Joel Kinnaman’s Stephen Holder is back with all his funny Holderisms — calling Chinese takeout “fu manchu poo poo MSG crap” while arguing that “pickles are vegetables” — but by the second hour of The Killing’s two-hour second season premiere last night, he’s begun to clue into how badly he’s been duped by his desire for a shiny detective’s shield.
My Lucky Day opens at the Larsen household with one of the boys woken up by a noise outside. Brent Sexton’s Stan Larsen ventures out in a t-shirt, shorts and bare feet with a baseball bat to investigate the noise, only to find his dead daughter Rosie’s blood-stained pink bedazzled backpack on the doorstep. I saw crew set up for for this scene at the S.A. Larsen Moving & Storage set at the old Burrard Ironworks building near the Main Street overpass last December when they filmed episode two.
Rosie Larsen’s real killer is taunting the Larsens. It’s then that Joel Kinnaman’s Holder begins to have doubts that Seattle mayoral candidate Darren Richmond is the “doer”, but still doesn’t suspect that his Narcotics Anonymous sponser and former supervisor at the county Sheriff’s department Gil Sloane, played by Brian Markinson, is part of the political conspiracy to get Richmond.
As Holder parks near a Seattle diner, really Deacon’s Corner in Gastown, where he’s meeting Sloane, he takes a call from his Lieutenant Oakes instructing him to take the pink backpack to a different tech than the one normally used by his former partner Sarah Linden. Concerned, Holder remarks to Sloane how odd it is that Oakes is suddenly interested in who Holder gives evidence to. Sloane distracts the easily-distracted Holder saying: “I need caffeine. You buying?” Holder replies: “I gotta choice?” And that’s that for the moment. I did try photograph Markinson (who always makes a good villain, especially as Ronnie Deardon on Arctic Air) but couldn’t get a clear shot from where I was near the Main Street Overpass.
Eventually Holder can’t ignore what’s happening especially after Lieutenant Oakes tells him the tech found only Rosie’s prints on the backpack and no other hits. He calls an emergency meeting with Sloane under a Seattle bridge, actually the Granville Bridge in Vancouver lit up.
I was above the shoot on the bridge with no idea I was watching one of the key scenes of this episode. Inside the car, Holder tells Sloane how he swapped bags and didn’t give the tech the real Rosie Larsen bag so Lieutenant Oakes must have been lying about the test results:”Why would he do that unless we got the wrong guy?” Exasperated that his patsy is piecing things together, Sloane snaps back, “We didn’t get the wrong guy. He [Richmond] was on the bridge. He’s the doer. It’s over.” But Holder wants to tell IA about Oakes. He still doesn’t get how Sloane has used him. “Shut the hell up,” Sloane barks. “You think you got this job because you’re a good cop. You got it cause you’re dirty and everyone knows it. Crankhead. Low-life tweeker. Do you think anybody’s going to believe you. Why do you think you still have a paycheck. It’s because of me.” And a shaken Holder finally realizes he’s been part of a coverup all along, that the incriminating security photo of Richmond on Desolation Bridge that Sloane got through “his connects at County” must have been a fake. “You were taking a shortcut. But you didn’t care. You wanted the badge more,” Sloane taunts.”Now get the hell out of my car.”
Alone under the bridge, Holder stands in disbelief in the dark for several minutes. Later he tracks down Mireille Enos’s Sarah Linden at her motel, pounding on the door and shouting, “Open the door Linden. Linden just open the door Linden,” until he sinks to the hall floor with his ill-gotten shiny detective’s badge, which falls to the carpet where he leaves it.