Reactions to The Killing

Some bullet points regarding episode 9, "Reckoning":

*Holder has some great lines at the start of the episode, none better than when he gets a look inside Danette's storage unit: "For being broke as shit, Danette sure has a ton of it."  For three seasons now, Holder's wit has provided much-needed comic relief to this grim-themed show.

*Carl Reddick is looking guiltier than ever to me: he's the one who allegedly discovers Joe Mills's box full of victim's rings, and the placing of Bullet's body inside the trunk of Mills's cab could have been part of the same frame job.  Suspicion hardly alleviates later in the episode when we learn that Reddick received a call from Bullet earlier that night she was slain.

*The scene where Danette and Mills face off across the table in the interrogation room was played wonderfully by both actors, and accentuated by the deft use of alternating close-ups.

*The episode throws a couple of wicked curve balls: first, with the seeming Jesus freak Dale's cruel manipulation of Seward, and then with the shooting of Annie's lover.  How darkly ironic that Francis Becker Sr.--a man whose profession involves executing killers--now has a murderer for a son.

*Speaking of wayward children: something just smells funny about Adrian Seward.  I wonder: could he have been involved somehow in his mother's death, and Ray has taken the rap in order to protect him?

*Perhaps apropos of its tile, "Reckoning" was an extremely physical episode, with several of the characters suffering vicious beatings.  But grueling emotional experiences--from Ray's Death-Row desperation to Holder's devastation over Bullet's death--easily overpowered the overt violence.  Kudos to The Killing's writing staff for scripting such hard-hitting drama.