With Holder on the outside, still drinking and kind of crazy after Bullet's death, Sarah pulls every trick out of the book trying to get a stay on Ray Seward's execution. One of the rings in Joe Mill's stuff matches the wedding ring he gave Trisha, which everybody knows isn't really good enough but at least gives Linden something to hang onto. The episode begins with twelve hours to go, and ends right when you know it's going to.
In between, it's a very intense hour: As Linden tries to get Ray's help in nailing the real murderer, she gets more and more desperate just to throw doubts at the Washington AG, takes a detour through momentarily thinking the whole thing was a scam, and eventually just trying to get Ray to say goodbye to his son in person.
When it comes down to it, the facts are so banal they're see-through: Ray ran away that night, leaving his family behind for good, and then had a change of heart at the last minute. He returned, to find Trisha already murdered, which is why neither he nor Adrian could ever tell the truth about the night: All evidence points to him doing it, including Adrian's own experience of the evening. He never had a shot.
In the end, she and Holder take on Ray and Adrian in separate, moving sequences as they ready themselves to meet for the first and last time; a final act of brutality by Becker (who's having father/son problems of his own, remember) makes sure they never do. But some quick thinking and a coded last message from Sarah mean he can at least see his son through a window on the way to the chamber.
The execution itself is brutal to watch, particularly to watch Sarah watching, and even Becker's resolve fails in the end, so that Henderson's the one that puts the hood on him. All of which would be heartbreaking, given the acting talent involved, but is nearly unbearable after the episode itself, which is some new thing that "bottle episode" doesn't even really cover: It's more like Sarah and Ray have an entire lifetime of a relationship over the course of the episode, as they break each other down and build each other up over the phone. It's like the panic-attack moment with Becker, stretched out to infinity, centered on two people we actually care about.
And then too, in the moment that Sarah temporarily decides the whole thing is a trap and Ray's lying, there's some awesome stuff where Holder calls her on her bullshit, nearly turning her inside out in the jailhouse parking lot, before finally making her laugh with a joke about trying to kiss her last week. While they are both wild animals that are running away from all human connection, he says, and while we'll never unknot the chicken-or-egg question of whether their addictions facilitate that or vice versa, one thing is for sure: She has missed her shot at fucking him.
A show built on unrelenting pressure -- whether it's Mitch's quiet misery, or Sarah's unblinking resolve, or Seward's slow unraveling, or even Holder's thousand pretenses and stances -- doesn't really have to earn the occasional release. But with a show like that, that's so studied and determined to never let up, it does make the light moments, and the graceful ones, hit a lot harder.
Any careful viewer, who watched the grotesque line of vengeance unfurl across two seasons of this show, should be able to intuit the stance that the show's not crass enough to spell out: Killing Ray Seward doesn't bring Trisha back to life, whether he killed her or not, any more than putting a hit on Belko or paralyzing Darren did one damn thing for Rosie Larsen. But I do think that there's something to be said for the unflinching way this Death Row stuff has been portrayed, above and beyond the simple difference in morality between those two parts of our culture: Because frankly, if you do think the death penalty's a good thing, then you've got even more of a duty to watch it happen, without turning away.
PREVIOUSLY
Assured that nothing he said or did mattered -- and a child of the system -- Death Row inmate Ray Seward wanted to make a big noise when he went, so he demanded his right to a hanging. Linden and Skinner, have had fairly interesting lives since making the original arrest, but now that the Killing has started up again it's become (moderately but not entirely) clear that Ray was not the man who killed his wife to begin with. The front-runner suspect, a child pornographer named Joe, was eventually nailed by the cops (and the victim's son) and a trophy matching one taken from the victim was discovered (by Reddick?) in Mills's crap.
Seward's getting more and more nervous as his end date comes near, and on the outside Sarah's desperation to save him has been amping up, but today's the day, and finds Sarah lurking around outside the jail, while her partner Holder -- heart broken by the last of Joe's victims and a betrayal by his interim mentor Reddick -- is off on a bender. While the evidence against Mills for Seward's murder is dubious, Sarah has been getting more and more loosy-goosy about how she gets the job done. While there's no way he's going free -- he's done plenty of awful shit regardless -- she doesn't want to be the person that sent an innocent man to the chair, much less the gallows.
5:00 AM
Another hack approached Henderson earlier in the season, talking about selling off all these accoutrements -- the shackles, the hood, the rope -- but this is the first time we've really seen them. A man reads out the final sentence as Henderson watches, and then it's all very official: Several men at several buttons push them, and the man drops... But it was just a dummy! The clock starts now: At five PM, unless Sarah fixes it, that'll be Ray. Welcome to this show.
To throw you off even more, the camera is all jerky as they let her into the building, all the beeping and everything, with her bag of rings. Seward is more happy to see her than he lets on; after the abuse from Dale and the general breaking down of his lifetime's worth of defenses, she's not just an avatar of hope to him but more than that. She's the coincidental, random possibility of survival, teasing him: Life itself.
Ray: "You didn't call yesterday, I waited."
Sarah: "Kidnapped, then my best friend's best friend got kidnapped and murdered, it was a whole kidnapping frenzy for a couple days, don't worry about it. Look at these rings."
Sarah: "You swing so wide but it connects so often, it's the weirdest thing."
Ray: "Oh, are we not playing that game where I fuck with you the whole time and see how far I can push and alienate you because it's all I have and I know you're desperate enough to sit still for it? I guess we're on a clock? Okay, fine, that's the ring."
Sarah: "Is there anything specific you can tell me about this ring?"
Ray: "The fact I didn't want to give it to her but she got knocked up? Booyah!"
Sarah: "No, such as markings or imperfections."
He remembers that she is a robot lady, and just dicks around kind of out of habit, until finally she hangs up the phone and he calls out: There's a scratch on the inside band. She heads out to make a call, he stays there, with his head down. If you enjoy looking at and watching Peter Sarsgaard as much as any right-thinking human being should, this is probably the point where you're realized he's gonna be pulling out all his toys tonight. Every color in the paintbox. Both of them, actually and of course.
Everybody really. I don't even know what you would call this. It's an hour-long countdown to a death that doesn't need to happen, that takes place in and around the grounds of a prison where we've only ever seen three people. Like a bottle episode, but the bottle is being thrown at your head in slow motion and you can't duck it or look away.
"He positively identified the ring as belonging to his deceased wife ... found in the trophies in Joe Mills' possession ... I wouldn't be bothering you if I weren't talking about an actual person about to be put to death... Okay yes sir, yes sir, I can do that. I can do that right away, thank you."
The sun comes out, she loses half her tics she's so focused on getting this done. We've seen her enjoy the job part of the job before, but this is something else: This is her testing the feeling of a weight being lifted. She leaves a breathless, babbling, entirely un-Linden voicemail on Holder's phone, begging him to bring the file she gave him last week, and we learn that she can't leave: Around this whole episode, there's yet another constraint that she can't come back once she's gone. I sort of licked my thumb in the air when she said that -- "that'll matter later" -- but by the time it did, it wasn't about creative constraints anymore, because we are very quickly going to be In The Shit.
Becker watches Ray slurp down a breakfast burrito, delighting in it, and when he says it smells good, Ray offers him a taste.
"You know they got a cemetery right outside these gates? 346 inmates buried there, from the 1800s. No names, no one ever claimed them. Wonder what that must be like, spending eternity as a nobody. Who's claiming you, Seward?"
He's livelier than usual, jumpy even. I never really did figure out everything going on with Becker in this last twelve hours. I think he takes the situation more seriously after Dale induced that panic attack, but I also think for a man like Becker -- that whole speech he gave his son about men, some stuff he says later -- it's easy as pie to take all of this anxiety and turn it into the gold of masculinity: Well, nobody ever said being a man was easy.
You see it in abusive parents who were themselves abused -- Ray's own father, who beat him bloody the day before he went in the first time -- and in a lot of people whose jobs attracted them because of what authority allows you to do, the decisions you get to make about what is fair or decent, and nobody can stop you. The difference between a shitty cop and a good one is a lot farther than that same distance for most other jobs.
Here, though, Becker: Any cruelty can be for the greater good, once you start seeing the world this way. That even his unending taunts against the captured and near-dead are, in some obscure way, a favor he is doing the world.
Like Henderson is worried about him, after last night when his son shot one of his mother's suitors, and instead of being grateful for (or even really registering) that, he gives Henderson a creepy speech about how he's there because he is a vital part of the team and nobody can perform his duties and this is about the concepts of duty and responsibility and then, just to tie a bow around it of how he is in charge of everybody and everything, retrofits this conversation as a lesson he was teaching Henderson about those concepts. The last point being, of course, that Henderson can't let Seward die until it's time for Becker to administrate his murder.
Out in the waiting area Sarah's getting creative: What if the jewelry shop's new owners have boxes somewhere with receipts? The AG's office is not interesting in helping with that, no matter how brightly she speaks, or how much it costs her. She keeps working, speaking more politely and considerately than we've ever seen; even as the foster mother brings in Adrian, casting her nasty glances, she smiles and hopes.
When Becker comes to get her, they stand up and they sit back down again. It's enough for now that she saw them, and can approach him about them, along with everything else.
He wants to be forgiven without asking for it. He wants to know his life had a sum but he doesn't want to leave the world immediately after his worst moment, and his son's. He wants the things he can't want, he wants them to happen anyway. He wants to live.
The AG says it's not enough that he identified a scratch on a ring; he wants more. More time for more things they want to just happen. Nobody knows where Stephen is -- moments away from buying meth, she assumes, and we assume, and Stephen assumes -- but he might be able to bring in pictures that connect that ring back to Trisha's life. If there were a picture somewhere, of her wearing that ring.
"Is that what happens to your things after you're killed? They're put in some basement at the police station?"
Yeah. And when no one claims them, it's like you never existed. They are destroyed.
Sarah Linden regularly sets fire to the past, to keep herself from looking back. To keep from being claimed, because then she would be stuck in time, a history. A sum.
His world is small: "Did you notice the larch trees when you drove in?"
Her world is smaller: "Do you have a friend coming today to be here with you?" He laughs, and reminds her that he sent Skinner an invitation; he goes back to the larches, on the east side of the building. She puts herself in his shoes: That means his window opens out on the east, on the two larches. She can't imagine, but she can feel, how grimy that window is.
"Adrian's tall, for his age. Good-looking boy." She gives him the gift of observation, her Linden skills: "He likes drawing -- as we know -- and based on the mitt in his bedroom, he enjoys sports."
"Does your son play baseball?"
She almost rears up, any mention of Jack too tender to bear, but he's not pushing right now. He is pressed up against the glass but he's not pushing.
The first rule of survival -- Bullet knew, even Lyric knows -- is that you keep your eyes open. He could reach into Becker's soul and pick out the truth without even trying. So good at it that he gave Becker a complex; whole conspiracies and gossip spiraled out from his lucky guesses.
"Your son doesn't live with you?"
"Sometimes it's better that way."
She's still not sure if he's playing games, or being sincere. He's not sure either, entirely, but something in her softness -- this strange open thing, this new gift she gave herself over the year on her island -- is a new opening, a new opportunity. What if you could take that skill, those powers of observation, of reaching-into, of fighting-past, and use them to cross the glass? Not to hurt her, or manipulate, but just to know her. To be known.
Could she trust him, if he did that? Could he trust himself not to turn on her?
"I keep hearing things. Not voices, nothing like that, but the fluorescents... Do you hear them? The buzzing?"
Nothing. He's jumping around too much, landing hits without knowing it, swinging wide when he tries to explain himself.
"There was a lady in the hall earlier, complaining..."
Adrian's foster mom, of course. He's unimpressed. "We met. Everybody wants things, when you're about to die. She wanted me to see Adrian too, like you do."
She wants it so that her child can be less broken, can move on having closed a chapter. It's selfish, as any mother is. Linden wants it for those reasons, and more selfish ones still.
"You both seem to think it'll do him some good."
She lets him in, a little bit. Everybody trying to tell you that connecting with your child won't burn him to the ground; nobody understanding that simply holding yourself in this tension, not touching the child your entire body wants to touch, is exactly how you keep him safe. It's close enough, without touching, that he's earned something back. She looks him in the eye for the first time and sees him looking back.
"It's the adrenaline, when... You hear everything, you smell everything, you see it all, but it's like you're in a tunnel. Everything's moving slowly but happening so quickly, too."
Like tapping out a message in code and finally, finally getting something back. His eyes light up and he sees her, finally as a person. As a woman. He loves her, a little bit.
That's when they come for him, to take him away from her. The universe won't let her smile for more than a few seconds at a time; the universe -- Becker -- won't let him feel less alone. Reality closes ranks and clashes down like a gate.
"I'm a cop! Hey! I can sit here and talk all day if I want! Hey!"
She shoves her badge against the glass, pissed. Pissed for them both. But there's no desperation anymore, to her kindness. She is simply on fire. Her need to save him from her mistake has become a need to save him.
You spot it, you got it.
The day is measured out in teaspoons. Every moment he's alone is a moment he's dying, spirit preceding his body into darkness. Every moment she isn't there, holding onto him through the glass, is a moment that she's failed him. It adds up. In her reflection, half of her is him in there.
If you told Orpheus the whole story before he ever went down, what do you think he would say? This is how it's going to go: You're going to win your way into the Underworld, and be reunited with her, and triumph over the Gods and Furies themselves, and then at the last minute, you're going to turn around and look. And you will lose her forever. What do you think he would say to that?
Inanna goes down to see her sister, and at every gate removes something new: A bracelet, her shirt, the broken pieces of herself, her sanity, until all she is, is naked.
All you are is in the way.
1:00 PM
"I realize that you're a cop," they say, after almost an hour of waiting to go back in, "But you did fail to mention the irony that you were the one who put him in there. Fail being the operative word." They call on guidelines, used to brute force, and she quotes them back, chapter and verse. The guard's almost sad to open the gate again.
Ray's breathing hard, when she comes back. Some new terror.
"They weighed me. Again. You know that if my neck doesn't break, it's six minutes of hanging, suffocating..."
She promises him the AG will call; her will to make them both almost believe it.
"Have you eaten?" he asks, after a litany of his last meals, and she smiles. The grace in that.
The chef at the prison, we've been told, takes special care in that last meal. A culinary tour-de-force. Sarah smiles, and Ray shakes his head.
"He knows we'll be too nervous to eat. It goes right back to him."
When Ray parries her request for more information on the ring -- itself just a stand-in, just filling time until Stephen comes through -- she deliberately, forcefully, checks her watch. He gets scared.
"You know if you go, they'll just send me back to my cell."
She settles down. It needs to stop being about power. Everything in here is about power, she's not the only one dangling hope and taking it away. Dale gave him God and took Him away again; Becker gave him a little bit back. It felt good, but that wasn't the point: The point was that Becker had the power in the first place. She needs to be better than that.
"It's a measure of a person's life, I think, those who come see you in the end."
He's not talking about Adrian, but it's the only safe topic. When she brings him up, drops him into the conversation so it will stop being about what she can give him and what she can take away from him (what she's already taken, what she's already giving), he shakes his head and says he's his father and his father is no better or less broken. The line of vengeance, the old litany of Becker: Jail is in the blood, for the captor and the guard both.
"He's not a little boy anymore," she gently reminds him. "He knows what this place is. You don't have to be afraid that he'll become like you."
Too far, too kind. Making assumptions, correct or not.
"Is it me you're trying to save, or yourself? The son you gave away, what's his name?"
She's offended, so he backs off. "You know, my daddy was here, and his daddy before him. Maximum security's like a family tradition."
A trick she learned from Holder, the way humans talk shit to each other: "Is that your excuse? You're breaking my heart, Ray."
It's a violent impasse, but she doesn't look away. He begs her -- begs, those Sarsgaard eyes -- to pick up the phone again: "Come on. Come on. Come on."
"I'm not here for you, no. But I've seen monsters before and you're not one of them."
He grins, that smartass pothead grin that says I caught you: "That's not what you said at my trial!"
"I beat her. Sometimes in front of Adrian. I took out a twenty-year-old's eye. I crushed a priest's jaw with a metal pipe, so that he'll eat through a straw for the rest of his life."
"I don't have any illusions about you. What it's like in here, down below. I lost those a long time ago. I am here because I made a mistake."
A good answer. A good enough answer. He nods, and she can't take that either. She has been here, communing with him, off and on for seven hours. Her hand cramps; she assures him she's not going anywhere before she puts down the phone to shake it out. He watches her, phone to his ear.
"When are you gonna see him?" she whispers, begging, but he just sighs. She swears that she'll be back when her phone rings, but she won't tell him who it is. Out in the hall, you can see down the inmate side of the phone bank; she doesn't look, like Rosie Larsen, because she knows she's coming back.
Stephen looks a mess, out in the guest lobby. Drinking since yesterday, still drunk. But not high, not yet. She takes him in.
"I mean, a scratch on a ring? The AG doesn't even grant a stay for DNA evidence."
They look at Adrian, sidelong; through their hands, they look at him.
"You're good with kids," she says, begging him to pull it together. Knowing somehow that Adrian can fix him. Little man, little man.
Out in the yard for a smoke, he goes gangsta on the kid. Calls himself a "serial chilla" and the usual Holder nonsense. And as usual, the kid goes mad for it.
"You're acting drunk," he spits, and Holder grins: "I'm not acting."
Adrian's sudden love for him is just apparent enough that he can see himself, through it; reflected through the glass of a little boy not that much different from Linden. A little man, not that much different from the way Bullet used to look at her Bugs. It's enough to scare the shit out of him.
There's one picture of a birthday party that features the ring.
"The Ding Dong birthday cakes were my idea," Ray chokes, laughing at himself. "He hated chocolate. I didn't know that. He looks miserable..."
Sarah nods. "I fed my son Twinkies for breakfast a few times."
It's not the bonding moment he thinks it is; she's not admitting to being like him, although today -- refusing to see Adrian who is yards away -- they're more alike than ever.
"This photo is going to the AG, and then we wait. And while we're waiting, Adrian is out there waiting. And he's not leaving until 5 PM. As long as there's a chance."
"I wasn't even there when he was born. I told Trish to get an abortion. I kind of hated him, actually." She smiles, knowing what's coming : "I bet you can relate."
But she's not Becker. She doesn't mind if you see her secrets, because she has no shame. She's a wild animal, who can't believe people will see her for what she is, and so they never do. But Ray is a wild animal too. "I know what you're doing," she grins, and he realizes how far they've come. When she promises to return, they nod at each other, smiling hugely. A secret team of two.
I don't believe that love stories are ghost stories, I think that's Generation X nonsense that says because we pretend irony is necessary that we never know anybody else. But if I had to say anything to you, to us, this world out here outside this prison, it would be that: There is a part of you that hates irony. Anything that isn't honest isn't necessary.
But every ghost story is a love story.
Sarah's heart leaps when the AG admits to considering the stay, finally. She catches Adrian in the reflection of the vending machine, before running -- running -- back to Seward, and realizes she has her own amends to make. She can't help but smile as she draws near; even knowing that she needs to control it, stay at Basic Linden, she can't.
"I saw your dad he was... real curious about you. He asked a lot of questions about you."
"Can I still see him? Even if I lied?"
"Honey, that's not why they're making you wait. You're not in trouble."
She considers how she would feel, in this position; she's on the money: "And I'm not mad at you."
"I didn't want him to get in trouble again," Adrian says, and something about his tone wrenches the scene violently around her: That's not what you would say, that's not what he meant before about lying. What about fingering Joe Mills would get Ray in trouble? "Even if I lied," the boy said. That's not what he's talking about. Her face falls before he's even answered, smile clattering to the floor.
"Because he was there that night. He was the one I saw."
Stephen's driving back to the jailhouse with a case of beer, broken face -- the sadness of Stephen's face, when there's nobody around to see it -- and sloppy, pulling up to the tiny, tiny jail.
He drops his beers at the edge of the graveyard, the tombs of the unknown monsters, but before he's taken the first sip he slams the beer out into the stones. First the one he's opened, then each of them one by one. He's not acting: His sobriety comes from this, always, not from a higher power but from a boy, looking at him like he's a man. Daring him.
Ray catches her face, no longer elated, and tries to get her talking again about the things that elate her.
"AG's considering the new evidence. It's a long shot, but he's considering a potential stay..."
His hope jumps, horrific: He shakes a fist, giggling, nearly crying. Laughing about his last meal. "Salisbury steak and vanilla ice cream? Send it back!" But she can't join in.
"You were there that night. That's why Adrian's never been able to talk about it, remember it. Because he saw you. Please don't lie to me."
He swears he wasn't. It's a sadder story than either of them know, but for now he swears he wasn't. Three years in, he mostly believes it. She sees this too.
"I was there/I wasn't there. It doesn't matter what I say, because you've already made up your mind, just like the others. Guilty until proven innocent..."
The spiel. She can't see the pain behind it, now, because he's turning back into an inmate, right before her eyes. Breaking her heart.
"You want me to say I killed her? Okay. I killed her!"
But even now, pissed as she is, there's something else. He clams up, as she begs him to tell her the secret behind it all. She bashes the phone against the glass, again and again, and goes walking in circles. When she returns, he picks up the phone. She's desperate, hysterical.
"You tell me the truth. You tell me the truth right this minute, or I'm walking out, and any chance you've got is walking out..."
He tries. "He was in that closet because I was never there, his mother ... leaving him staring up at those stupid plastic stars night after night..." But she just keeps screaming. It's a question without an answer. Why was he there? Why was he not there.
"You think saving me is some kind of noble act? I didn't care when I left every night. I didn't give a damn when he screamed at me not to walk out on him that night. Every night. That's who you're saving!"
Up against the cold chaos again, trying so hard to give her a narrative that answers questions without answers. The truth is that he was there -- like Rosie, like Jamie, like Aunt Terry -- because he couldn't stand to say goodbye yet. The truth is that the universe descended on him that night in all its screaming, arbitrary horror. But she hasn't earned that truth yet. So he can't answer. She grunts like a beast, and stomps all the way out of the building.
Stephen Holder sees that face, the urge for going, and intercepts her immediately, drunkenly grabbing her keys away. She isn't here to solve a mystery, to save herself, to commit a noble act. She's here to be witness, and she's running out on it.
"If you leave," he reminds her, "You can't come back. You don't know the answers to these questions, that's not the same as a lie. The truth is that you're doing what we all do, all the time, on this show and in real life. You are deciding to simplify. You are putting a man to death, you are putting a hit on Belko, you are shooting Darren because it's easier than admitting to the horrible unknown of things, of tragedy. You are forming online fatwas against Veena Sud because you are not grown up enough to handle the not knowing. You want the genie to go back in the bottle, and if that doesn't happen you grab your ball and go home? That's so beneath you. You are here to bear witness, nothing more."
She locks herself in the car, desperate to get away.
"You see this hoodie? You have turned me back into an animal. Bullet and Reddick and Joe Mills and Mama Dips. Caroline's a smear on the road behind me. You think I can't see you, but I do."
She looks at him, through the glass. Half of him is her reflection.
"What the hell happened to you, Linden? Why you always taking off?"
"Why don't you just shut up and take your own damned advice?"
"We never stay. And in the end we lose everyone."
But that's not necessary, and suddenly he sees it, the way to get her back. To apologize, for burning down their history as his lowest point. To show gratitude for the way she kept it, held onto it in that moment, to keep their relationship safe for them both. The unimaginable courage she showed, in that moment, neither coming closer nor pulling away. For a second she's his reflection.
"I'm not gonna try and kiss you again, Linden. Keep dreaming. You hear me? I'm not gonna kiss you again, Linden! Uh-uh, you missed your chance, Linden!"
He takes shame and turns it into gold, and they burst out laughing. She hates it; she loves him more than she's ever loved him before. To just wipe the slate like that, like Becker staring into Ray Seward's eyes saying, "Just breathe. I've got you."
The AG drops it, as they're heading back in. Not enough for a stay, not enough for anything. She cracks open, a little bit, as she's hanging up. Stephen Holder is close by. Her beauty is hollowed out.
But all that was theater. That was just a hobby, a last-ditch way to spend their day together. There was never going to be a stay, they don't even do that for DNA. It was about having a reason to be there, to be with Ray, and to fight for Adrian. So now it stops being about the stay, about Ray's life, and starts being about his death.
"You're going to turn around, at the last second. You won't be able to help yourself. Your heart will be breaking and she'll gasp, begging you not to do it, and you'll hate yourself, even as you're turning to look at her, but there's no way you aren't going to do it. That's how people are built." And what do you think Orpheus would say?
3:03 PM
"Oh my God, you're still here?"
"For Adrian, dick. Not for you."
He tosses out a reference to his death -- one hour, 56 minutes, 9 seconds -- waiting for her to leap into the silence afterward, tell him it's going to be okay, tell him the AG is running tests or comparing evidence or finding a judge to sign off on something or other, and the leap never comes. He stares.
"I'm sorry."
His choices are few -- getting fewer all the time -- but right now he can go back into yelling at her for failing him, yelling at her for getting his hopes up, yelling at her for abandoning her kid... All the classics. But one look at that face on her, the exhaustion behind her eyes, gives him a bit more strength than that. The knowledge of, just a little bit, being loved.
"Nice try, though."
They can't look at each other anymore.
He laughs when she Lindens back into it: "But WHY were you in the apartment?"
It's not about his life anymore, it's about his death. He finally, finally relents.
"You know how a kid looks at you before he's been messed up? Hit every day, pushed down, called a shit? You know that look? When they still think the world is big, and that their life could be big, too? I do, because I was like that once. I wanted that for my son."
She reaches past the glass and into his heart; it's become a two-way street now: "You went back for him. You came back to get Adrian."
He was burning down his history and then realizes he wasn't his father, and his son wasn't him, and the world was still big. That he could go and see it -- like Rosie, like Twitch -- if somebody would just let him. That Adrian was the son of two animals, but not for any good reason.
"I was gonna bring him with me. I knew in that moment of grace that things can change."
He let it change him, on the spot; fill him in with all the love and hope he didn't think were possible, and it turned him around and walked him right back to that house.
And on the floor, there was his wife. Nothing could change. Hope is a lie. And he realized exactly what would happen, every step of the way. Linden and Skinner, three years on Death Row, and finally today.
"Ray? Adrian's right outside. He's waiting for you. Don't leave without letting him see you, know you. He will carry that with him every time he looks in the mirror, the broken parts of you, because you never let him see the best part. I know what it's like to never have that. He's waiting for you. Please."
Ray wipes his tears away and sighs, so brave. He thanks her with his tears.
Holder accompanies Adrian and his mother down the hall; Adrian is nervous about his dirty sneakers, and on the other side of that door, Ray twitches in his new shirt.
Stephen takes the boy into the bathroom, and looks at him in the mirror; he takes his shoes and washes them, while Adrian stares at himself in the glass. Stephen works his hands through the little man's hair, smiling, gentling. In the end, they're proud. He looks perfect.
Ray flirts with her, in the meeting room. Not as a defense, not as an attack, but because she is the last woman he will ever see and the best woman he has ever met. She indulges it; she loves him too.
"I built him a treehouse when I got out of the State Pen. He'd just turned six... There are no trees in the city. We had to go to the park so he could run around. Kids should be able to run around... He loved that dumb treehouse."
She tries, valiantly, but can't quite keep her sadness out of her smile. It's getting close.
"You know, those trees lost their leaves so fast. Like, everything goes so fast... Do you think it'll hurt?" She knows it won't; she begs him to think there could still be a reprieve.
Ray thinks about striking out, but they've walked too far together. The animal doesn't go away, but it bends under her touch for a second.
"I know that you did everything you could for me. Thank you."
And what should he say to the boy, when he arrives?
"I don't know. Everything."
Out at the gate, Becker sees a man's son come close to saying goodbye. A man who didn't deserve to have a son, who isn't even a man. He makes the call.
"Get up, inmate, let's go."
Ray and Sarah collapse into hysteria. He attacks, gets thrown to the floor; she's screaming about supervisors and his rights. Becker doesn't enjoy it, but he doesn't hate it either. Ray's face is pushed into the floor as they kneel on him, and she realizes Adrian's probably right outside, waiting to come in. She begs Ray to stop, to calm down; her voice eventually cuts through it.
"Think about the trees outside your window," she hushes him. To any bystander it seems poetic, bathetic; on the nose. But it's a code. They have taught each other the language of themselves.
"All you have to do is look. Just look outside your window, Ray. Look outside your window. You'll see them. Look outside your window, Ray. You'll see them."
Still shouting into the phone when she rejoins Stephen and Adrian, in the hallway, until Stephen takes the phone out of her hands: "It's over."
Ray looks out the window, maybe it's too dirty to really see them. Like he told the priest. Like Dale told him, before he taught him how to hope.
They snap him into DOC grays, and shackle his feet. All these things will be up for auction by tomorrow. He's moved, hobbled, past Becker and into the Mile. Dale doesn't look up.
Six seconds is a long time. She is there for every second of it. They watch the clock, but she just watches him. Breathes for him, until he's gone.
WEEK
Is the two-hour finale, entitled tellingly "From Up Here" and "The Road to Hamelin." No big clues on what's going to happen, except of course that Ray didn't kill anyone, and Joe isn't exactly the Pied Piper.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps The Killing, Pretty Little Liars, Ray Donovan, Mistresses, and True Blood for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as a regular column for Tor.com, Geek Love.