7/15/13
View Logs: The Killing S3 Episode 8
Episode Title: TryI wonder if the writers of the show are starting to realize how much of a deadweight Seward's plotline is. I know it's going to be tied into the main storyline of the show eventually and there'll probably be some kind of twist with the guards and Seward. I just hope it won't be contrived like the previous seasons. Seward only has a few scenes in this episode and all of them are meant to serve as either foreshadowing or extra motivation for the main characters.
Keep in mind that the prison plotline started out fairly equal to all the others when the show started. How much this plotline has scaled back should be an indicator that there wasn't enough there to really make it a major sideplot to begin with. Seward as a character himself continues to baffle me.
Why does he suddenly not want to hang when at the early part of the episode he wanted to go out with as much trouble as possible? Was he just merely throwing a tantrum at the beginning of the series because he was unfairly convicted? Maybe it's plausible that a person will actually self-destruct if they are innocently condemned to death, but the way Seward was written he seemed to want to convince the world that he could do more damage to society. I mean he bashed the fricking prison chaplain's head in. That's not something an innocent man would do. That's something a serial killer would do just to prove a point.
Now suddenly he has this great fear of dying, he desperately wants to "stop the hanging", and he starts begging Linden to try harder? Excuse me? There's character development and then there's character 180s. Sometimes the difference is subtle but that subtle difference is the line between great writing and just contrived sloppy writing.
The best character twists are ones that you don't see coming while experiencing it but you do see it in retrospect. This show just seems to have a general problem with setting up and executing twists when it comes to its characters.
BTW, Pastor Mike... (spoilers... he's not the one...) is another great example. The way he was shot during the last episode was genius. The sinister lighting, the intimidating blocking, everything was well executed except the way he was written. What I mean by that is the dialogue and his character direction is just a more minor version of Seward's character sloppiness. His dialogue is so suggestively evil in the previous episode and now at the end of this episode he spills his history as a misunderstood priest.
So there's nothing actually creepy about him? There's no real closet skeletons? He's secretive because he was falsely accused and people just assumed he's a perverted pastor? So why did the previous episode's dialogue sound so sinisterly creepy? See what I mean by this show having a problem setting up and pulling off character twists?
It's such a shame because this show is so well shot. But the writing is just goddamm schizophrenic sometimes that it takes me out of the show.
So yes this episode is a step back... despite that Linden and Holder remain as strong characters. In fact, Linden's dialogue with Pastor Mike during the car ride is surprisingly interesting on Linden's side.
I haven't written anything about Bullet before because I didn't think there was much to write about. I'm starting to like Bullet more and more. She seems as just a random street punk in the beginning but she now has developed quite a bit of depth. She's one of the few side characters that the show hasn't been ruined with sloppy writing. (Lyric IS one btw... don't get me started on her. I'll complain about her later).
The plot twist at the end of the episode is fine... although at this point it's very obvious that this is the show's formula... so every episode I expected a huge "reveal" cliffhanger. I tolerated that with Battlestar Galactica... but in this show almost every single episode ends off with that kind of cliffhanger. It's now annoying... anyways the twist is that Bullet finds out who the killer is. She tries to contact Holder but he doesnt respond to her because they had a spat in this episode... so she is waiting at a random diner thinking what to do and the final shot is of someone driving in a car scoping her out. It's heavily implied that it's the killer (although with this show you never know...)
I have a theory... I'm going to guess it's either a cop (Reddick?) or Seward's warden... Actually the ladder would make dramatic sense since Seward's plotline is obviously setting up for some kind of twist near the end of the season... If I'm right on either one... this show will be the worst thing ever...