By Stuart Mitchner

He sat back, checking only to see if the tape was still running, lit his pied piper, and gave ear. — John Lennon, from Skywriting by Word of Mouth

On one of this December’s rare rainy afternoons a dark green 2000 Honda CRV pulls into a deserted parking lot and sits idling while the male occupant talks urgently into his cell phone. Ten minutes later a silver-gray 2011 CRV pulls up alongside. Rolling his window part way down, the man in the green car calls out “Yo Linden!” and the woman in the silver car laughs and shouts back “Holder!”

The couples’ playful nod to Linden and Holder was inspired by their total immersion in the rain-drenched world of The Killing, where two Seattle detectives are trying to capture the Pied Piper, a serial killer so named because his victims are teenage girls, street kids selling sex to make ends meet.

The cause of the emergency offsite meeting in the parking lot is for real, however. There’s a crisis at home involving collateral damage from a lifetime of psychic drone strikes targeting their son, in particular the one launched 35 years ago on December 8, 1980. Given the time of the month and the theme and title of The Killing, it’s easy to see a connection, since John Lennon’s assassin claimed to be executing a Pied Piper of music who had sold out and gone over to the dark side. Testifying on his own behalf in court, the killer read the passage from The Catcher in the Rye that has Holden Caulfield imagining “thousands of little kids” playing in a field of rye on the edge of a cliff” while he stands on the edge “to catch everybody if they start to go over.”

One of the little kids who fell over the cliff was a four-year-old who had been nurtured from birth on the music of the Beatles. Having been on the case for almost 40 years, his parents know not to blame the killing for traumas before and after the event. They have also given up hoping that any one cause could be found or that the mystery would ever be solved.

Returning from the rainy rendezvous to find their son asleep, the crisis on hold, the parents tiptoe upstairs and settle down in front of the flat screen to binge on the concluding episodes of Season Three of the series they’ve been living in ever since Patti Smith celebrated it in her new book, M Train.

Linden and Holder

With the rain letting up and a glimmer of daylight intruding on our mood, we pull the shades. We’ve got all the rain we need in Seattle. For 10 days we’ve been soaked in the incessant Netflix downpour (“streaming” is right). A year or so ago, we tried The Killing and gave up after four episodes, due in part to all the bad press it was getting for leaving the audience hanging at the conclusion of the first season, which was littered with red herrings. According to “The Amazing and Unexpected Comeback of The Killing” (www.buzzfeed.com), the show “underwent the social media equivalent of a stoning,” with “vocal audience frustration” showing “the actual effects dissatisfaction can have on a show’s viewership.” By the time The Killing returned for Season 2, “goodwill for the show had disappeared,” its ratings declined, and it was cancelled. When knowledgeable hard-core fans protested, AMC brought it back for the third and by far the best season, and then cancelled it again.

Meanwhile, we were hooked. We saw the genius of the show in the deepening relationship between Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), one of the oddest, most unlikely couples imaginable. Never mind the plethora of unmanifested revelations and false leads the writers cooked up to keep us watching the embattled romance. Let the rain fall, let the coffee go cold, let the relationship spin out of control, it’s all redeemed by the small (5’2) but mighty Linden, with her reddish-gold ponytail and haunted haunting relentlessly unyielding gaze into the heart of darkness, and the ever-looming lean and rangy Holder whose crude rapper-inflected teasing can make her smile (he has the snappiest lines in the show) when she’s sinking, flailing, losing her way.

In M Train, Patti Smith “feels Linden’s devotion to each terrible mission, the complexity of her vows, her need for solitary runs through the high grass of marshy fields.” Writing in the aftermath of the shocking, unresolved conclusion of Season 3, she nails the essence of the scene: “Holder, numb with grief and insomnia, waits in that same car drinking the same cold coffee. Sitting vigil until she signals and he is again by her side as they tramp purgatory together.” Then she gives us Linden, a poet’s Polaroid: “Linden is running. She abruptly stops and faces the camera. A Flemish Madonna with the eyes of a woman from the backwoods who has slept with the devil.”

“Six Minutes” 

Shades pulled, we’re submerged in a world of endless rain and gloom that makes Seattle/Vancouver as evocative a setting as the London of Bleak House and Sherlock Holmes. The afternoon that began with the charade in the parking lot coalesces with the tense, hushed, breathless wonder of watching the episode titled “Six Minutes” where Linden’s devotion to her cause becomes sublime. At this stage in the series there have been moments of deeply felt solidarity between Linden and Holder, intimations of the love that prevails at the end of the fourth and final season. But for intimate endgame intensity nothing can match the scene between Linden and death row inmate Ray Seward (Peter Sarsgaard), who has only hours to live. It’s a situation dating back to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and innumerable Hollywood prison cliffhangers, the condemned man we know is innocent, the ticking clock, the hope for a last-minute stay of execution.

“Six Minutes” explodes the stereotype. Two people sit on either side of a glass panel, each holding a phone, Linden the detective who helped convict the man she’s facing and is torn by the knowledge that she was mistaken, and Seward who is beginning to realize, with something close to awe, that his former adversary is going to the limit for him, that even if she fails to save his life her passionate determination has become personal, as if her life and his were tied to the same fate and together they’re approaching some sacred absolute, a truth, an awkward wounded state of grace.

When a scene achieves greatness, you move beyond the vicarious, life and art merge, you’re there, feeling it, sharing the excitement of the actors’ awareness of what they’re making, of what’s happening to them, so that a seemingly minor detail becomes extraordinary, like the moment when Linden’s hand is cramped from holding the phone, and she says “I have to put it down,” and you know how tightly she’s been gripping it, and when she puts the receiver aside, it’s as if she’s giving you a rest, the tension suspended, it’s a chance to pause and catch your breath, as we do, nothing to say, just exhale, sigh, murmur some inadequate exclamation (maybe a whispered “wow”) as we begin to fathom the simple magnitude of what we’ve been sharing. Interviewed in the buzzfeed piece, Sarsgaard recalls the moment Mireille Enos alerted him to the scene. “She was the first person to have told me that Episode 10 would be a lot of the two of us. She came running up to me and said, ‘Episode 10! It’s going to be so great!’”

The Killing ends happily for the characters who are its heart and soul. Somehow Linden and Holder weather the outrageous denouement of Season 3, to which Patti Smith gives more than its fair share of credibility in M Train, where you learn the identity of the Pied Piper and understand why another season was necessary. No spoilers here, just a salute to Netflix for making Season 4 possible and streaming it so the Linden and Holder of the parking lot rendezvous could enjoy it all at once, on their own terms.

Nowhere Man

The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which was released 50 years ago this month, features timeless John Lennon compositions and performances like “Norwegian Wood,” “Girl,” and “In My Life.” Not quite on the same level is “Nowhere Man,” a song I’ve always associated with December 8, 1980. At first you might think it’s Lennon in typical put-down mode, writing about a nowhere man living in nowhere land, with his nowhere plans, no point of view, blind as he can be. With Lennon’s peerless singing, the plaintive middle section (“Nowhere Man please listen …”) leads to the universal (“Isn’t he a bit like you and me?”), which can make you catch your breath and shake your head (the musical equivalent of what happens in “Six Minutes”) when you imagine him singing for the man who killed him, the nowhere man in prison, sentenced to the morbid irony of the line “the world is at your command.”

Streaming Lennon

John Lennon’s Skywriting by Word of Mouth, published six years after his death, takes punning and nonsense to a level that would have James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, and Groucho Marx cheering from their ringside clouds in word-of-mouth heaven. “When you’re dead,” Lennon skywrites, “anything’s funny.”

What’s amazing about the book is the way Lennon streams his consciousness of the cliches, tropes, slogans, and trivia of everyday life, so copiously and freely that he becomes a magnet for coincidence. If you live in Princeton, your eye is caught by “He hailed a cab and adjusted his witherspoon.” If you’ve been thinking about how his assassin came armed with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, you’ll sit up and take notice when you see “catch it the rye endless sea of foam,” and if you’ve been watching The Killing you’ll relate to lighting “a pied piper,” “mystery writers crampma moses are red my love violence is blooming,” and, of course, “Do I detective a note of self-pity at the foot of the bed? Am I the master of my own destiny, or am I simply following orders; who knows to what ends meet?”