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

by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

“People believe stories. They buy into myths.”

We’ve finally reached the end of season one of Clarice. With the conspiracy wrapped up, in a rather explosive fashion, the only arcs that remain unfinished are those of our lead characters. Clarice, Tomas, Ardelia, and Krendler are all dealing with the repercussions of their actions that have built up throughout the whole of the series. 

We pick up where we left off, with Tyson at Clarice’s apartment. She lets him in and they have another, albeit more honest, conversation about their relationships with their fathers. All of which amounts to Ty being complicit in Clarice getting taken by some of Nils Hagen’s men. It’s there that Clarice is put into a cell and discovers the truth of what the CEO of Alastor has been doing, with the help of his son: kidnapping and raping women until they become pregnant. 

However, Nils Hagen can’t have children, except for Tyson. Ty was a miracle child, whose mother escaped Nils and tried to keep him safe from the monster at the head of the food chain. So, Nils has been trying to have another miracle, to no avail. Instead, he has all the miscarriages and stillbirths in jars in his office at the abandoned animal testing site where he’s keeping all the women. Which… is totally not villain behavior at all.

With the FBI clearly onto him, Nils makes the choice to burn his current operation to the ground. He’s started from scratch before, after all, so he starts the protocol to kill all of the women he has captured and dispose of their bodies. He gives Ty an ultimatum, complete with a handy gun. He can choose Clarice, or he can choose family. With Clarice in his ear, reminding him of all the messed up still Nils has done - or made Ty do - Tyson ends up killing his father, before committing suicide.

Meanwhile, the team is trying to find Clarice, after a search of her and Ardelia’s apartment uncovers Clarice’s broken add-a-bead necklace. Tomas does some… police brutality and gets the information they need to help find where Nils might have Clarice stashed. VICAP and the rest of the FBI are waiting for orders from Ruth Martin in order to start their raid to save Clarice.

They’re halted, though, when Llewellyn Gant, who takes PAC money from Nils Hagen, comes in to threaten Ruth and tells her to step down as AG. He knows about the way Tomas gathered the intel that the team is currently acting on and uses it as blackmail material to force the issue. Krendler lies about the validity of their information, though, and she allows them to proceed. 

During the raid on the former animal testing site, Krendler gets shot under his bullet proof vest, which puts him in the hospital and out of commision as head of VICAP. Murray is put in charge and while he doesn’t have any intention of getting Tomas in trouble for the police brutality, Tomas knows he was in the wrong and has filed a full report against himself. Ardelia is placed on administrative leave for her involvement in everything. But also, as she states to her boss, because she’s Black and she cares less about Hoover’s institution then she does about the people working there.

Clarice goes to see Catherine and through their conversation decides that perhaps it's time for her to pay a visit to her mother, since she’s spent the majority of her life vilifying her and her choices. Some, I would say, for good reason, but with the truth about her father finally crystalised in her mind, she decides that it might be time for a reevaluation of the woman who raised her - set to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”

And we leave Clarice Starling on her saying hello to her mother, whilst never seeing the woman in question. We’re left with the possibility of Clarice, Ardelia, Tomas’s stories all unfinished, which is perfectly fine for continuing into season two - if we ever happen to get it. But it seems like those storylines seem destined to play out in our heads, and probably not on screen, as crushing as that possibility might be. 

Something I’ve loved about this series, that I think is really and truly remarkable is how distinct it’s made itself. Which is a tall task when you’re living in the shadow of not just one of the greatest films ever made… but one of the greatest crime antagonists of the last forty years. And while it’s true that Hannibal Lecter casts a long shadow over the characters who appeared in Thomas Harris’s original story, his absence is surprisingly not missed. 

Elizabeth Klaviter, and all the writers in the room, has done a supremely good job of making Lecter’s impact on characters mean something in the show, without letting him overpower the series as a whole. He’s brought up throughout the series in vague mentions, because of the rights issues… which is ultimately what might kill this series in the end. Rights issues.

But rest assured that the first season of Clarice will go down, at least for this fan of Harris’s universe, as a truly unique and impactful series that often succeeded in telling empathetic stories about the ways we deal with trauma.