"The Road to Hamelin" is the thirty-eighth episode of the American television drama series The Killing, which aired on August 4, 2013, as the second of a two-part season finale.
The episode is co-written by series executive producers Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin and directed by Dan Attias.
In the episode, frantic to find Adrian (Rowan Longworth), Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) and Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) voice their suspicions about Carl Reddick (Gregg Henry) to James Skinner (Elias Koteas).
Holder and Linden ask Adrian's adoptive mother, Tess Clarke (Ingrid Torrance), if she has seen him.
She grows worried when his backpack is found in the house and the back door is open.
He arrives at the Clarke house, where Holder and Linden tell him about Adrian possibly being abducted.
Holder and Linden then talk to Cammy Ezer (Jennifer Copping), a neighbor of the Clarkes'.
At the station, Linden mentions security camera footage is being collected from the school to Adrian's house.
Holder dupes the agents into believing that he has rigged Reddick's car with a bomb; his cell phone is the detonator.
Reddick quickly arrives, upset that his family night out was interrupted by the prank.
Skinner tells Linden that things would be different if she would've walked away after Joe Mills was arrested.
He has found a piece of paper with Adrian's writing on it, saying that, if his father dies, he wants to be with his mother.
When they stop for the final time, he says that he is tired of hiding, confesses to Bullet's murder and easily making Joe Mills the suspect.
Holder pleads with her to put her gun down and spare him, but is unsuccessful; Linden shoots him in the chest, killing him.
In an August 2013 interview, Mireille Enos (Sarah Linden) talked about her response after reading the script for "The Road to Hamelin": "It's so powerful and intense — and such a surprising twist for TV, to have her kill him.
Sean McKenna of TV Fanatic stated, "In a two hours that could have easily dragged and become bloated, [the] season finale of The Killing Season 3 found a way to be compelling, exciting, focused on the characters as much as finishing the case, and providing one heck of an ending.
Club's Phil Dyess-Nugent gave the finale a B+ grade, stating, "The pieces fit, and the revelation that Skinner, the cop who put the wrongly convicted Ray Seward away, was actually covering up his own crimes, alters the story in a way that, if anything, makes more sense, not less.