overnights

The Killing Recap: Hoodie Holder’s Back

The Killing

Scared and Running
Season 3 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating 2 stars
Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) and ADA Caroline Swift (Jewel Staite)The Killing _ Season 3, Episode 5 - Photo Credit: Carole Segal/AMC

The Killing

Scared and Running
Season 3 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating 2 stars
Photo: Carole Segal/AMC

A girl who might be the missing Kallie (it’s impossible to tell) gets hit by a car. The guy who hits her gets out and asks if she’s okay. He might be related to Shia Lebouf but again, nothing is certain right now. At the sound of his voice, she screams and runs off into the woods. I’m going to give everyone the benefit of the doubt right now that this is because she doesn’t get a good look at him and so thought he might be her attacker instead of someone who could potentially drive her to safety, call the police, help the case be solved in four episodes instead of thirteen, etc. Once she’s gone, the guy turns and sees some sort of shadowy presence in front of his headlights who is either the killer or Holder’s ex-partner Carl, lost on his way home. The driver screams at the shadow but then during the credits, the shadow joins forces with its cousin, the smoke monster, and they both head off after the girl.

Meanwhile, Holder and Linden are interrogating Mama Dips, who is really living up to both parts of her names. For one thing, she’s acting like she keeps a stash of Fun Dip under that motel front desk that she combines with vodka and takes swigs from every few minutes, times 30 years. For another, she’s Joe Mills’s mom. Joe, if you remember, jumped to the top of the suspect list last week when the computer told Holder and Linden that Joe was a bad guy. The computer also told them they would be having babies together by 2015, which made Holder crack a joke and Linden give the slightest rumor of a smile before telling him she was driving even though they were just hanging out in the station, not going anywhere in that moment. This also happened during the credits.

Linden looks pained when Mama Dips tells them her son is a good boy and that no one understands him except her. This is either because Linden worries that her own son, Jack, is going to turn out like Joe or else that he’s going to turn out the complete opposite, perfect in every way as long as she continues to stay away from him. They figure out that Mama called Joe at Kallie’s mom’s house and they head over. Linden’s pained look is now one of anger. There’s a slight difference in the way she furrows her brow, is how you can tell. I’m not making fun of Mireille Enos. I’m sort of addicted to the choices she makes on this show. And I’m also so fascinated by how different she looks in the previews for World War Z. What a difference not wearing a boxy wool sweater makes.

Linden tells Kallie’s mom that some people don’t deserve to have children. Kallie’s mom tells her that her daughter actually called her last night. She holds up her cell phone. Linden looks at it confused and thinks, “Why is this woman all proud of her paperweight? Why does she want me to look at it so badly?” She and Holder leave, and he says they should probably follow up on that call from Kallie. She ignores it. He tries to make her talk about why she was so hard on Kallie’s mom, “You spot it, you got it.” She won’t go there, either. It is confusing why she is living in Seattle, though, no? Considering that up until the last two days she was no longer tied to her job and was dating someone that she clearly wasn’t that serious about. I mean, I know she’s got a lot of bad mother baggage, but there are very concrete steps she could do immediately to help remedy them. Even if she is incapable of making flights that she has booked, there are other ways of getting to Chicago. Hell, she could jog there if she wanted. Plus, just think of all the dead bodies she could find that way.

They drive to a wildlife park. Skinner’s there with the driver of the car from the opening scene. He tells them about the girl who got hit and Linden and Holder start combing the area. They very quickly come across one of those biodegradable bags hanging on a branch, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless the bags are not only what the attacker uses to store the girls’ bodies but to also kill them. Maybe he runs after them holding the bag open until they trip and then he, like, falls on them with it and kind of uses it like a really dangerous duvet cover. Otherwise, wouldn’t he keep the bag in his car or in his backpack or something? Or maybe this part of the woods serves as a sort of walk-in closet area? I don’t know.

The discovery of the bag makes Linden and Holder get back into their car so they can drive through the streets that border the park. They talk about Jack and how happy he is in Chicago. Holder talks to him a lot. Linden says that the streets would be empty at three in the morning when the girl got hit and so she would’ve been a sitting duck. But then she also says, “If you don’t want to be found, you don’t stay out in the open.” They turn a random corner and see some tipped over garbage cans, which is where they discover a severed finger. That fits the profile of the other girls and also of Peter Sarsgaard’s recently realized missing digit wife.

Linden’s probably talking about how the girl didn’t want to be found by the killer, but there’s also an ongoing plotline this episode where everyone keeps talking about how these runaways hate the authorities and would never go to them go help. I can see how that would apply to if they got beat up and raped by a pimp like Bullet did or if they overdosed or something but a mad man being after them, who had either already slashed their throat or was trying to, feels like an entirely different set of problems. I just can’t imagine this girl would continue to hide from the cops. When Linden and Holder go to the place where the kids get free beds for the night, the social worker guy says that the runaways would never go to a proper hospital. Then he acts like he’s giving read inside information by being all, “There are three 24 hour clinics left in the city. I’m sure you can find them all on your own.” I did love how freaked out those two looked when he said that. Like, that probably involves using the Internet, right? A search like that could take the tech guy weeks.

Luckily, Bullet is hanging outside to take Holder and Linden (can I just start calling them Holden?) on a tour of street kid landmarks. I was confused why Bullet hadn’t already gone to these places herself but I can see her not wanting to go alone after what happened with Goldie. And also after she saw what happened with Twitch and the skate punks. She tells them Kallie would never go to a 24-hour clinic when she was in need of medical attention. It makes much more sense that Kallie would drag herself to a highway overpass? Bullet says it’s where Kallie sometimes slept when she had nowhere else to go (which sort of blows the it being too sketchy a place to go alone theory but I’m trying here). None of this really matters, because the most important part of this scene is when Holder pulls a Superman. He walks over to his trunk wearing a suit and then when he walks back he’s transformed into the Hoodie Holder we first loved. He goes to blend in the kids under the overpass, telling them he’s looking for his dog. Bullet comes up with the name Bugs for him because “looks like a stretched out white rabbit” (it’s weird she wouldn’t have gone for the more obvious, “Because he gnawed on carrot sticks like a bunny in front of me”). She shows Linden that she’s written the word faith on her wrist and says she wants to draw “north star” on Linden because she seems like someone who will always help people find their way home. Linden smiles and almost asks Bullet to draw the words “GPS” on her dashboard, but then Holder comes back with a new lead. The kids told him about some drainage pipes that are their second choice when they’re in need of a doctor but can’t get an appointment at the overpass. The three of them go there and find blood inside one of the pipes. Bullet is dejected.

In between all of this, there are scenes between Seward and the chatty inmate Alton and also a third inmate whom we have just met. Alton is about to go meet with the family of his victims, but he won’t talk about what he did to get in there. The new inmate has found God and is about to meet his fiancée for the first time. You can imagine Seward’s reaction to this guy. Seward is told he has a visitor, too: Seward’s son’s foster mom. She wants Seward to sign the paperwork so she can adopt Adrian, and she also asks if he would allow his son to come visit him. Seward doesn’t take to this conversation any better than he did to the one with the born-again prisoner. I’m just going to assume that he’s acting like such an unrelenting jerk because he thinks it’s best that Adrian forget all about him since he’s going to be dead in two weeks. Either that or Peter Sarsgaard watched a mislabeled copy of Silence of the Lambs that he thought was Dead Man Walking. At the end of the episode, Alton comes back and tells Seward that his crime was that he murdered his mom and dad and that the family he just visited was actually his own brother and sister. He can’t believe that they forgave him.

They go there and find the girl who was hit by the car, but it’s not Kallie. She’s asleep or passed out on a gurney, but as soon as they touch her, she wakes up screaming. Her throat has been slit and then sewn back up. I have no idea why the killer would take her there if he was the one who had slit her throat in the first place, so maybe it was someone else. Maybe Joe Mills did it, because there’s no way he’s the actual killer but maybe he’s working with the killer somehow or trying to stop the killer. Maybe it was Carl! Oh, how I hope it was Carl.

There’s also a scene between Linden, Holder, and Holder’s inexplicable girlfriend. They watch TV together while the girlfriend reminds Holder that it’s Valentine’s Day. I don’t blame him for forgetting. You can barely tell when it’s day or night in that weather, let alone when it’s February or May. He and Linden go back out again after getting a call from Bullet. She just remembered another place that Kallie might have gone if she was hurt. She knows it’s a long shot compared to the overpass and drainage clinics, but there’s this sketchy doctor who tends to people off the books. Maybe Kallie went there as a very last resort. Holder’s girlfriend looks not thrilled but tells him to go. Isn’t this lady a D.A.? Wouldn’t she entirely understand that this is part of the job?

Kallie’s mom, who is finally worried about her daughter, drives through the streets looking for her. She calls Kallie’s cell, because she’s a rebel who has always lived life on her own terms, which means doing things that the authorities would never dream of doing. There’s no answer. She goes back home and there’s Joe, who is the cop’s main suspect, but I guess that pursuit was dropped once Holder and Linden’s initial visit didn’t pan out. You would think maybe the police would’ve at least propped Carl in a car outside her house. He tells her not to worry about Kallie, that she’s fine. He’s going to take a shower. Kallie’s mom calls her cell again and is surprised to hear it ring. She discovers the cell in Joe’s bag and he comes out right then. Oh, the old “I’m going to take a shower” fake-out, gets them every time. It is looking a whole lot like he’s the killer, which means he is absolutely not the killer. Or he is just Kallie’s killer but not the other teenage girls plus Seward’s wife’s killer. I hope we pick up exactly here next week and that before Kallie’s mom confronts him about the cell, he tells her that what she didn’t see was what else was in his bag. He brought her a present: dozens and dozens of orders of hash browns. Happy Valentine’s Day!

The Killing Recap: Hoodie Holder’s Back