Both Falling Skies and The Killing had their season finales last night, only to leave us hanging and wanting more. Here’s a recap of the latter… a long… recap.
SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Killing’s finale was packed into two hours, episodes “From Up Here” and “The Road To Hamelin.” The first hour was contrived of bits and pieces left from last week’s shocking episode in which Ray Seward (Peter Sarsgaard) was hanged. Unfortunately, we all knew that he was an innocent man and didn’t deserve that fate. In fact, we hoped that at the last second someone would intervene and stop the execution. What we got were a minute or so of Seward suffocating after he was dropped with a noose around his neck; something that was painful to watch. Other highlights from the first hour were moments of closure and it somewhat tied loose ends. Lyric goes back to her working girl ways, Twitch (Max Fowler) rids of his drug use and goes clean, Danette (Amy Seimetz) and Lyric (Julia Sarah Stone) both converse and stay in good terms, Holder and Danette attend Bullet’s (Bex Taylor-Klaus) funeral (we miss her) and Linden (Mireille Enos) and Holder (Joel Kinnaman) are once again smiling and joking with each other. All that while we continue to look for the real killer of those girls, after Joe Mills (Ryan Robbins) wasn’t the man they were looking for. Although slow paced, the show sped up in its second hour, giving us hints and luring us towards Carl Reddick (Gregg Henry), Holder’s previous annoying partner. With a season of who-done-it and various suspects that we surely thought would be innocent via plot twists, the last few episodes led us to believe that we were onto something: Reddick or James Skinner (Elias Koteas) were the killer(s).
Maybe the second hour felt a bit too fast paced, as it mainly focused on the identity of the killer, rather than having both hours linking pieces of broken glass from the past.
After Adrian (Rowan Longworth) left school and headed home, he was followed by a car, a cop car. That narrowed it down to either men. He later goes missing and thought to be kidnapped by Reddick, who supposedly set up Holder, who was going to spend 48 hours detained for harassment. But was it Reddick who set him up?
As all evidence pointed towards Reddick being the man of the show, Skinner’s sudden decision to leave his wife and daughter and inviting Linden to join him as his soulmate (aha), the suspicion changed paths.
And then the moment Skinner hugs his daughter goodbye as his wife and Linden watched completely made our hearts stop for a minute. She wore Kallie’s (Cate Sproule) ring, a trophy collected by the serial killer (as done to the other victims), indicating that in fact, Kallie is dead and Skinner is the one after all. A bit sloppy, perhaps clumsy of him to give his daughter one of the trophies, is it not? Was he really expecting to get away with it after that?
When both Linden and Skinner head outside, there’s a epic moment between the two for more than a minute. A moment where all of Linden’s possibilities for a new life with her new beau started and then ended so quickly. A moment where she knew that in a few seconds she would have to act accordingly in order to save Adrian and her own state of mind. That was one of TV’s most intense scenes I have ever witnessed and it was beautiful.
While Linden and Skinner are having emotional conversations about each other on their way to Adrian, Skinner reveals that he sees the homeless girls as garbage; people that will never be missed, burdens of the world. And earlier in the episode, it was concluded that he was after Adrian that night his mother, Trisha, was killed. He wasn’t after her. Ray had built Adrian a treehouse in the woods, where one day Adrian witnessed Skinner dumping a girl in the lake.
Reddick later finds Adrian at the cemetery near his mother’s grave, alive and well and not in the trunk of Skinner’s car as he’d led Linden to believe. With both Linden and Skinner face-to-face in the middle of the woods at night and a few minutes left till closing, the moment intensified. Linden don’t open the trunk! It’s a trap! It’s a trap! -me
Bam! She shoots Skinner, all while Holder chased the sound towards Linden pointing her gun to a kneeling and injured lover. With Holder’s words of wisdom, she puts the gun down, but then a spark in her in-the-moment breakdown causes her to react and shoot him dead. A decision that leaves Holder crying out “No no no no!” and Linden’s fate in the hands of the viewers and the show’s producers. Something we might never find out if they don’t RENEW IT!!!
This season (series??) finale was a mixed bag of twists and a truly terrifying, emotional ride. The actors = A+. If Peter Sarsgaard and Mireille Enos don’t receive Emmy nods next year, I will protest! Both did an extremely well job this season and shouldn’t be overlooked. The show deserves nods as well; even though seasons one and two were dragged a bit, I still quite enjoyed them. Yes, the Larsen case should have been solved by season one’s finale, but I’m not complaining. With the addition of this season, this show could very well be headed towards American Horror Story‘s route, though the same characters, there should be a different case each season (as suggested in Carter Matt’s article HERE). Although the finale was a hard blow that it won’t return until some time next year, if renewed, I know that I’ll keep busy. Breaking Bad‘s final episodes premiere this Sunday, as well as AMC’s new series Low Winter Sun (still thinking whether I should try it) and Hell on Wheels on Saturday (I still need to finish season 2). That and the huge roster of shows premiering and returning this fall (August-October) -shout-out to the shows still currently airing as well!!!
