“The easiest answer is usually the right one.”
“You never really see a brother in one of these serial killer roles.”
“You seem like a good boy.” “Well, don’t be fooled by appearances.”
Even before Edmund Gaines wanders into a children’s entertainment facility wearing a pig mask and holding a butcher knife, Them: the scare It’s not subtle with him. Of course, Detective McKinney’s maxim of always choosing the easy answer is incorrect in this case. he is investigating, the murders of Bernice Mott, who it turns out was alive due to her destruction, and Curtis Maynard (Darnell Jordan), a single father and low-level drug cook also murdered by whatever malevolent entity killed the abusive foster mother.
But the rest is quite true. Rhonda is right that black serial killers are few and far between on screen (Candyman is the only black entry in the iconic slasher pantheon) and Edmund is right that his good-guy exterior is deceptive. Given that he self-asphyxiates himself while on hold with unspecified business for what seems like the 200th time, there’s obviously something very wrong with this guy. But how wrong?
This is not a rhetorical question. It’s something I struggled with throughout this episode. Would a serial killer jump around his room imitating Hulk Hogan, considering how far removed the bombastic Hulkster’s personality is from even the most charismatic serial killers we know in real life? Would he need to study the most basic canonical slasher films to figure out what to do, as if he weren’t familiar with the genre or lifestyle beforehand?
Would a person who has already killed people react with shock and glee at seeing others cowering before him, as Edmund does in his restaurant, given that he would have already scared people almost literally to death? Does he have all those masks and wigs because he’s a psychopath or because he’s a bad aspiring actor? Do his crisp white boxers and pantyhose mask recall Patrick Bateman and Francis Dolarhyde because he’s a killer, or because director Craig William MacNeil, writers Tony Saltzman and Malcolm M. Mays, and creator Little Marvin want us to? think Is he a murderer?
“The natives are restless.”
“Don’t feed the animals.”
“If I’m the one with the badge, shit’s not going to happen under my watch.”
The first two quotes sum up the LAPD’s attitude toward those they are sworn to protect and serve. They come from the detective who greets Dawn Reeve when she arrives at the scene of Curtis Maynard’s murder. Reeve, who is used to not only being insulted but assaulted at crime scenes by angry residents after the beating of Rodney King, saw Curtis immediately thanks to his strange but fleeting smile. But when she chases him into his apartment in a fantastic long take, all she finds is her young son and his insistence, backed by the way he’s blocked the windows (and mirrors?), that they’re being watched. .
In a bitter irony, it turns out that he actually has drugs, as racist Detective McKinney continues to insist despite initial evidence to the contrary. He flushes everything he can down the toilet when the police return, but this is just an illusion. His real visitor is the unknown entity who killed Bernice Mott, and who kills him and stuffs him under the floor with her stash, after using duct tape to force her baby to watch her death unfold. .
The third quote above is from Reeve herself to her son, who was greatly shocked by King’s images and wants to know why his mother became a police officer in the first place if, as she says, she has firsthand knowledge of the cruel what is it. Police officers are for black people. But it has already been proven false. She is not stemming the tide of unnecessary deaths. She doesn’t keep her racist white colleagues in line by virtue of her presence; If anything, people like McKinney seem to delight in making her angry and then acting like a martyr, while even relatively reasonable guys like Lieutenant Schiff treat her as overly emotional and overcommitted.
Police fanatics like to dismiss abuses, to the extent they acknowledge their existence, as the work of a few bad apples. Surely these isolated cases don’t spoil the whole, right? But even if we agree, it follows that the opposite must also be true. Let’s agree, for the sake of argument, that Reeve is a good apple. Does it make the apples around it better?
On a completely different note, Reeve is a character with a certain spark. There’s a wonderful moment in the first episode where she throws away a birthday card from her ex-husband, the father of her child, without reading it. She doesn’t seem angry or abandoned or anything like that. It’s more that she says, Well, okay, he remembered my birthday, that’s nice, it’s the thought that counts, now I’ve recognized the thought, let’s move on. She is neither pushover nor spiteful. She’s just living her life.
There is an equally revealing incident in this episode. At the impressive home of her lawyer boyfriend Reggie (Charles Brice), she listens to Sade (a nod to Christopher T. Mollere’s excellent musical supervision, which contrasts wonderfully with Jason Hill’s menacing score), looks gorgeous, and fucks him. in his pool. Then she turns away from him and just looks at him with burning eyes. Nothing happens At this moment per se, it is not the prelude to some new sexual movement or the beginning of a series of dialogues or anything like that. It’s just a way to represent the intensity of your emotional connection by briefly cutting off the physical one. A+ stuff.
However, there is one more thing about Reeve. It is this.
Her son Kel, who has been seeing shadowy figures on and off throughout the episode, arrives in the living room to find his mother obsessively watching Rodney King’s attack over and over again, a strange smile plastered on her face. . When she turns on the lights, she’s not there; when she tries to stop filming, it is necessary to unplug the TV from the wall to stop it.
Who is that? What’s that? Is it an external threat? Is it Kel’s impersonation of the side of her mother that she fears, the side of her that became a cop because on some level (she fears) she likes what cops do? Would that be more or less terrifying than her being possessed by a literal demon?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about television forRolling Stone,Vulture,The New York TimesandAnywhere that has it, In fact. He and his family live on Long Island.
