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Clarice
You can’t rule me
Season 1
Episode 4
Editor’s Note
Photo: Brooke Palmer / CBS
Good news, Fannibals: tonight’s episode of Clarice gets a little disgusting! Alright, so it’s only a little gross. But stay! Hearing aids cut and cut open the corpse of Wellig, the poisoned hitman from the previous episode; look at the puddle of blood on the mortar table; seeing Wellig’s dead head inanimate back and forth as the coroner does his job – that’s not Bryan Fuller’s YBA-style serial killer setup art Hannibal, but it is something.
It’s also a promise of upcoming horror that the rest of the episode ostensibly chooses not to keep. This is an hour of television devoted to how Clarice Starling’s VICAP team is reacting to an internal investigation into Wellig’s death on her watch (seriously, the phrase “on our watch” or “on your watch” watch ‘must appear half a dozen times) while trying to sneak into a more in-depth investigation into the identity of his assassins and the plot between them. It’s a bit bland, even, at least until its gonzo ending. (More on that later.)
Much of the fallout from Wellig’s death in VICAP custody (he was killed by a fake Baltimore cop while the team was distracted by an equally fake defense attorney) comes down to an old grudge between Team Leader Paul Krendler and his classmate Quantico, Special Agent Tony Herman. (David Hewlett). According to Clarice’s teammate Esquivel, Herman is “the white boy mafia” – not a fan, as a rule, of people like Esquivel and Tripathi and Starling taking up space in this white man’s game.
This angle runs parallel to an arc involving Clarice’s former roommate – and, as Clarice can’t quite bring herself to say, her only friend – Agent Ardelia Mapp. As a black woman, Ardelia is all too familiar with the multiple layers of glass ceiling that hold her back. When Herman presses her to help her investigate VICAP, she has no illusions about her new boss, who throws her into the mix mainly to unsettle Starling. But she is also irritated by Clarice’s excessive familiarity, which threatens to jeopardize the investigation. The opportunities that fell in time on Clarice’s turn and once again did not materialize for her friend, who is primarily office. Can’t Clarice see this?
Not really, no – his eyes are always on the next award, as only someone with a serious, unquestioned hero complex can be. With Tripathi’s help, Clarice finds the name of a doctor, Marilyn Felker, who participated in the clinical trial that links all of Wellig’s victims. Felker is hot, but Clarice manages to find out that her medical license has been revoked in at least one state and that she has a sister, Luanne (Natalie Brown), who is also in the medical profession, caring for patients. comatose as his sister tried to do so. to be a “pioneer”.
But something is wrong with Clarice regarding the ease with which the team finds incriminating evidence in Felker. Sure enough, the Rio ticket she bought was never used. It is a staging. And when Clarice returns to Luanne’s medical establishment, she finds no one other than Marilyn, her eyes staring blankly from her hospital bed. She tries to communicate with the woman when sister Luanne gets the drop on her, pricks her neck with a syringe, and ends the episode on a cliffhanger. Oh, Clarice. Will you never learn?
If there is a pleasant surprise to be found in Clarice, it’s the surprisingly complicated relationship between the main character and his boss-rival, Krendler. In this episode, Clarice mentions, both rightly and rightly, that she is constantly told to trust such and such a person, including Krendler, when her own instinct has turned out to be right regarding both Buffalo Bill and the conspiratorial nature of the River Murders while others have been proven wrong.
But elsewhere in the episode, Tripathi argues that Krendler’s priority is to protect his agents; unlike Jack Crawford, Clarice’s former boss (and unnamed – damn those rights issues!), Krendler would never have cast her “the cannibal” as an intern. This instinct is what leads Krendler to illegally treat FBI visitor logs to make it appear that he, rather than Esquivel, had signed off on Wellig’s assassins. And when someone examines the coroner’s report to make it appear that Wellig died of natural causes, thereby eliminating VICAP from any error or misconduct and bringing Herman’s investigation to a close, Krendler is a natural suspect, although ‘it doesn’t seem to have done the job in this case.
And as the unfortunate incident with Luanne and his Big Needle indicates, Krendler might even have been right to scold Clarice for rushing into Bill’s basement of Horrors without first calling for backup, convinced that she was that only she could stop him from killing again and only. if she acted right away. If you’ve ever watched Ridley Scott’s Hannibal or read the Thomas Harris book it’s based on, you know how nasty this version of Krendler – the one who gets his brain eaten by Lecter while he is alive – could get. This Krendler looks like a very different animal.
Yet, with Clarice threatened by another killer that she alone seems capable of detecting and stopping, it’s hard to ignore the show’s responsibilities as a narrative. Thesilenceofthelambs works because Clarice is investigating a single case and has only one contact with death. In Clarice, she has already had three near-death experiences in four episodes in total. It’s classic shit sure, but you don’t want your Silence spin-off for being more than standard cop shit? If, several times a season, Starling must be killed before the killer is thwarted, his painstaking realism will quickly become a handicap. Hannibal could get away with Will Graham & Co. bagging killer after killer because he was clearly disinterested in realism from the start. Clarice has neither such ambition nor such luxury.
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