walks and extension classes. "Twitch has been learning koine Greek and Bullet's taking French cooking classes and Lyric made a shitload of potholders last week."
Outside, that same Beacon kid has left a note on Danette's car that says, succinctly enough, HE'S LYING. Any other show, it would contain more information, but on this show you know that whatever he's lying about, it's not what Danette thinks or what we think or what Sarah thinks he's lying about. Certainly not what Holder thinks he's lying about because Holder is so into this guy right now he can't even see straight. (The version of Holder that would, say, frame a politician and turn the entire internet into rabid animals attacking a brilliant TV show in the last two seconds of its season finale, just for like a random example.)
C BLOCK
So the backstory on Becker's home life is that he missed his shift -- allowing Alton to die -- because his son called him, freaked out, because his wife was out running around and had disappeared, and Becker found her at some bar with some guy, which caused him to project his own feelings of emasculation and powerless onto his son, so then that became a whole other thing, where now he needs his son to respect him again. Already quite a tangle, but then you have psychic Ray Seward somehow pushing that button, so now he's also projecting all of that nonsense onto "the cons," like the inmates are just having these hushed conversations about his being a cuckold all the time, which -- because he is obsessed with his own importance and authority -- leads directly to like, "I will lose control of the population, and then there will be a riot." All of which is happening only in his head. I'm so sure anybody cares what your whore wife is up to, that none of us has ever met or even knows exists.
AM DEBRIEF
Reddick, verbatim: "We scoured every scabies-ridden motel, SRO and warehouse in the city. No luck finding Joe Mills, or nine-fingered Angie."
While they're getting their plan together to find him/them using vigilance and taxi cab routes, Danette shows up with that note. The more we see her, the prettier she gets. She's still a hot damn mess, but I remember thinking this with Mitch too, that no matter how down in the dumps she got, the more ways you saw her face the harder it got to look away from her face.
Linden: "I am prepared to stop torturing you mentally, Mother of Victim, but only if you provide us with helpful information rather than endless jibber-jabber."
Danette: "Great, so listen. I found this note that Pastor Mike is lying? About something."
Linden: "What do you believe he is lying about. 'Everything' is an acceptable answer, to me but especially to my partner, 'Partner.'"
Danette: "Just that he's lying."
Linden: "Was there anyone in the vicinity of the car when you found the note."
Danette: "No. Please just tell me I'm helping."
Linden: "You are providing useful aid. This will help the investigation."
Danette: "That is really nice of you to say!"
Linden: "No. It is facts."
PIZZA, WITH EXTRA CLUE
Holder: "So, the note was written on a pizza coupon. Let's have some pizza and see if that was done intentionally."
Linden: "You may eat pizza. But if we have to move, we have to move. This informant may want to move quickly and in secret to protect his or her anonymity."
Holder: "Yo dawg I would like the grossest pizza please. With extra gross."
Pizza: "Comin' right up."
Linden: "Holder, a homeless youth. Be alert."
Rayna: "Good following that pizza clue. Now, about everybody dying."
Linden: "You are the best one besides Bullet, I enjoy solving crimes with you."
Rayna: "Here's my story. I was in for the night at Beacon, went onto the roof to smoke around four, and down in the alley there's Angie Gower. Near dead, maybe actually dead, certainly down a finger. How curious, I thought to myself, and I called Pastor Mike at his house to tell him about this. I'm pretty close, just driving around in the middle of the night like a normal person, he says, and he drives up. Second she sees him, she goes apeshit, comes back to life, runs away. He chases her down, they both disappear. Hour later, he shows back up, covered in blood."
Linden: "That sounds like a lot of excitement for one night."
Rayna: "Yeah, I was dragging ass that whole day of being a child prostitute."
ROOFTOP LOVE
Bullet: "One day we will have a home, with all glass ceilings, so you can always see the sky. One might say I've gotten ahead of myself."
Lyric: "Pastor Mike has informed me about Section 8 housing. It's important to be informed about programs intended specifically to help people like us, he says."
Bullet: "Wouldn't you rather canoodle in the elements than fill out a bunch of paperwork? Oh, and on that note, I am in love with you and have always been in love with you."
Lyric: "It's only barely possible that even I, Lyric, am that stupid that I wouldn't already know that. But it's nice to get verbal confirmation, either way."
Bullet: "And so, according to Bugs Bunny, that means I must find you a home."
Lyric: "I have faith in you. Just like that tattoo on you would say, if I could read."
SPDHQ
Holder: "I think that probably Pastor Mike is a time-traveling Satan worshipper who cuts off heads and fingers throughout time and space."
Linden: "Or -- and I am merely spitballing here, Partner, based on the actual facts that we know and the clear narrative into which they cohere -- perhaps he drove the chopped-up girl to the veterinary office so that she would not perish."
Holder: "But then why is he lying? I have a pizza coupon that says he's lying. Maybe he chased this girl down and caught her, several times, all over town. Only to lose her, and then have to chase her again."
Linden: "I guess, but we both know that's crazy."
Holder: "I will remind you that there is substantial precedent. Jamie Wright gave chase to, and lost track of, Rosie Larsen no less than twelve times over the course of the night she died."
Skinner: "Plus, he does know every dead girl. And every alive girl. And every girl in-between. Okay, fine. As much as I don't want to be helpful in any way, let's investigate the shit out of Mike Sheehan, a man we already know doesn't really exist. But we have to be thorough because of the bad press involved in outlandish accusations such as a man of the cloth maybe abusing children. Also, because it is obligatory in this episode, I want it noted that Stephen Holder is dressed like a crackhead."
BEACON HOME
Bullet: "You must bend the rules for me! For Bullet! Bugs Bunny told me to!"
Pastor Mike: "That is not how the lottery works, and you know it."
Bullet: "Then I would like one Section 8 housing, please."
Pastor Mike: "It's the middle of the night on a Sunday, you don't have any of the paperwork, you don't have a job, and the offices are closed, and you need a deposit..."
Bullet: "Even if her stepdad is mean? Thanks, Obama."
Pastor Mike: "If you give me a second, I will think of something even worse we can do."
Bullet: "You 'da man'! Glad I told those cops who are secretly investigating you not to investigate you."
Pastor Mike: "Come again?"
Bullet: "Oh, that was just me accidentally warning you that the cops still think you're the Pied Piper, despite your sketchy behavior obviously being about completely other stuff."
Pastor Mike: "You've just given me the worst idea of all. Thanks, Bullet!"
C BLOCK
There is a beautiful scene of Henderson trying to get Seward onto the scale so they can build the gallows precisely, and I don't know what to say about it except that the energy back and forth between them is of a very high quality. Sometimes Henderson feels bad for Seward and other times he is annoyed by him; sometimes Seward is all bluster and other times he's as balky as a toddler getting his MMR shots. All that actually happens is that Seward doesn't want to get on the scale and then he does, but the crashing waves of import back and forth, the length and heaviness of the scene, the things Sarsgaard can make his body do... It's a long, long scene and it is worth every second.
B-BALL STAKEOUT
While they watch Pastor Mike play innocent -- or is it menacing -- basketball with the youths, they spiral out into a conversation about Jack, how Jack knows she smokes, and how he wants her to go to Chicago and be a cop there. Mostly at this point I was just remembering that one time Darren Richmond played basketball with the youths, and it went viral. That was so incredible.
Holder: "What's keeping you here? Not Cody."
Linden: "You have no idea how right you are about that. But also, remember how I'm not a police person? Or even barely a human being?"
Holder: "Wait, what is happening with Cody? Firstly because if your relationship has gone south then I might as well dump Caroline right now, but secondly -- based on you showing an emotion of any kind -- I have this suddenly weird feeling I might need to beat the shit out of Cody."
Linden: "Yes. But no. I don't want to talk about it. I'd rather talk about the situation."
Linden, verbatim: "I guess I wanted to be that person, you know, like living on an island, working nine to five, not smoking. But I..."
Holder: "Sometimes what you get isn't really what you want."
Linden: "The scary, awful thing I'm realizing is that maybe the opposite is usually true."
Hoo. Which I would say is The Thing. Your behavior only ever descends from your priorities. If your behavior ever runs counter to your priorities, it's only a disguise and it won't last for very long, and when it slips it slips big. (We go off diets, but not lifestyle changes. A nonsmoker can still smoke now and then, but a smoker who "quit smoking" will always be a smoker. Etc.) So your only option is to change your priorities, which is obviously a much harder battle -- which is where Holder's addiction stuff is an important counterpoint to the transformations they're both going through because when he talks about that he's not talking about Linden-style shapeshifting, but actual soul changes. Sea changes.
Holder: "Or maybe it's to be redeemed from killing girls under different identities."
Linden: "We're gonna go, before we get you total immunity or you disappear or you turn up in the back of my car with a knife at the end of the episode."
Holder: "Computer! Look, up a tattoo!"
The Computer: "Sure, they're just like fingerprints. Tell me about it verbally."
(Sure, that's cool. Fine, whatever.)
Lyric: "Hey Pastor Mike, what was with all that yelling at cops?"
Pastor Mike: "Oh my God, don't worry about it."
Lyric: "Okay. On the off chance that you are a murdering psycho, could you wait until Bullet gets back from her PO?"
Pastor Mike: "Sure, when should that be?"
Lyric: "I guess around midnight for some reason."
SPDHQ
The Computer: "The person with a tattoo of those words has been positively identified as one Mark Elwood. AKA Pastor Mike, who was charged with kidnapping a 16-year-old girl in Tempe AZ, six years ago. The girl got away, but she OD'd before the trial, so the prosecution dropped all charges. Elwood lost his ministry, lost all funding for the shelter he was running, and came here to Seattle."
Holder: "To destroy children!"
Uh, no. I will bet you one hundred dollars that he "kidnapped" that girl according to the uncle that was fucking her, and because she OD'd before that all came out, he looked super guilty and that's why he is here now, unable to stop helping people. Which is funny because it's just as creepy and gross as Linden's obsessive stuff, but then with the creepy grossness of him being a man on top of it: If Linden were a man, interrupting little kids in the middle of the school day to harass them and so on, this would be a vastly different show.
SHEEHAN
Lyric: "Oh sorry, just eating your ice cream out of the carton, with the freezer hanging open, like some kind of fucking feral child raised in a barn because what I am is one of those."
Pastor Mike: "No problem. Can I get super fucking intense on you?"
Lyric: "Even I, Lyric, have noticed that you are acting a little intense."
Pastor Mike: "Do you ever think sometimes you'll never fully be reborn or redeemed from mistakes you've made in the past? No matter how many fingers or heads you chop off of ladies?"
Lyric: "I am too young to worry about that kind of stuff. I just recently fooled around with a chick. Like, I'm pretty new to life. I dated Twitch. I'm into ice cream."
Pastor Mike: "If everybody thinks I'm the Pied Piper anyway, maybe I should just cut your little head off! Fuck it!"
Lyric: "Really?"
Pastor Mike: "No, not literally. That's just how I'm acting because this whole show is a complicated system of tricks and pulleys."
SWAT
Gets all up in the Sheehan house, but it's too late! He is gone, and Lyric is gone. And Bullet is still off doing her Bullet things, with no idea that she created this new problem for everybody by trying to manipulate Sheehan into doing more and more favors for her and her little wifey. Holder is disappointed and screams in faces, faces of cute little cops who are just doing their best, and once again Linden has to be like, "This is not how we do."
Holder: "He's a coward! He's preying on the weakest!"
Linden: "Fine, sure. What are you going to do about it? Hold it together."
Holder: "Says the person with the world record of never holding it together."
Linden: "No arguments here, so maybe you should listen the fuck up to what I am saying."
"You go down this road, you lose things. That's how it works. That's what you've got to look forward to."
SPDHQ
Danette meets a Mrs. Conrad, who has been waiting for seven years for her daughter to come home. She has school pictures, aged composites, dental records, medical files. She takes them with her everywhere she goes. And every time they say they found a body, she gets excited. And every time it's not her daughter, she gets excited too. Only the part in the middle, as it swings between certainties, is painful. The rest is just hope.
Like any other drug, it's killing her. For seven years, just when her priorities are about to change and she thinks about getting off the stuff, boom: They find a body, and the hope goes through her, like electricity. Serotonin and possibility. And she grabs that file and she heads for the door, to wait in the awful silence between the body and confirmation that her daughter is still missing, and thus maybe still alive.
Danette's appalled, horrified, ashamed. This woman is a mirror; another harsh truth about a world she's been ignoring all this time. She gets to be scared of one more thing every week, as the world opens up; she's running out of people to be.
C BLOCK
Ray: "On review I would say that you were wrong, and in fact I do not have much control over my life or death."
Dale: "Oh no, that was just a metaphor. For like Jesus or something. Pastor Mike has a tattoo that might..."
Ray: "-- Excellent. Thanks once again, Dale."
"I was talking about a choice to forgive yourself, Ray. Salvation. Salvation is a place for everybody, and there's peace there. But it's a choice to go there."
That's when they stop building. When the block finally goes blessedly silent, again.
Becker takes his son up on the gallows and explains to him how he may not have control over his whore wife, but he sure does have control over Ray's death. Every single detail, every kind of execution there is, that's what Daddy's power is. The most power you can have. Does he pull an actual lever? Kind of. He's the one that puts the noose around the guy's neck. That's what's important.
SPDHQ
Skinner: "So his house contains nothing having to do with the Pied Piper killings, neither weapons nor finger trophies."
Linden: "Or maybe he did them, though."
Skinner: "Also, the ME called. All our girls were killed in 2009 from June to November, and then Trish Seward the day after Christmas, over a month later."
Linden: "We already know she's different, that's why it took half a season to convince you this is happening."
Skinner: "What do you think is going on?"
Linden, almost crying: "I don't know and Holder is freaking me out and also we are about to be the people who killed a man for something he didn't do."
Skinner: "I know."
She runs her face across his, briefly, hungry for skin. He does believe her, about Ray: Whatever math he needed to do in his head to keep from entrenching on it, he's finally done. Luckily, before he can kiss her, the phone rings: They found Mike's car.
TRAIN STATION
But it's not helpful. They span out and try to catch every train that would have left from here, and to have police at every stop, but it's all very tricky because you know, and I know, that he did not do any of this, and that Lyric is probably just confused and locked herself in a broom closet somewhere, or maybe a grocery store ice cream freezer. So the entirety of Seattle PD going to town on this train station, I mean, every week they look a little nuts and over-enthused, but the degree to which they have manhunted Pastor Mike this episode makes them look as weird as Holder is looking.
Holder: "WE HAD HIM, LINDEN! JUSTICE FOR ASHLEY KWON! FOR LYRIC! FOR KALLIE LEEDS! FOR ANGIE GOWER'S ONE MISSING FINGER."
Linden: "Maybe. I mean I guess so. I'm going home, this is stupid."
So just as Bullet is running up to the nothing that is going on, yelling her ass off about Lyric, and Holder is stressing because of all the times for Sarah to not be on the crazy train with him, and Linden is just hoping Cody isn't hiding in her bushes, that's when she gets abducted by a scary man in her car at the train station, and told to drive.
WEEK
Bullet pulls a total Larsen move, flipping out on everybody for zero reasons and getting arrested. Pastor Mike's getaway pushes Holder further into whatever explosive new transformation he's working on, and the world gets maybe dangerous for Linden. What I am looking for is, vindication for Pastor Mike so we can quit with Pastor Mike -- and get back to Joe Mills, who if he is not the Pied Piper of murder at least he is of my heart -- and an hour of Stephen Holder going absolutely bugshit trying to save our girl.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps The Killing, Pretty Little Liars, Ray Donovan, Mistresses, True Blood, 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.