What I’m Watching: The Killing

The Killing: Season 4, Episode 2 “Unraveling” (B-)

This episode is a slight improvement over the season premiere, but I’m still not taken with it. I was thinking towards the end of the episode that the signature closing music hadn’t yet kicked in, and then it did, but it’s still true that this show doesn’t feel the same as it used to (not that it was always a good thing). Maybe it’s also that, after a bleak beginning, this show has managed only to get darker as it’s gone on, with this season being the absolute grimmest. There’s something immensely disturbing about the notion of military academy students deliberately mocking the death of the family of one of their own, and the way that it’s being handled by ice queen Margaret doesn’t help matters at all. Each development in the case hat Linden and Holder are discovering is unsettling, and there’s no way any of this ends happily. Holder froze completely at the supermarket when his impending fatherhood hit him, and I really hope that he isn’t inspired to bolt, especially since Caroline seems genuinely taken with him and the idea of having a child with him. Carl deserves some credit for his detective skills, and I did not expect him to be the one to follow up on Skinner’s disappearance. Even though I still don’t support that as a plotline for this season, it might be interesting to see what Carl does as he learns more about what happened and Linden and Holder’s role in all of it.