Where “Ogi Jun” was this focused procedural uncovering the convoluted comic-book story of the boy with the manga tattoo, lying in wait for years to exact revenge on the man who killed his father, “Ghosts Of The Past” is dressed as a horror film without any animating purpose. What’s scary about the story of Alexi acting like he has crucial information and subsequently spilling the half-bean he may or may not remember? Nothing, really, but nightmarish sequences sure help pass the time. No, “Ghosts Of The Past” is pure soap opera. Stan and Terry finally kiss, Jamie goads Richmond into staying in the race, and the latest dun-dun-dun reveals that Rosie wasn’t Stan’s biological daughter and she knew it. It’s a filler episode, and worse, like its little red herring Alexi, it pretends to have something to say.
Points for style, but it has almost no connection to substance. The episode begins with a Halloween II-style nightmare of a hooded figure stalking through the hospital to find Richmond. It’s Belko, of course, smiling as he paralyzes the councilman. Then Richmond wakes up. Later, Linden walks into her apartment to find someone already there. It’s her ex-husband, call-sign Helo. Just before he leaves, he says, “You care more about that dead girl than you do about your own son.” See? This isn’t horror. It’s Lifetime, the shallowest psychologies erupting in the most obvious clichés. “Ghosts Of The Past” does a fine job showing that Linden’s getting obsessive to the point of ignoring her sick child and worrying even Holder without putting it in so many words. A little later Linden hears a noise outside and finds a burned-out light bulb. As she recovers from fear, all the other lights go out. She slams the door shut and locks it, and suddenly someone knocks. It’s Holder, who for some reason decided not to call before showing up at his partner’s house in the middle of the night to investigate what looks like a major break in the case.
It’s not a major break, though. The episode is marked by these slow, windy pushes in on a scene, as in an early sequence where Linden, Holder, and their phone-tapping guy are standing around a table listening to the message Rosie left on Alexi’s phone. It starts wide and gradually closes in on a circuitous path investigating each character in the shot. But this episode doesn’t slowly close in on anything. The voice-mail reveals that Rosie was scared when she called Alexi from the casino. “I saw him again,” she cries without even the slightest clarification. “God, please, Lex, help me.” Linden and Holder press him on the call, but right when Alexi’s about to reveal who Rosie was scared of, Alexi’s lawyer walks in with Lieutenant Carlson and out with his client.
Linden and Holder tail him to Babka’s, but eventually Alexi comes forward on his own. After Linden goes home to check on Jack and Holder gets back in his car, Alexi’s there in the backseat: “Don’t turn around. Just drive.” Again, it’s a fake-out. Alexi’s there to continue their interrogation. All the horror is psychological; the physical world offers only allies and support. Unfortunately, Alexi doesn’t know much. What he does know is that one night when he was with Rosie at the ferry to the casino, she got spooked by a black luxury towncar in the dropoff lane. The windows were tinted, which makes real-world sense but still says a lot about the arbitrary information blockages on The Killing. Rosie wouldn’t tell Alexi why she spent those nights at the casino. He didn’t even know how she found out about Stan. But she did find out that Stan was not her biological father, and that’s what spurred her to act out so much in the months before her murder. So that’s one mystery solved.