The Killing

What hasn't changed and what matters, is Mireille Enos's sodden, unshakable integrity as a detective who could outlast a pack of bloodhounds. [10 Jun 2013, p.48]

Good, compelling, creepy start.

It’s a bit of a rarity, an intimate, sprawling, and at times touching procedural that makes the networks’ versions of the genre look like simple board games.

The first episode took a little while to seem real, but, as Holder would say, I was feeling it before long. Like Linden, I was drawn back in.

[Holder and Linden are] fascinating to watch as they work around Holder’s lazy partner and strong new characters who include a brilliant psychopath about to be executed.

It's effective, finely realized genre work from a notoriously dark and idiosyncratic director and it speaks directly to the show's reenergized interest in exuding its own distinct personality.

It relies on excellent work from Enos as the dark, damaged Linden and Kinnaman as the slightly lighter Holder to carry us along even when the plot seems to be stagnating.

The performances are spot-on, of course, but Enos and Kinnaman were never the show's problem. Quite the opposite, in fact. Retooling the show with the murders solved at the end makes The Killing deserving of a new lease on TV life.

The biggest disappointment about The Killing's surprising return is its strategy for cheating death: by dialing down the ambition, by becoming more conventional. Still: It's good enough. And for this show, that's a strong step in the right direction.

This is the closest thing to a fresh start the show is going to get, and there are some promising developments here suggesting this could ultimately be a more rewarding viewing experience than The Killing 1.0.

A year after the Rosie Larsen case ended, this new chapter is compelling enough to earn some fan forgiveness.

It's too early yet to know if the writing can avoid the pitfalls of the "Who Killed Rosie Larsen?" story, but this is off to a promising start.

The new Killing appears to have taken a sharp turn from the kind of emotional life that enriched the last season, with its drama of a disappeared daughter. In its portrait of family grief, beautifully nuanced to the end, the series landed a dramatic punch more potent than that of the key question, "Who killed Rosie?" Itself a mystery of considerable power, and one that the latest chapter of The Killing will have to go some way to equal.

It is finally unshackled, plot wise, from the far better Danish version of the show and should be able to pace itself in a more effective and gripping way than it did it the past.

I'm reluctant to lose my heart again, much less encourage anyone to follow me down what could be a dead end. And yet I'm intrigued.

It's too soon to say if the show will again employ a bounty of red herrings, but the show's penchant for plot holes persists.

That initial heat from Season 1 has been lowered to room temperature. Kinnaman continues to give The Killing a pulse. But he can’t do it alone, and at this point merits a new, more vital vehicle in which he can really gun his engines.

As was the case with the first two seasons of The Killing, this new one takes its sweet, sweet time getting going, and as it slowly gains momentum, it carries itself as if it's the greatest series in the history of American television, single-handedly reinventing the police procedural for the 21st century.

The creators take a fresh start, but cling to the sepulchral atmospherics that too often take the place of narrative. The series is still suspenseful, but the dread that once again follows Sarah through damp forests, deserted tenements and shadowy, rain-washed streets diminishes with overuse.

While it’s great fun to have Holder back--you could make a TV show out of him just walking and talking and it would be fantastic, because Kinnaman is so compelling--the Seattle street urchins at the core of the murder mystery are almost unbearable to watch. The acting, writing and scenarios for the latter are all mediocre.