Hooked by master of the red herring

FANS of Sarah Lund, the taciturn, world-weary protagonist of The Killing, are hunkered down as the brilliant procedural races towards its denouement.

FANS of Sarah Lund, the taciturn, world-weary protagonist of this cult Danish TV series (aka Forbrydelsen), are hunkered down as the brilliant procedural races towards its denouement.

It's episode seven tonight, and of course the more things change the more they stay the same.

Lund, played by the magnetic Sofie Grabol in those faded jeans, flat black boots and the now famous snowflake-patterned jumpers, is still hunting 10-year-old kidnap victim Emilie Zeuthen. She's the heiress to Zeeland, a multinational shipping and oil company owned by her father, billionaire Robert (Anders W. Berthelsen), his rapprochement with divorced wife Maja (Hell Fagralid) still oddly forced as the investigation unfolds.

Lund is uneasy around former lover Mathias Borch (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), now a senior member of special branch, national security section; both have a hard time shaking the past, their working relationship suffering as a result.

She's also failing again in her relationships with her mother and, especially, her son Mark, who she keeps neglecting miserably.

Tonight secrets are revealed from within the Zeuthen family from an unlikely source, but it's all still a matter of shadows and echoes for Lund. The many narrative strands weave in and out of each other so bafflingly as to cause headaches, and not just for Lund.

Series creator and head writer Soren Sveistrup has a talent for manipulating our assumptions that amounts to devilry. He's a master of the red herring and blind turn, plotting with the precision of an architect, while juggling motive, clues, suspects and conflict. But he also creates characters with a dreadful plausibility about them that engulfs you in their untidy lives, leaving you at the end of each episode, as that familiar finale music rises, feeling mildly traumatised.

Lund, though, simply moves on, peering into dark corners and unlit basements, heavy gun firmly in hand, the foreboding score from composer Frans Bak, with its deliberate echoes of David Lynch's Twin Peaks, pursuing her.

She rarely eats and only occasionally changes those famous jumpers.

The Killing, SBS One, 9.30pm Wednesday