TV review: The Killing, Season 4 starts

I was so happy when I found out Netflix was making a final season of The Killing to wrap it all up for fans. Being a HUGE fan of the series, I couldn’t wait to get my eyes on it.

I just finished watching the first episode. It took a little while for my brain to remember what happened at the end of the last season, but soon enough, it all came flooding back.

We start off with Sarah a complete mess after she killed James Skinner, her former partner, at the end of the last season. Holder has helped her cover up what she did, and she’s left with the guilt of all of Skinner’s victims never being found. A new case comes to light, and Sarah and Holder begin investigating the murder of a family whose only survivor is a member of an all-boys military academy.

The first episode is like many of the second and third season episodes, and I expect this season to play out just like those seasons did too. It starts off slow, you’re not really sure what’s going on, and you’re not sure when you’ll start putting the pieces together.

But as always, the acting is great and the chemistry between Holder and Sarah is what brings you back. Mireille Enos (Sarah) is a fantastic actress and both her and  Joel Kinnaman (Holder) look like crap all the time, which makes you believe the story.

The mood of the series hasn’t changed with the move to Netflix. It’s still dark, it’s still miserable and creepy, and there’s still enough suspense to make your heart skip a beat when there’s not actually that much happening on screen. At one point I could hear myself breathing and all that was happening was Sarah standing in the middle of a room. Good stuff.

The best thing about The Killing is that these characters haven’t changed – they’ve stayed true to how they were orgianlly written in that first season and even though the series has been cancelled twice, the writers didn’t try to make them more appealing or bend to mainstream norms of how mainstream characters should look or act like.

Obviously if you haven’t watched any of The Killing yet, you should.

So I think I will be watching the rest of these in one big go. But it’s like a good book – you don’t want to get to the end because then it’s all over, and I just don’t want it to be over.