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

by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

“Seeing the mother’s the nightmare.”

There’s something a little comforting about the seventh episode of Clarice being a sort of classic procedural. The kind of story that I’d hoped the whole of the show wouldn’t be predicated on. One that’s set into motion at the top and then tied into a perfect, albeit disturbing, bow by the end of the hour. Episodic, in its own way, with a touch of serialization to propel us into the next one. 

Perhaps it worked for me because the story at the center of the episode is not overly, but it is deeply emotional. This moment of episodic storytelling certainly works better in this episode than it did in the second one, where the one-off story felt too big for a single episode. 

I’d wager that part of why this and the second episode feel different is because Clarice, as a whole, is working through a vast conspiracy in a serialized fashion. Having the second episode also have a completely unrelated (at least currently) conspiracy muddles the water and created a confusion on where the story was going and how it would be told. However, this episode is a pretty cut and dry case about two dead boys that feels pretty complete by the end.

The episodic story begins with a 14-year-old boy named Cody Phelphs is found dead in the wall of an empty home, a year after he went missing. Ardelia helps the team run DNA and gets a match to an older case which had similar circumstances: Bobby Larkin. The difference was that Bobby was Black and the police stopped actively looking for his killer shortly after he was found. 

Since the procedural crime of the episode didn’t have anything to do with the larger conspiracy, it was interesting to see how that aspect was weaved throughout. I was actually a little shocked, though in retrospect not entirely, by Clarice immediately discovering who the man who attacked her was. It’s an impressive hurdle, one that might not work in most cases, but I think it makes sense to have the reveal before the opening credits because of how little of the conspiracy is present here. In fact, Krendler believing or not believing Clarice is the only forward momentum we get in the overall storyline.

Because the case in the episode really comes down to fathers, specifically lack of fathers, I came back (as I often do) to the subject of Mr. Starling. Maybe I’m too focused on this, but I think it’s important and I’m just mostly confused by what the show is aiming to do with it. Clarice Starling’s father is important. The original story knows it (both the book and the film make a huge point of it with Lecter), and the series knows it too. There’s a reason why he’s been brought up in basically every episode and even appeared in Clarice’s hallucinations. Nearly every episode is deepening our understanding of her relationship to her father… but the show has shown no signs of contradicting her story about him, like the source material does.

I think part of the reason I’m so focused on this is that it’s such a huge part of Clarice’s story, especially as it interacts with Lecter’s, in The Silence of the Lambs. It’s one of the big reveals of their quid pro quo sessions and it allows us to see Clarice in a different light. She’s hiding things, lying to protect her father’s legacy and her own broken childhood. She’s shoving down the trauma she experienced as a child that surely led her down the path to the FBI in the first place. However, the show seems committed to there being no lie in place, even when Clarice is alone, it seems like she’s telling the truth. I’m still holding my breath that, considering how many other things the show is keeping in its canon, the truth about Clarice’s father is actually the same as in other iterations of the story. If so, then it certainly becomes a marker for how she deals with trauma. She doesn’t.

This episode also delves into Ardelia’s relationship with her father. He’s still alive, but was attacked during a union dispute and has brain damage. Her own actions start coming to ahead as she waffles between joining up with the Black FBI employees who are fighting from within the Bureau for more power than they have, or not rocking the boat and hoping she gets noticed for promotions (what her grandmother wants for her). She sort of settles into a middle ground (at least temporarily) by joining VICAP for the case. 

Because of this we get so many great scenes and sequences with Ardelia and Clarice where they’re actually working together in an official capacity. I think the show is doing a really great job of showing off their strong friendship and working relationship, but not shying away from the places where both aspects are weak, and the characters know it. It’s a real highlight of the series!