The consequences of the Buffalo Bill fiasco are about to be revealed.
Clarice, CBS ‘ Silence of the innocents sequential series, debuted Thursday, taking stock of the life of FBI agent Clarice Starling a year after the events of Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning film. Although his life was a hellish cocktail made up of a part of the media circus mixed with a PTSD part, Starling (this time portrayed by The originals’ Rebecca Breeds) looks for keeping herself under control … but she is about to be thrown into another horrible rabbit hole.
“I thought it was done. Buffalo Bill took seven women. He skinned six … six of them. I saved one. The last. Catherine. “
We started like flies on the wall of Clarice’s mandatory therapy session, where she and a doctor discuss how media attention has affected her life and work. The psychiatrist asks about his relationship with Catherine Martin and mentions how his last “therapist” was criminally insane and ate his patients (this series is legally forbidden to say the word with H). As he tries to meddle in Clarice’s relationship with Anthony Hopkins’ ex-madman, his defensive attitude increases. He suggests that she be kept out of rotation until she can heal from her PTSD, but before she can refute, the session is interrupted. Ruth Martin, the United States Attorney General, requests Starling’s presence on an urgent matter.
Martin tells Starling that two dead women floated downstream, each stabbed several times. The AG thinks he’s a serial killer. She wants Starling on the case, so that no family has to suffer like hers when Catherine was kidnapped. Clarice’s reputation for hunting monsters precedes her, so Martin makes Starling a special task force agent. Martin warns that Paul Krendler, the head of the team, may still have a problem with Starling for reporting him in the Bill case. Martin also asks Clarice to return his daughter’s calls; the injured girl thinks that Starling is the only one who can help her.
Clarice enters the picture, and Krendler wants nothing to do with her. He calls it Martin’s “drop of honey” for the press. He is trying to close the case cleanly and quickly, making it clear that Clarice is expected to say and do exactly what he tells her (and confirming that he is a chauvinistic sexist idiot). The bodies in question have strange bite marks that Clarice notes are superficial and scattered. “There is no intimacy here, no frenzy,” she tells the team. She does not believe that the killer is a true serial killer. “It is very controlled, very logical.” Krendler does not want to hear. He promptly throws her in front of the press like a lamb for slaughter, pressing her to confirm the serial killer’s story.
Clarice and Agent Tomas Esquivel interrogate one of the victim’s husbands. Angela Byrd’s troubled husband doesn’t help much, but they discover that their eldest son has autism. They hunt for the next victim’s next of kin, a drug addict who tells them that his mother took custody of his son, who ended up in that “learning place, the place for crazy children who need to be fed by a tube”. It turns out that both victims have connections with children with special needs. When they report their findings to Krendler, he assigns Clarice to a table.
Meanwhile, Clarice returns a message that turns out to be from Catherine. The young woman is beyond disturbed, telling Clarice that she will never feel safe. She asks Clarice if she can sleep, “… or do the moths wake you up?” Catherine wonders how Clarice can be out there in the world, to which Clarice replies that they are different people. Catherine counters, saying that they are exactly alike, and cryptically warns her against trusting her mother, Ruth.
A new victim is found and Esquivel discovers that the woman had a daughter with severe facial deformities. The agents then discover that Angela Boyd was in a clinical trial for migraines, and many of the children of the participating women turned out to be “confused in different ways”. Clarice finds a pile of papers that Angela hid with a number by a journalist named Rebecca who was writing an article about the trial. Angela was reaching out to the other women, and they were all ready to beep.
Clarice and Esquivel go to the journalist’s house and find an unmarked vehicle outside, which immediately puts them in defense. The killer is already inside the house! Esquivel finds the journalist almost dead in the bathtub, with her wrists cut off, but he is immediately ambushed from behind by the killer. He tries to stab the attacker with a piece of broken mirror, but the guy runs off. Clarice follows the criminal, who smothers her and throws her on a table. A fight begins, which ends with three bullets in the guy’s chest.
“You have no idea what this is,” the guy mutters, but he doesn’t speak until he makes a deal. When the journalist is taken to an ambulance, Clarice confirms that the women at the trial were planning to talk. When Clarice tells Krendler that the killer was hired to kill whistleblowers, he asks if she can prove it. She can’t … yet. He wants her to tell the press that they caught the serial killer. He says they will investigate the conspiracy angle without her, but tells her to go there and tell the lies that he fed her.
Clarice then tells the press the truth: that women died because they were trying to tell a story. “They were not random victims of a serial killer,” she confirms, and “I will be here until we close the book.”
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