Team Linden circles Pastor Mike all episode long, trying to figure out exactly how the Shepherd serves his flock. After a fight with Twitch, new couple Bullet and Lyric crash at Pastor Mike's residence, narrowly missing a visit from Linden and a swiftly losing-it Holder. (Whose bro-down with Bullet about taking care of one's lady is directly responsible for putting them there in the first place, ironically enough -- especially considering he was talking to himself more than Bullet anyway.)

One of the kids from Beacon Home alerts the cops -- and Danette -- to some inconsistencies in Mike's story, and the cops realize that he's living under a fake identity. Turns out in his old life, Pastor Mike was arrested for kidnapping a girl who later OD'd. Bullet accidentally warned Mike of their investigation while trying to manipulate him out of a bed, so by the time the cops get a warrant and swarm the house, he and Lyric are long gone. Bullet and Team Linden race to the train station separately, discovering a bloody-backseated rental car that fits with the other kid's story, but no Mike and no Lyric.

Ray Seward accidentally causes strife among the hacks after a blind guess about "somebody" sleeping with Becker's wife lands between the eyes, but in more important news the sound of Ray's gallows being built pushes him over the edge and he finally breaks. Terrified, he garners a certain amount of sympathy from Henderson, but perhaps all these sudden changes of heart will mean nothing and he will just get hung, the end. (Hanged.)

It's a bravura performance, as we've come to expect/already expected from Sarsgaard, but put up against the little bit we know about Pastor Mike, it's very interesting indeed: For a guy this obsessed with saving children, is it really out of the question that his "kidnapping" might not be such a bad thing? Could he, like Ray Seward, be so over fighting a perception of guilt that he chose another way out?

It doesn't explain his wonky whereabouts during Angie Gower's amputation and near-death experience, but if so, kidnapping Sarah Linden in the last seconds of the episode is probably the sanest possible response he could have to this sudden influx of police interest in his doings. (Plus, the parallel with Seward means it's even less of a red herring than usual.) Assuming they both make it out of this little hostage situation alive, it's my guess that his redemption will be something Sarah understands even if the state does not. (The state which, in this episode, we find out has a database of tattoos that is tantamount to a fingerprint database, somehow.)

In personal news, Sarah gets a post-breakup creeping from a suddenly less-adorable Cody, and everybody seems very interested in Holder's style changes of late. When she finally explains -- first to Cody, then to Stephen himself -- that it's happening again and they are transforming into wild animals, she seems a lot more upset about it than Holder (who is exceedingly on edge all day), which we can all agree spells trouble for the entire universe. Oh, and she and Skinner nuzzle like when Dwight Schrute was on Six Feet Under, and he is now convinced that probably Ray Seward did not cut off his hooker wife's head in full view of their son. So that's a plus.

Next Week: Probably Pastor Mike is the Killer of the Killing and after an hour of Holder losing his mind trying to get Linden back from this insane murderer of children and the occasional wife, they are finally reunited and they fall in love and have albino rabbit babies and then it's just three episodes of that, like the strife of babies, before the big two-hour finale of my big gay wedding to Darren Richmond where Bullet is my best man. That's probably how it's gonna go. Or no wait, the opposite of that: An hour of running around to no real purpose, and then Mike is like, "I kidnapped that girl because they were raping her!" but he goes to jail anyway, and is beaten to death for things he did not do, and Linden's like "You win some you lose some meep-morp-morp."