'The Killing' recap: A deadly 'Reckoning'

By Blake Hennon

July 22, 2013 12 AM PT

Well, that was intense.

The most emotionally rattling episode of the season, “Reckoning,” includes a shocking death and a major arrest. Take deep breaths.

As it begins, Danette, after putting fliers about her missing daughter, sees her place’s door open. She calls Kallie’s name and frantically looks around, but who she finds isn’t who she hoped for. Instead, it’s her former lover Joe Mills – back with a sinister smile after several episodes away – who she suspects in the disappearance.

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Linden and Holder are called to Danette’s and find she’s been beaten; she says Joe took her money. Holder is surprisingly harsh toward the battered woman. Where he previously had to restrain Linden in dealings with Danette, now his partner signals him to cool it.

Information Danette provides leads them to a storage unit. And here’s where having Jonathan Demme directing is a great call. The Oscar winner, who shot similar scenes in “The Silence of the Lambs,” orchestrates the unease, tension and brutality excellently as the detectives find where Joe’s been sleeping, complete with a still-smoking cigarette butt. They split up to search for the suspect, who tackles Linden and savagely punches her. Holder runs toward them and, instead of pulling his gun, launches his body into Mills, punching him and then holding him as a badly bloodied Linden gets in a few payback kicks.

Slightly later, as her boss James Skinner is saying there’s nothing tying Mills to the Pied Piper victims’ bodies, Det. Carl Reddick arrives with a find from the search: a box full of rings – and one other item. Linden pulls out Bullet’s necklace. As she hears Holder trying to get Joe’s cab’s trunk open over the radio, she races to try and save him from the psychological trauma.

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She arrives in time, but despite her pleas, probably realizing who’s inside, he opens it slowly. There’s Bullet’s “FAITH” tattoo and bloodied hand. He’d been ignoring her calls after she dangerously lied to him, and he’s badly shaken by what’s happened. She may have known the identity of the Piper.

At the station, as Mills sits cuffed in an interrogation room, Reddick tells Holder and Linden in the observation room that Bullet’s cause of death is the same as the other 18 victims – and that she’d fought back hard – before offering to let Holder have five minutes to make the guy look more like he’d resisted arrest. Mills has insisted on talking to Danette, Skinner says, and Linden notes that Kallie’s ring wasn’t among those found.

In the interrogation room, Danette asks Joe where Kallie is. This guy’s a piece of work, saying she knows he could never hurt anyone after he’s clearly knocked her around. He says he picked Kallie up on the night she disappeared, but the teen jumped out of the cab and ran off. And, get this: After she gets some money together with his mom to hire a lawyer to get him out, they’ll find Kallie and be a family. Wow. Danette brings up that he films himself having sex with underage girls – and that his mom says she too is through with him. He cries over not being mama’s little boy anymore.

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“Those little girls,” he says, “they came to me. It’s not wrong. It’s nature. It can’t be helped. They look at me with that ache, that sweet, sweet ache. And they look at me with those little sad eyes and they’re like, ‘Please, mister, please just make it go away.’ I was gentle, and I took care of that. And I made it go away.”

If you thought Danette wouldn’t jump across the table to attack him, you were wrong.

On death row, Ray Seward calls and leaves a message with Linden as prison guard Francis Becker supervises. The humanity Becker showed the convict last episode during the former’s panic attack is gone, as the guard gives him guff. Ray fires back with a shot about Becker’s unfaithful wife, which embarrasses and upsets him.

Linden finally gets a chance to speak with Seward’s son, Adrian, who may have seen the face of his mother’s killer; the detective believes that murderer is the Pied Piper, and not Ray. Asked if anyone on a sheet of photos is the man he saw that horrific night, the boy looks at a sheet of photos and points to the one of Joe Mills.

Skinner, speaking to reporters about the Mills arrest, says the “so called Pied Piper is off the streets, and the city of Seattle can rest easy tonight.”

A troubling issue arises for Linden’s investigation when she sits with a distressed Danette, who says she thinks she deserves all this. As the detective tries to comfort her, it comes up in conversation that Joe was in Alaska three years ago on the day after Christmas – which is the day Tricia Seward was killed. So Adrian’s ID of him as his mother’s killer appears ruined.

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Linden finds Holder at home drinking and brings him up to date, saying no one else knows that Adrian’s ID is a lie and so she could use it to get a stay of execution for Seward. They sit in silence for several seconds before, feeling guilty for Bullet’s death, he says, “I should have picked up.” As Linden comforts him, Holder, who earlier had a spat with his girlfriend Caroline, moves to kiss her. She avoids it, and he apologizes. He cries with grief over his young friend’s murder, and Linden repeats, “It’s going to be OK,” but clearly doubts it.

Ray’s cell neighbor proves a more complex character than previously suggested. Dale leads him into prayer, and then mocks him, saying on the outside he’d killed with his hands but in prison he kills with his words – and suggesting that he’d used his religious talk to sway Ray’s prison friend Alton into suicide.

The prison guard Henderson, after finding out he’s on the execution team – which he’d tried to avoid – gets a panicked call from Becker’s wife. Becker drives home to find police and Henderson there. His teenage son has apparently shot and killed a man involved with Mrs. Becker. (You’ll recall that earlier in the season Becker told Ray that Adrian was destined to end up in prison.)

Holder stands before Bullet’s sheet-covered body. Only in death does he learn her birth name: Rachel Olmstead. And he learns from another detective that she’d called the station a number of times the night before, looking for him. Reddick logged them but wrote them off as “another wild goose chase.”

That sends him in a rage to Reddick’s house, where he rings the doorbell during family dinner to land a few punches on his sometime partner’s face.

Linden tells Skinner she was wrong about there being a connection between Tricia Seward and Joe Mills.

“For what it’s worth,” he tells her after saying she’s done good work, “I think you should stay on. This is where you belong.”

Suspect Derby

Joe Mills looks like the guy, doesn’t he? But is he? There are two episodes left, and that’s plenty of time for another to take the lead amid the twists and turns of the derby’s course. There’s still Reddick, who might have pulled off an elaborate frame job. There’s still Becker – it’s unclear where he was if he wasn’t at work and wasn’t at home when his kid shot mom’s other guy.

Lingering questions

Where’s Kallie? What really happened the night she disappeared?

Last thing(s)

Nice to see Nicholas Lea, who was Krycek on “The X-Files,” get to be villainous as the previously repentant Dale.

RIP, Bullet. Bex Taylor-Klaus’ performance has been one of this season’s highlights, and she’ll be missed.

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