My Girl Sarah Linden

My favorite characters are all the brilliant, determined, dark, and flawed ones.  And Sarah Linden on The Killing is the best of them all.

So insightful about her cases, so blind to her own motivations.  So dogged in her pursuit of her goal, so oblivious to the cost of the damage she leaves in her wake.  So on top of her game, so helpless to stop herself from plummeting out of control.

Two weeks ago, we saw her locked up in a psych unit as part of a grand scheme by we-know-not-whom to get her off the streets and off her case.  Her psychiatrist, who has no idea that she has been duped, is skillfully gentle as she questions Sarah.  And we see that Sarah, for whose success we have been rooting for nearly two years, is incapable of self-reflection and assessment when her doctor asks her whether she notices any connection between the two murder cases that have sent her off the deep end and her own childhood story of abandonment.  She looks genuinely baffled when she is asked to link the pieces together.

And then, just as we are completely fed up with the psychiatrist and her naivete', and cheering for Sarah, in a state of disorder or not, to get the hell out of there, the doctor points out that Sarah is NOT fine by noting that in the past couple of weeks she has lost her fiance' to a break-up, her son to his father, and her job to the ashes of her case.  Our girl Sarah really is a mess.

And now she's back on the street, officially off the case but doggedly fighting to solve it.  Whether she can retrieve any of the pieces of her personal life remains to be seen (and would appear to be highly unlikely), but she and her partner ~ a masterfully flawed man himself ~ are going to find out who killed Rosie Larsen.  


What will be left of Sarah once she has accomplished the one thing for which she lives?