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.