‘The Killing’: Season 4, Episode 4 Recap: “Dream Baby Dream”

In Episode Four, Holder blows his and Linden’s cover as he comes down from a high, and Reddick drives up to the lake house where Skinner was murdered. Linden and Holder narrow their investigation to cadet Lincoln Knopf, who apparently was having an affair with the late Mrs. Stansbury.

What’s going on with Linden?: When Linden suspects that Holder has used again, she steps up and tries to keep the investigation going without any hiccups. After she’s denied entry into Lincoln Knopf’s barracks, she goes to pick up her son Jack from her social worker’s boat. Jack is having an awesome time, relaying how he and his girlfriend started dating when Sarah walks in and ruins everything with her dismal attitude and inability to say anything nice to anyone. This scene was particularly infuriating because no sane person would walk into someone else’s home — especially someone who is watching your offspring and doing you a solid favor — and start throwing insults around before screaming and, as Sarah Linden does best, storming out.

What’s up with the case?: After a late-night vision of his youngest sister, Nadine, Kyle goes to Colonel Margaret Rayne for comfort, but she only tells him he needs to start moving on. Linden and Holder confront troublemaking cadet Lincoln Knopf after finding out he was canoodling with Mrs. Stansbury while she was still coaching tennis at the local high school. Knopf might have very well been in on what happened to the Stansburys, but there’s no way someone so dim-witted plotted a family massacre and got away with it for this long.

What to expect in Episode Five: After pulling Skinner’s body out of the lake, be prepared for Reddick to come down hard on Holder and Linden. As far as the Stansbury case goes, Kyle’s memory is coming back to him faster than anyone at St. George’s expected, and his suspicions about AJ and Lincoln’s involvement in his family’s massacre are becoming clearer.

Most appalling part: “Slap Happy Sing-Along Day.”

Forget about all of the murders over the last four seasons; this wins Most Disturbing Scene of the series. In an attempt to haze the incoming freshman cadets, AJ Fielder summons Kyle to help him kick off the festivities. The party starts in the bathroom where AJ makes about a dozen new cadets line up and face one another, then slap each other across the face repeatedly while singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

Take away: Well, you’ll never be able to listen to “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” ever again, that’s for sure. We also learned that you should never confess to any illegal activity in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting because you never know which CI you’ve just tipped off. And apparently, Seattle is apparently chock full of some of the worst parenting in the world; between Linden, Knopf’s mother (who allows him to paste pictures of women on his bedroom walls with their faces cut out), and Linden’s estranged mother (who purposefully walked away from baby Linden in a crowd so she wouldn’t have to be burdened with being a parent), Seattle might not be the cheeriest place to raise a family.