Created by Jenny Lumet & Alex Kurtzman
Starring Rebecca Breeds, Michael Cudlitz
Thursdays at 10PM on CBS

by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

“Real people, decent people, have to live here in all this.”

There is nothing I want more in the world than to send Clarice Starling back into Appalachia - though I didn’t realize that was true until the second episode of Clarice did just that. Bringing in her roots, in both a present day setting and in visual flashbacks, is opening up the history of Clarice even wider past the Buffalo Bill case, and it fucking rocks.

I’m also interested in seeing how Clarice uses what she learned from Hannibal Lecter going forward. They referenced the quid pro quo nature of her and Lecter’s relationship in the pilot, so I think it’s a good indicator on how this character will operate as she navigates these cases. It’s something we saw her do with the husband of a victim in that first episode, and it’s a tactic she pulls neatly into place with Lucas Novak in episode two.

The episode starts with Clarice on thin ice with Krendler, since she said the killer in the last episode was decidedly not a serial killer to the press. Krendler has put in a request to transfer her out of the unit for insubordination, but there’s a new situation before it can go through. Suddenly, Clarice finds herself back in Appalachia. It’s not quite home, being Tennessee and all, but it’s close enough that the accents rhyme and she can see these people as her own. (There’s also a nice little moment where the show puts a fine point on the pronunciation of “Appalachia.” Which, as someone from the region, I really appreciated.)

The new situation? An ATF agent was shot, though not killed, trying to serve papers to the Tennessee-based militia group, The Statesman. Once on the outskirts of their property, Clarice sees a young boy which puts everyone on even higher alert than they were before. The grim shadow of the disastrous Waco siege is called out often and loudly. Novak says he’ll only talk to Clarice, who enters the fortified house unarmed, but with a recorder inside a hair barrette.

While inside, Clarice uncovers a sex and blackmailing ring that Novak has imbedded into the local government. She gets him to confess by using the lessons she learned the year before with the good doctor, but she stays alive by trusting her team. And that’s the center point of this episode: Clarice isn’t alone anymore. She needs to trust the people around her. Trust that they’ll let her do what she knows will work, if she communicates it to them. And she needs to trust that they'll save her when she needs it. She’s not walking into Buffalo Bill’s basement on her own. Not anymore.

What’s unfortunate, at least for me, is that the show is sticking to its “case-of-the-week” style of storytelling. Which is fine, and perfectly acceptable, but when you introduce ideas and stories this complex and then have to wrap it up in twenty minutes? It kinda loses a lot of its steam. What is a very interesting story, that could have at least spanned a few episodes, is reduced and collapsed because we have to wrap it up in a bow before next week. I’m still hoping for some more serialized cases, but I actually think it really works in the show's favor to not do serial killers - at least not yet. It’s a smart choice that I think will pay off like gangbusters when they actually do it. I’m hoping that will be longer arcs.

Also, the invocation of Waco raises some questions for me about the timeline of the show. It’s supposed to be roughly a year after the events of the Buffalo Bill case, which is 1990 in the film and 1988 in the novel. But Waco happened in 1993. My assumption is that we’ve just moved forward the timing of the original story once more. I take no real issue with it, but I find it interesting more than anything else. Waco was a big disaster, so to bring up and possibly change the timeline for it? I’m curious if that means anything for the show later down the line.

On top of everything else, I think Rebecca Breeds is absolutely killing it as Clarice Starling. It’s a hard role to take on, and she’s shining through. I’m excited to see what kinds of depths they’ll take her to next week.