Clarice Season 1 Episode 5 Recap: “ Get Right With God ”



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Clarice

Be righteous with God

Season 1

Episode 5

Editor’s Note

3 stars

Photo: Brooke Palmer / CBS

Okay, show of hands, please: who was waiting Clarice to kick off an episode by releasing the needle on C + C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”? No one, eh? Oh wait, you in the back – ah, I see, just stretching out. It does not matter.

In short, yes, Clarice started tonight with one of the biggest and dumbest hits of the ’90s, using it to create a coma soundtrack. As an unhealthy joke, this is a pretty good one. And like Clarice episodes go, it’s a pretty good one too. Sometimes tense, sometimes bizarre and always grounded in Rebecca Breeds’ thoughtful and restrained portrayal of the main character, this is the best hour of Clarice again.

It’s also one of the nastiest, if medical stuff scares you. The accessories department had to buy syringes by truck to accommodate the numerous attacks on Clarice by the disturbed doctor Marilyn Felker. (At one point, Clarice hallucinates being trapped in Buffalo Bill’s well, with her dirt floor littered with needles, so they did Buy them in bulk.) Marilyn poses as her twin sister Luann, while the real deal lies in a nearby bed, able to see and hear but unable to move a muscle. As Clarice gradually discovers during the conversations she has with Marilyn – in her few moments of lucidity between being dosed with drugs – it is a reversal of the fraternal dynamic that existed in the youth of women. At the time, it was Marilyn who was paralyzed by a clinical drug trial whether or not related to the one that people were killed throughout the season, while Luann took care of her.

Or not, depending on the case. Clarice believes that young Marilyn was neglected by her parents and her sister while she was paralyzed; Paralyzing his sister in turn was a means of revenge as well as a means of hiding his identity from investigators in the plot. It is not the better plan I never heard, because someone would surely end up noticing that the coma quarter was partly populated by identical twins. But it turns out that Marilyn / Luann has been hanging around for a long time, waiting for her co-conspirator – that Clarice can only see from behind, preventing her from identifying her – to chase her paralyzed sister and herself out of the country.

Clarice spends part of the episode intubated and unable to speak. She spends another part of the episode being repeatedly electrocuted by defibrillators in an attempt to Make his speech. (Not that she has any real information to give up, to Marilyn’s frustration.) For a large part of the rest, she hallucinates scenes from her childhood (her late father, letters she wrote to him and then burned to him. his death, a beloved) horse, the attempt to save a lamb from the slaughter which gave Thesilenceofthelambs title) or Buffalo Bill’s basement (including his final words, “How does it feel to be so beautiful?”, which were present in the original Thomas Harris novel but not in the classic adaptation by Jonathan Demme). When she is able to get a word out, she tries to warn Marilyn that the mysterious “they” behind the cover-up murders in clinical trials will eventually drop her, because “they always abandon the girls”. She actually laughs after delivering this dark truth, which makes it even more disturbing to hear.

Indeed, her conversations with the murderous doctor – sometimes structured like the quid-pro-quo relationship that Clarice had with The One Who Should Not Be Named – are full of icing gold in this sense. When Marilyn begins to go through the antecedents of the other patients in the room in order to brag about taking care of them when they have been abandoned by their families, Clarice notices a dark and comical detail on their names: “I’m sorry – ace you sort alphabetically those people? ”Indeed, she did, not that it prevented her from killing one of the patients in a new attempt to get Clarice to speak. Later, after one of her hallucinations on the lambs, Clarice proposes a theory on why Marilyn, who herself was neglected, chose this line of work: “Sometimes remembering old wounds can feel like a hot bath.” Childhood trauma, a demanding career with life and death issues: Clarice and Marilyn actually have a lot in common. There is an understanding there, at least when they are not trying to kill each other. I Have to say that portraying a maniacal doctor in the Hannibal Lecter Cinematic Universe is a pretty steep climb, but writer Tess Leibowitz makes every conversation count.

But there is a big difference between Clarice and Marilyn: Clarice has friends. (Only a truly lonely woman, Clarice points out, would continue to argue with an FBI agent she plans to execute.) With advice from her former roommate Ardelia, who puts aside their recent fight to help find Clarice, the The ViCAP team gathers and follows Starling. to the hospital. At this point, Clarice is on the verge of getting out of there, thanks to a maneuver which I am sure does not appear in any Office guide: she injects Luann with a lethal dose of drugs, forcing Marilyn to save her life. his sister. rather than preventing Clarice from escaping. A bit sketchy, but that beats the planned alternative, which is for Marilyn to throw her in the facility’s incinerator.

Ultimately, Ardelia and Krendler (who, in a surprisingly convincing side plot, plans a divorce from his wife despite their continued attraction to each other) get the jump on Marilyn. Krendler saves Luann while Ardelia tries to drop Marilyn her deadly needles; instead, she plunges them into her own neck, dying of outright suicide rather than cop suicide.

Thus concludes this stage of the investigation of the so-called river murders. I guess there will be hell to pay for Clarice, who once again left to investigate on her own and fell into the clutches of a killer without telling any of her colleagues where she was going or what she was doing. “Alone is safe for her,” Ardelia tells the boys at ViCAP – safe in a psychological sense perhaps, but physically it is a damn dangerous state for someone in Clarice’s line of work, and two. women died because of Clarice’s actions. It’s a conundrum: Her investigative instinct is brilliant, but her risky propensity to go solo threatens to undo much of the good she’s otherwise capable of doing. I’m glad the show crafted this compelling little horror story to highlight this central conflict. Hopefully they keep turning the screws until something clicks.

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