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The Killing, Ep. 3.08: “Try” – Rinse and repeat

The Killing, Ep. 3.08: “Try” – Rinse and repeat

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The Killing, Season 3: Episode 8 – “Try”
Directed by Lodge Kerrigan
Written by Nic Sheff and Aaron Slavik
Airs Sunday nights at 9 on AMC

For viewers who don’t mind – or even like – how The Killing introduces a new red herring at the end of every episode, there is a lot of rewarding material in “Try.” The most emotionally affecting scene is, again, between Holder and Bullet. Bullet has given Holder false information to try and get the police heavier on the trail of Pastor Mike. When that information is exposed, Holder says some pretty damning words to Bullet to the effect of “You’re nothing and you have nothing.” We’ve seen legitimate connection between the two before this, when Holder has acted as a kind of father figure to Bullet, but respect and trust are fickle things. It takes a long time to build them and almost nothing at all to destroy them. What’s worse for Bullet is that Lyric has abandoned her, too. She’s “not gay,” she tells Bullet. All Bullet has done is try – to draw on and embody the episode’s title – to help the people around her, but the only place it has left her in is a diner with drugs in her pocket and a potential killer just outside.

That’s not to say that the scenes between Mike and Linden weren’t affecting, but there’s an inherent lack of tension there when we know that our main character isn’t going to die. Without spoiling anything, the first season of Forbrydelsen – the Danish series which The Killing is based on – made a decision in the second half of the season that proved characters weren’t necessarily safe. This is one way in which The Killing has really deviated from its predecessor, because we get the feeling both Linden and Holder are permanent fixtures in this series. And that’s perfectly fine, since their relationship is what makes The Killing so watchable, but it means sticking a knife to Linden’s throat and a gun to her back isn’t going to convince us that she’s going down anytime soon. The real tension there is when Pastor Mike is considering killing himself and then considering getting the police to shoot him as he pretends to draw a gun that he doesn’t actually have. While that’s a much better use of generic expectations, we haven’t been given the same amount of time with Mike that we have with other new characters, so our investment there isn’t as strong as it is in a much quieter, low-stakes scene between Bullet and Holder.

Halfway through the episode, we come back to Seward. Sarsgaard has been an absolute blessing to the revitalization of this show, but I might have been content seeing a Linden/Holder-centric episode like “Missing” from season one. Veena Sud has the writing credits for that episode and for next week’s episode, so we may get something like that as Seward has little to do right now. That said, Becker calming down Seward through a panic attack and trying to play it off in his tough-guy way afterwards was a hell of a scene. And as we wind down this third season, the urgency of figuring out if Seward is going to live or not becomes of greater concern.

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