In an episode that involves the discovery of a vast network of Nazis inside the LAPD and the birth of a bone-mangling serial killer in the back of a Chuck E. Cheese, I’m not sure how much attention anyone will be paying to needle drops. But under the dreamy direction of horror specialist Axelle Carolyn and the superb music supervision of Christopher T. Mollere, a crate-digging music cue provided the backdrop for my favorite shots of the Them: The Scare Episode 4. The song is “Free” by Deniece Williams, and as its gossamer introduction floats over the soundtrack, the faces of Dawn Reeve and Edmund Gaines as they drive through the lights of the Los Angeles night fade in and out, to and fro. It doesn’t advance the story. It isn’t scary. It’s merely beautiful.
On this show, you take beauty where you can get it. Consider Dawn Reeve’s descent into the LAPD’s underbelly of white supremacist cop gangs, one of which she determines counts her old partner turned nemesis McKinney as a member. She follows him to its meeting house and shooting range after first tracking down his wife and kids. (The wife’s “amen, sister” to her when she thinks they’re both cop spouses is pricelessly cringe.)
But keep in mind that Reeve is no supercop. She helped blow an important investigation by beating up an informant, even if the informant was himself an abusive shitbird. Earlier in the season she’s easily bested by angry neighbors during a foot chase. She’s just a single mom — a beautiful single mom who occasionally adresses like Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice, but a single mom — who followed her dad’s footsteps for a living. She’s not Serpico, she’s not RoboCop, she’s just some guy.
So when McKinney intercepts her as she tries to flee the cop gang’s compound, she’s terrified. She gets even more scared when his buddies swarm her, openly talking about killing her, following her to her car. It’s the scariest non-supernatural moment of the season to date. If you know anything about these kinds of cops, you know 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 this episode. A working girl named Destiny (Chantal Maurice) barely survives a run-in with Edmund Gaines, the budding killer. Watching what writer Beverly Okhio does with this whole storyline is fascinating. She succeeds in making Edmund genuinely frightening — not just because he’s a creepy scary Hollywood serial-killer kind of guy, but because he’s a cruel, misogynist piece of shit. Chantal becomes aware she’s in danger not only because he locks her into his car, but because he starts berating her, treating her as dirty and damaged because she’s a sex worker. When she legitimately gets scared and tries to flee, he repeats her screams of terror right back at her, like Buffalo Bill echoing his victim’s screams in The Silence of the Lambs.
Then he gets arrested by a passing patrol car, and things get both stranger and smarter. Under interrogation, he breaks the fourth wall, reaches out, and pulls the camera toward him so he can rhapsodize about his many victims. But meanwhile, another pair of cops reviews the videotapes they pulled from his trunk — along with his pig mask — and discover that his whole monologue about the deliciousness of fear or whatever is taken from one of his many, many failed auditions.
By this point we’ve learned Edmund’s backstory. In a twist that genuinely shocked me, the author of the self-help book to which he’s been listening turns out to be his own adoptive father (Robert Curtis Brown). A rich white guy living a rich white life with his rich white wife, rich white daughter, and rich Black toddler — Edmund notes this with evident pain — Dr. Gaines ditched Edmund at 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 parenting, which is some real chef’s kiss shit. Dr. Gaines unsubtly hints to Edmund that they were worried he’d rape their rea—ahem, their biological (rich, white) daughter, hence his expulsion. At the time the comment seems, well, ludicrously racist, but this is before we watch Edmund menace a prostitute of course.
Edmund and Dawn have more in common than you might think. We’ve been watching her mother Athena struggle with fixations and hallucinations, culminating this episode in an illusory Dawn tulpa who materializes in the bathtub and confronts “her” mother about the contents of a mysterious box in her possession. When the real Dawn returns home, she finds her mother, immobile and with her face obscured, clutching the box in her hands. (From eerie doubles to creepily inanimate people, this is a show that understands Freud’s concept of the uncanny — stemming from the minute but all-important gap between the normal and the paranormal — extremely well.)
With a pair of performances so painful they all but visibly bleed, Pam Grier and Deborah Ayorinde hash it out. Dawn, too, was adopted. Neither her mother, nor the cop father who inspired her career and has her worried she has a heart condition, are her biological parents. The revelation staggers the already reeling Dawn, who flees, leaving her mother sobbing out apologies to an empty room. These are two basically decent people who love each other, torn apart by a lie told out of misguided love. Their schism is a brutal thing.
But there’s a lot of that going around. The crime scene photos of a man beaten to death, most likely by McKinney and his cop gang. The “good cop” who was beaten out of the force by McKinney’s crew, then used a razor to slice his gang insignia tattoo off his own leg. Finally, and most importantly, the murder of Donvan (Brey Howard), the camera guy at the casting agency who personifies all of Edmund’s rage. He’s the unfortunate birthday boy from the season’s cold open, taunted by Edmund — who broke into his home, rearranged all his stuff, took an unflushed shit in his toilet, 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’s here where he gets what is now clearly his first chance to mangle someone to death. It seems we’ve met our man — if indeed, the killer is a man at all.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
