I haven’t bothered with spoiler warnings thus far in these The Killing episode recaps, but seeing as how this is the last episode of season one, I just want to issue a warning:

SPOILERS. THERE ARE SPOILERS BELOW.

Now. Normally, at the end of these recaps I’ll lay out a little suspect list. I’ve been sold on Gwen being the culprit for the past several weeks, and as we’ve gotten closer to the end of the season, I’ve been asking Kris who she thinks is the killer. She’s been pretty noncommittal, thinking the killer wouldn’t be revealed in the first season and imagining the mystery would spill over into season two. I just couldn’t believe that: how could a single-season murder mystery show not lay all its cards on the table at the end of the season? “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” was the question posed to us, and surely, while every plot thread might not be addressed in the finale, they must at least answer that question.

Well, Kris was right: though the finale shows the detectives finally making an arrest, another last-minute twist springs itself on us, and it looks like we’re going to have to sit here and wait for season two to find out what really happened.

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As if to make up for weeks of lost time, The Killing ratcheted up its pace in the penultimate episode. The show began with the current Evil Mayor’s campaign apparently coming to an end, because the waterfront restoration project he’s been touting has been stalled because some Native American remains were found on the construction site, which means he can’t keep building, which means suddenly no one in Seattle will vote for him. That’s how elections work, right? Voters will all suddenly abandon their candidate because his construction project hits a snag, and they’ll all vote for the other guy instead automatically. Buh.

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Last night The Killing delivered an episode that contained what I’ve been asking for since the beginning of the series: several nice long scenes of Holder and Linden talking to each other. In fact, the entire episode pretty much consisted of nothing but that. This is both great and horrible.

Great, because we finally get to see the two detectives sharing some real quality time, and we learn some new stuff about them both. After Linden’s stupid kid Jack goes missing, Holder and Linden take a break from the investigation to try to track him down. During the course of the day, Linden opens up considerably, and we learn that she’s more messed up than we knew: she’s a former foster kid, her fried Regi (the lady with the houseboat) is actually her social worker, and the case that haunts her so much involved a guy murdering his wife, going to jail, and leaving his kid to navigate the same damaged foster care system that Linden grew up in.

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For weeks, The Killing, to my mind, has been steadily losing altitude, and while the latest episode wasn’t outstanding, at least the series seems to have leveled off and even powered the engines back up a bit. The detectives got to do some long-overdue investigating and interrogating, and their new suspect, though pretty obviously not guilty simply because he looked completely guilty, was at least discounted within a single episode instead of it being dragged out for several.

So, where are we, with only three episodes left?  Bennet is alive and in the hospital (boooo), and Stan has turned himself in for savagely beating an innocent man (and while he’s in jail, Mitch discovers that their bank accounts are empty). Belko is investigated, and while it turns out he’s a violent weirdo creep with mommy issues and pictures of Rosie above his bed (gross), and that he used to hang out in the Larsen’s home when no one was there (yuck), he at least didn’t kill Rosie.

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Okay. I’m going to have to admit that this show is not nearly as good as I’d hoped, and it has gotten clunkier by the week. Still, I’m invested at this point, and I’m going to see it through, and I’m going to pretend I’m still really enjoying it, when I’m only really sort of enjoying it.

This week we got some fairly unsurprising news: Bennet is not a terrorist. Like I had mostly figured out with my huge intelligent brain, what appeared to be some Muslim terror plot was actually a Muslim rescue plot: a little girl was being spirited away to protect her from an unwanted marriage and female circumcision. Bennet is clean, actually, more than clean: he was risking a lot to protect an innocent girl.

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Last Sunday’s The Killing didn’t do much to advance the murder investigation, focusing instead on the terrorism B-story, the Larsen family’s continuing downward spiral, and some long-overdue business between Linden and Holder.

First, Linden and Holder seem to have resolved their differences, their differences being that I thought Holder was awesome and Linden did not agree with me because she’s stupid. She didn’t trust Holder, because he was flashing wads of cash and having secretive meetings with some guy, and photos of Rosie’s body had been leaked to the press. She tailed him, and it turned out he was in a support group and his sponsor has been doling out his paycheck in chunks because Holder can’t be trusted with money because of whatever addiction he has (maybe gambling?).

Thankfully, Holder didn’t seem pissed that he had followed her. Why was he not pissed? Because, as I’ve said, he is awesome. Hopefully this will all mean they’ll start working together on the case and have some actual conversations instead of just being snippy with each other all the time.

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So, we’re still watching The Killing Sunday nights on AMC. It’s mostly still very good, though a half-season in, some of its flaws are starting to show.

First of all, the glacial pacing. At times, the show appears to be hanging around and checking its watch, waiting for the last five minutes to slap a revelation or cliff-hanger into our faces. It’s mostly forgivable, because it’s a full-season mystery, and if it was throwing suspects and clues at us every commercial break, it would be obvious that none of them would turn out to be legit. Still, it could use a little more content, more substance. Mood will get you only so far; some of the gaps could use a little filling.

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