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Going Numb on THE KILLING Day Sixteen

Joel Kinnaman’s conspiracy patsy Stephen Holder goes numb in epic fashion in The Killing’s third episode of the second season: scaring his nephew, beating up one of his old dealers, having sex in a car and then walking through oncoming traffic on what looks like Vancouver’s Georgia Viaduct (the red S on top of the Scotiabank tower is a giveaway).

This is where Mireillie Enos’s Sarah Linden — now back as lead detective on the Rosie Larsen murder case — finds Holder, having spent Day Sixteen of the investigation methodically backtracking what he has done or not done during her brief absence. She asks a uniformed police officer what happened to her warrant for a client list from the Beau Soleil computer servers, the on-line escort service sixteen-year-old Rosie Larsen worked for. It turns out Mark Moses’s new Lieutenant has obstructed her with red tape. While she’s waiting for the warrant, she goes to the Larsen house with a photograph of the manga tattoo from the arm of Rosie Larsen’s mysterious bicycling companion in a video. She’s confronted by a hostile Stan Larsen unwilling to look at anything until the police tell him what they’ve discovered about Rosie’s pink, bedazzled backpack dropped on his doorstep at the end of Day Fourteen.

That brings to Linden to just-retired Lieutenant Oakes’s boat moored somewhere on the Fraser River to retrieve the backpack which Holder entered into evidence. She quickly realizes that this is not Rosie Larsen’s backpack and that Holder must have made a switch, calling him to say: “I know what you did with the backpack…we need to talk..call me back.” Back at the station, she re-watches the video of Rosie Larsen on her bike for the umpteenth time. The uniformed police officer interrupts to tell her that he went to serve her Beau Soleil warrant at the shoe place but there was a fire there that morning.

Sarah Linden gets out of her car at the arsoned shoe store, filmed in Vancouver’s Chinatown early this year, saying, “Seattle PD. Were the computers damaged?” Told there were no computers, she squints around in Linden fashion, spying some security cameras on the street.

This was the first time I’d seen Mireille Enos filming on location for season two. She is so different from her character, quick with a smile and happy in her life, as you can see below in my photograph of her and a crew member.

The next scene in Numb is of Brent Sexton’s Stan Larsen picking up his two boys at school, only to discover that shady crime figure and Larsen’s former boss Janek Kovarsky has been by to visit them. I photographed Brent Sexton in character as Stan Larsen filming this scene at Vancouver’s Lord Strathcona Read More »Going Numb on THE KILLING Day Sixteen

BIG READ: THE KILLING Investigation Returns for 2nd Season

Published March 30, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

The  investigation returns this Sunday night with The Killing‘s two-hour second season premiere on AMC and a new marketed tagline — Be Careful What You Uncover — on the show’s poster. Following a Twitter riot over last season’s finale, showrunner Veena Sud has promised that the central mystery and last season’s marketed tagline — Who Killed Rosie Larsen? — will be solved in this season’s finale.

In addition to not solving the murder in last June’s finale, The Killing turned Joel Kinnaman’s detective Stephen Holder, one of the few likable characters, into a seeming villain, who betrayed Mireille Enos’s lead detective Sarah Linden and set up Seattle mayoral candidate Darren Richmond for arrest. So it’s not surprising that in early filming of season two in Vancouver (which began in late November and is scheduled to wrap in late April), I never found Enos and Kinnaman at the same location shoot.

The set-in-Seattle cop drama debuted last spring with what is considered to be one of the smartest, most stylish and rainiest pilots in years but lost its lustre along the way with too many red herrings and erratic writing. I balked in the third episode when writers clumsily explained gallons of blood smeared on the walls around The Cage in the high school basement as the product of a nose bleed and the rape video as a young girl (Vancouver’s own Kacey Rohl)’s desire for attention. But I stuck with the series to the end and will be back on Sunday night because I developed an attachment to these characters. And that’s the dichotomy: the performances are sublime even when the plotting goes array.

Read More »BIG READ: THE KILLING Investigation Returns for 2nd Season