Season premiere review: The Killing ‘The Jungle’/’That You Fear the Most’ – You Don’t Get Anything

It’s not often a show gets cancelled and then comes back (though it does appear to be happening more frequently, in this age obsessed with retro) – but when it does, there is a decision by the writers and creators to be made: pick up right where they left off, or wipe the slate clean and try for something different. ‘The Jungle’ and ‘That You Fear the Most’ is a bit of both: there’s a new cast of characters and a whole new set of circumstances (tons of girls dying, instead of just one), but there’s also the same fundamental issues with the show to remind us why it got canceled in the first place. In other words, we’re back to The Killing we all knew and hated – just one with a different (and somewhat more intriguing) mystery at its center.

Right off the bat, it’s raining in Seattle and good ol’ Stephen Holder finds himself looking at the body of a dead homeless girl. She’s had her throat cut (to the point her head is hanging by a thread, she’s been raped – and for a touch of class, the killer (who is male.. of course) broke her finger after killing her when removing her jewelry. As always, it’s with Holder where the show really shines – no matter how bad the material may be, Joel Kinnaman eats the shit out of his dialogue. Now that he’s fitter and not dressing like a former junkie, we can see the cop potential in Holder: he’s charismatic, slightly arrogant, and still smokes cigarettes – even though he tries to tell Linden that he quit.

But after spending the opening 20 minutes with Holder and his new partner Carl Reddick (Gregg Henry), the focus slowly starts to shift back to Ol’ Faithful, the problematic character of Sarah Linden. There are some bits of this episode I really enjoy (finding a way to tie in Sarah’s old case with this season is a great bit of writer trickery that could feel cheap, but actually adds some atmosphere and much-needed motivation), but this is The Killing, so we get some laughable moments where the show’s gloominess and lack of nuance rear their ugly heads again.

Yes, I’m talking about the scene with Jack (UGH) and the part where she shoots the dying cow in the field full of cow skeletons. Absolutely ridiculous.

But there’s been definite improvement in the writing of the character – save for this episode at least, and the limited scope to which it tries to explore her character. Most of it is (smartly) wordless: we can see and feel Linden being pulled back into a murder case she doesn’t want to get involved in, but we’re not hearing her say it over and over again. Just the haunting images of those trees, and the bits and pieces about the case that we get from other characters. If anything, it gives Linden an emotional connection to the case that the show grasped desperately at with the Rosie Linden case. As she points our to her now ex co-worker/lover Cody: “I break things… except this one thing”, which now appears to be unraveling at the seams.

At the center of her old case is our predictably dark and quirky murderer, Ray Seward, who was convicted of murdering his wife (thanks to work by Linden’s partner) in similar fashion to the homeless girl found by Holder. He’s an uppity sort, the type who likes to talk in a soft voice and have random outbursts of violence (here, he bashes a priest’s head against the wall after telling him “I’m not into Jesus and all that shit”). He’s a “watch the world burn” type – but to this point, doesn’t have much to ground him as a character except some silly characteristics that don’t say much, like wanting to be hanged so he can show people how he’s not a coward.

But it’s not The Killing without some early frustrations: along with Ray’s underdeveloped introduction, the entire homeless angle (which essentially replaces the politics) doesn’t really work well. It doesn’t help that our insight into the world comes via Bullet, a lesbian teenager who of course, gets raped by some random guy named Twitch (I think?) near the end of the episode. She’s our insight into the world, the homeless kid (WHO HAS A SMARTPHONE) and is going around looking for her friend Kallie, and trying to give a ring to a girl named Lyric (who is hooking up with some douchebag guy who spends her money from prostituting on hair dye (seriously, his character does nothing but stare in mirrors in EVERY scene he’s in). The idea is promising, but as always, The Killing‘s idea of subtlety is a hackneyed rape scene and some teenage girls with dirty faces getting sad – hardly the most emotionally gripping material. They do make some attempts to put homeless life into context, but it never extends beyond the surface of “well, we don’t eat much, or have a place to sleep” kind of stuff.

And that’s really been The Killing in a nut shell over the past two years: a show that starts its story with promise, but quickly devolves into red herrings, one dimensional characters, and the silliest plot twists one could ask for (not to mention Jack Linden, the shittiest of all shitty high school characters). Like I said, Linden’s personal connection to the case at least provides some intrigue and mystery – although there’s nowhere enough improvement with the consistently-goofy subplots and minor characters for me to place my trust in it again just yet.

Grade: C+

Other thoughts/observations:

– just give Holder his own show. DO IT.

– the first shot of the show was rain falling on a windshield: if anything, these people are consistent as shit.

– seriously… why the rape scene?

– the visual palette for this show remains the same: gray and shitty ALL THE TIME. so drab.

– why doesn’t Linden open her letter from prison?

– DEAD COWS.

– Seward’s execution is in 30 days, which I would assume sets up the timeline for this season. I’m just thankful we’re done with the “Day 26” like any of that shit even mattered.

– the scene with Kallie and her mother was really painful to watch. Just felt like two actors reading lines, without much reaction or emotion to the scene, just a dramatic cadence.

– the two-parter ends when Holder walks into the woods and finds a lake full of dead girls. We’ll just put aside the many, many unbelievable elements of this discovery, at least for the time being.

– the head cop in the death row wing is a tobacco-chewing douchebag… surprise!!!