In an episode involving the discovery of a vast network of Nazis within the LAPD and the birth of a bone-crunching serial killer in the back of a Chuck E. Cheese, I’m not sure how much attention they’ll pay to it. someone to the needle. drops. But under the dreamy direction of horror specialist Axelle Carolyn and the magnificent musical supervision of Christopher T. Mollere, a box-digging musical track provided the backdrop for my favorite shots in the film. Them: the scare Episode 4. The song is “Free” by Deniece Williams, and as its delicate introduction floats over the soundtrack, the faces of Dawn Reeve and Edmund Gaines as they drive through the night lights of Los Angeles appear and disappear, back and forth. The story does not advance. It’s not scary. It’s just beautiful.
In this program, you take beauty where you can get it. Consider Dawn Reeve’s descent into the underbelly of the LAPD’s white supremacist police gangs, one of which she claims counts her former partner-turned-nemesis McKinney as a member. She follows him to the meeting house and shooting range after first locating his wife and children. (The wife’s “amen, sister” when she thinks they are both police spouses is a priceless embarrassment.)
But keep in mind that Reeve is not a super cop. She helped ruin an important investigation by beating up an informant, even if the informant was himself an abusive jerk. Early in the season, she is easily bested by angry neighbors during a foot chase. She’s just a single mother, a beautiful single mother who occasionally addresses herself as Janet Jackson in poetic justice, but a single mother, who followed in her father’s footsteps to earn a living. She’s not Serpico, she’s not RoboCop, she’s just a guy.
So when McKinney intercepts her as she tries to flee the police gang compound, she is terrified. She becomes even more scared when her friends surround her, openly talking about killing her and following her to her car. It’s the scariest non-supernatural moment of the season to date. If you know anything about these types of cops, you’ll know that she’s lucky to escape with her life. She knows it too, it’s written all over her face and it’s horrible to see.
She’s not the only woman who gets lucky in this episode. A worker named Destiny (Chantal Maurice) barely survives a run-in with Edmund Gaines, the would-be assassin. Seeing what writer Beverly Okhio does with this whole story is fascinating. She manages to make Edmund really scary, not just because he’s a creepy, scary type of Hollywood serial killer, but because he’s a cruel, misogynistic piece of shit. Chantal realizes that she is in danger not only because he locks her in her car, but because she begins to berate her, treating her as dirty and damaged because she is a sex worker. When she legitimately gets scared and tries to run away from her, he repeats her screams of terror, like Buffalo Bill echoing the screams of her victim in The silence of the lambs.
Then he gets arrested by a passing patrol car and things get stranger and smarter. During the interrogation, he breaks the fourth wall, extends his hand and brings the camera closer to him so that he can speak enthusiastically about his many victims. But meanwhile, another couple of cops review the video tapes they took out of his trunk (along with his pig mask) and discover that his entire monologue about the delights of fear or whatever is taken from one of his many, many. failed auditions.
By now we know Edmund’s backstory. In a twist that really surprised me, the author of the self-help book he’s been listening to turns out to be his own adoptive father (Robert Curtis Brown). A rich white man living a rich white life with his rich white wife, his rich white daughter, and his rich black child (Edmund notes this with obvious pain). Dr. Gaines abandoned Edmund in a group home on his 12th birthday, basically because the kid was a pain in the ass. Since then he’s made a fortune writing about fatherhood, which is some real chef’s kiss shit. Dr. Gaines subtly hints to Edmund that they were concerned that he would violate his… er, his biological daughter (rich, white), hence his expulsion. At the time the comment seems, well, ridiculously racist, but this is before we see Edmund threaten a prostitute, of course.
Edmund and Dawn have more in common than you think. We’ve been watching her mother Athena struggle with fixations and hallucinations, culminating this episode with an illusory tulpa of Dawn materializing in the bathtub and confronting “her” mother about the contents of a mysterious box in her possession. When the real Dawn returns home, she finds her mother, motionless and with her face obscured, clutching the box in her hands. (From creepy doubles to creepily inanimate people, this is a show that encompasses Freud’s concept of the uncanny – derived from the tiny but important gap between the normal and the paranormal – extremely Well.)
With a pair of performances so painful they almost visibly bleed, Pam Grier and Deborah Ayorinde argue. Dawn was also adopted. Neither her mother, nor the police officer father who inspired her career and worries about having heart disease, are her biological parents. The revelation shocks an already staggering Dawn, who flees from it, leaving her mother sobbing apologetically in an empty room. It’s about two basically decent people who love each other, torn apart by a lie told by a misguided love. Their schism is something brutal.
But there’s a lot of that going around. Crime scene photographs of a man beaten to death, probably by McKinney and his gang of police officers. The “good cop” who was kicked off the force by McKinney’s team and then used a razor to cut the gang insignia tattoo off his own leg. Finally, and most importantly, the murder of Donvan (Brey Howard), the casting agency cameraman who embodies all of Edmund’s wrath. He’s the unlucky birthday boy from the beginning of the season, who Edmund made fun of, who broke into his house, rearranged all his things, shitted in the bathroom without flushing it, stole his home movies, and recreated his 6th birthday party in the back room of Cheddar’s, the restaurant from which he was fired. It is here that he gets what is now clearly his first opportunity to destroy someone to death. Looks like we’ve met our man, if the killer is a man.
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.
