Holy crap, right? So, doubling down on last week's unrelenting emotional landslide was probably the smart move, but damn. This is such a good show for being so hard to watch.

Joe Mills's reappearance at Danette's house sends Team Linden north, to the Canadian border, but a quick stop at his storage unit reveals his secret hiding place. A short fight later, Linden figures out his final victim, but it's too late to keep Holder from discovering Bullet's body in Joe's trunk.

While everyone looks for a way to let Holder loose on the guy's face, he's too busy breaking up with Caroline and becoming a wild animal to actually do much damage -- even after he risks permanent wreckage by jumping for a kiss with Sarah. As the solid one this year, she avoids the controversy, but once a heartless morgue attendant tells him Reddick knew she'd been calling all night he gets a little violent on his former mentor.

With the Pied Piper officially in custody, Adrian is finally allowed to give his own testimony, and identifies Mills instantly as the culprit of his mother's murder. A little light shed on the unrelenting darkness that is Season Three? Oh, hell no: He's lying, as an offhand comment from Danette makes clear. While Mills is properly (or at least presumably) culpable for the serial murders, he's still off the hook for Trisha Seward.

(And bonus, the scene of him finally explaining his child-molester rationale is exactly as nightmarishly visceral, technically beautiful, emotionally vile and ethically banal as you would assume. Any other show, the inexorable and pathetic account of his vampirism would be a high/low point, but in the midst of this particular episode it's only about half as awful as everything else.)

While Sarah eventually tells Skinner about this, bumming them both out, she does continue going over the evidence to save Seward from his execution (which, by the end of the episode, is taking place today). Holder's basically out of commission -- and possibly suspended after his violent attack on Reddick -- but soon enough, she's got possible evidence in hand and heads for jail.

Meanwhile, Becker's son shoots a suitor of his mother's -- notably, while Becker is once again out of pocket -- and in a flesh-crawling twist, we learn that fellow inmate Dale's ongoing attempt at Ray's redemption (which has borne fruit in many ways) was nothing but an act of final and ultimate cruelty: Without the ability to kill with his hands, he's become practiced at using words. Having talked Alton into suicide, he's been working a long con on Ray Seward. In a moment of abject faith, Dale whisks the illusion of God out from under him, committing a crime we don't even have a word for and compounding the seething misery of the episode tenfold. We'll see if it sticks, but it was sickening to watch in a way few things (on this show or off) has ever felt.

Twitch is more visibly broken by Bullet's death than even Holder is, although Lyric's infantile joy at having gotten both subsidized housing and Twitch to stay in Seattle is eventually undermined to some degree by the death of her last lover/victim. She imminently understandable, but as the person on the show least susceptible to horror of anyone, it's a bit hard to deal with her satisfaction on any level. (Which, one assumes, will obviously pay off in her brutal murder, because this show won't let anyone be happy and because she hurt Bullet's feelings moments before her murder, and because everyone on this show has horrible awful unimaginable things happen to them pretty much all the time.)

All in all, it makes sense to follow an episode full of moments of unasked-for grace with a story chock-full of surprise grief. Never maudlin, never overstated, it's not the rainy-day misery of Mitch Larsen or even the terrified hostage scenario of last week: Just unrelenting pain, in a higher register than the grief or even dread the show usually sets up. A story that's always been about the ache of limbo, transposed for the week up into the hell that lurks just beyond: Excellent, and absolutely unacceptable.

Next Week: Leading up to the two-hour finale, it's just an entire hour of live footage as the show's producers roam from one loyal viewer's home to the next, rounding up their pets and killing them execution-style. Carnival music and laugh-track no extra charge.