After surviving a brief, post-second season cancellation, AMC crime drama "The Killing" came back to life Sunday with a two-hour season premiere. The show originally had two seasons. (Photo courtesy of AMC)Holder and Linden are back from the dead, and this time around, they have something to prove.
After surviving a brief, post-second season cancellation, AMC crime drama "The Killing" came back to life Sunday with a thrilling two-hour season premiere that cemented the show's rightful place among the network's suite of heavyweight programming.
As the season opens, detective Holder (Joel Kinnaman), this time looking more like a cop in his suit and tie than a skateboarding teenager in his jeans and hoodie, is back to business as usual: solving homicides. Holder is moving up the ranks of the Seattle PD and seems to be winning at life with his new place and live-in girlfriend (Jewel Staite).
Kinnaman embodies the spirit of "cop-cool" with his chic raincoat and urban speech patterns, and his time on the screen is always compelling if not flat-out enthralling.
Meanwhile, a burnt-out but domesticated (now ex-detective) Linden (Mireille Enos) seems to be managing an average but sheltered island life with a new, less hectic job as a ferry operator and a boringly normal live-in boyfriend.
Enos plays Linden as beautifully broken and perpetually on-edge. Even when she should just be enjoying life, the tiny but fiery redhead is always nervously grinding her molars and seems to be constantly anticipating some dreadful catastrophe. Her neurotic nature adds a gritty tension to the show and provides a dark sense of foreboding any time she is present.
As Holder begins investigating a particularly disturbing homicide involving a teenage girl and her severed head, he finds some troubling similarities to a murder that sent Linden into a tailspin and landed her in a psych ward in season two.
Holder enlists Linden's help, and her obsession with the crime resurfaces, as it suddenly becomes unclear whether or not the man she put away for the crime, Ray Seward (Peter Sarsgaard), is actually the killer.
Seward, who is nearing his execution on death row, is played by Sarsgaard (a veteran psychopath from Boys Don't Cry) as perfectly detached and disruptive of the system that has shunned him. Seward even requests that he be hanged instead of the more conventional lethal injection, and his disregard for even his own life seems to suggest that he may be holding something back, leaving us guessing whether or not Linden will uncover his secret.
The cinematography is tops in television, and the sweeping arial shots of Seattle's thick green pines juxtaposed against the steely city's downtown make the show worth watching all on their own. The eternal bluster and gloom of the city provide the perfect backdrop for a twisted murder mystery and set an almost Fincher-esque tone for the show, which spends its time reveling in the similarly sunless and dismal world of teenage squatters.
The squatters, who don names like “Rebel,” “Lyric” and “Bullet,” live fascinating lives full of uncertainty and danger, and they are exactly character types that we, as viewers, love to dabble in and perhaps even live vicariously through for about an hour a week. The writers have also captured the ever elusive urban teenage spirit by providing the adolescents with superb dialogue that diligently saunters the paper-thin line between ultra-sincere and overly-cliché.
"The Killing" is rife with palpable irony and, as the premier ends with Linden standing knee-deep in a swamp of dead bodies wrapped in pink tarps, our collective curiosity is piqued. However, unlike many of its crime drama kin, "The Killing" requires investment in its insightful characters and cavernous plot lines, as it takes a full season to get the answers to all of those burning questions.
If the season premiere is any indication, it will be well worth the wait.
Reach the reporter at npmedo@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @NPMendoza
