The Killing Review: “Seventeen” (Season 3, Episode 3)

After a promising start, the third season of The Killing has started to meander a little bit. The last couple of episodes were fast-paced, intriguing and revealing. This one was just plain dull and felt like complete filler. Remember the infamous first season episode Missing, where Linden spent hours looking for her son? Yeah, sure, it was great for character development, but it came at a point where we just wanted to know who killed Rosie Larsen, not find out about Linden’s personal problems.

This episode is not nearly as ill-timed, but it does feel as if Holder and Linden are going around in circles. Holder talks to the tomboyish Bullet, goes back to the office, and then talks to Bullet again, spies on some child porn distributor, then Bullet, office, kiddie porn, Bullet, and the cycle goes on and on, while Linden’s more invested in solving a case from her past than working on the one they have on their hands.

Enough with the red herrings. We know Goldie didn’t do it, but he does seem to be connected to the crimes, as he was found in possession of a tape featuring Kallie Leeds, a friend of Bullet’s who’s gone missing. Nevertheless, we’re not shown this until the very end of the episode. What happened before?

There’s one storyline which has thus far served no purpose. Twitch still dreams of moving to L.A., and Lyric still hopes to join him. Why should we care? They’re friends with Kallie and Bullet, but I sincerely couldn’t tell you how they’re going to break into the overall story, whether they’re valuable to the investigation, or whether they were even good friends with Kallie at all, since she was seen hanging out with Bullet most of the time. Twitch is not even a well-written character, he’s completely one-dimensional and poorly played by Max Fowler. I hope they live up to their main character status before long, otherwise their scenes are going to start getting severely tedious to watch.