The aftermath of the Buffalo Bill fiasco is about to be revealed.
Clarice, CBS ‘ Silence of the lambs sequel series, premiered on Thursday and took stock of the life of FBI agent Clarice Starling a year after the events of the Oscar-winning film Jonathan Demme. Although her life is a blissful cocktail consisting of part media circus mixed with part PTSD, Starling (this time played by The Originals’ Rebecca Breeds) seems to have largely contained herself … but she’s about to be thrown another gruesome rabbit hole.
‘I thought it was done. Buffalo Bill took seven women. He skinned six … six of them. I kept one. The last. Catherine. “
We start like flies on the wall of Clarice’s mandatory therapy session, where she and a doctor discuss how the media attention has affected her life and work. The psychiatrist asks about her relationship with Catherine Martin, and mentions how her last “therapist” was criminally insane and ate his patients (this series is legally required to say the H word). As he tries to pry into Clarice’s relationship with Anthony Hopkins’ former madman, her defensiveness changes. He suggests she be kept out of rotation until she can heal from her PTSD, but before she can disprove their session is interrupted. Ruth Martin, the US Attorney General, asks Starling for an urgent matter.
Martin tells Starling that two dead women have been floated down a river, each with multiple stab wounds. The AG thinks it is a serial killer. She wants Starling on the case so that no family has to suffer like hers did when Catherine was kidnapped. Clarice’s reputation for hunting monsters precedes her, so Martin makes Starling a special agent on the task force. Martin warns that Paul Krendler, the head of the team, may still have a stick around Starling showing him on the Bill case. Martin also asks Clarice to call her daughter back; the damaged girl thinks Starling is the only one who can help her.
Clarice arrives on the scene and Krendler wants nothing to do with her. He calls her Martin’s “drop of honey” to the press. He tries to close the case cleanly and quickly, making it clear that Clarice is expected to say and do exactly what he tells her (and confirms that he is a male chauvinistic bastard). The bodies in question have strange bite marks that Clarice notes are superficial and spread out. “There is no intimacy here, no frenzy,” she tells the team. She doesn’t believe the killer is a real serial killer. “It’s too controlled, too healthy.” Krendler doesn’t want to hear it. He promptly throws her in front of the press like a lamb to slaughter and pressures her to confirm the serial killer’s story.
Clarice and Officer Tomas Esquivel question one of the victim’s husbands. Angela Byrd’s distraught husband isn’t very helpful, but they discover that his oldest son has autism. They hunt for the next of kin of the other victim, a junkie who tells them that her mother has taken custody of her child, who ended up in “that place of learning, the place for freaky kids who need to be fed through a tube.” It turns out that both victims have ties to children with special needs. When they report their findings to Krendler, he assigns Clarice to a desk.
Meanwhile, Clarice returns a message that turns out to be from Catherine. The young woman is not distraught and tells Clarice that she will never feel safe. She asks Clarice if she can sleep, “… or 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 replies, saying they are exactly the same, cryptically warning her not to trust her mother Ruth.
A new victim is found and Esquivel discovers that the woman has a daughter with severe facial deformities. The agents then discover that Angela Boyd was in a clinical trial for migraines, and many of the participating women’s children were found to be “confused in various ways.” Clarice finds a pile of papers that Angela has hidden with a number for a journalist named Rebecca who was writing a piece about the trial. Angela had contacted the other women and they were all ready to whistle.
Clarice and Esquivel go to the journalist’s house and find an unmarked vehicle outside, which immediately puts them on the defensive. The killer is already in the house! Esquivel finds the journalist nearly dead in the bathtub, her wrists cut, but he is immediately ambushed from behind by the killer. He tries to stab the attacker with a broken mirror, but the man runs off. Clarice follows the culprit, who chokes her and throws her on a table. A scuffle ensues, which ends with three bullets in the man’s chest.
“You have no idea what this is,” the man mumbles, but he doesn’t talk until he has a deal. While the journalist is being driven into an ambulance, Clarice confirms that the women in the trial were all planning to talk. When Clarice tells Krendler that the killer has been contracted to kill whistleblowers, he asks if she can prove it. She can’t … He wants her to tell the press they caught the serial killer. He says they will investigate the conspiracy angle without hair, but tells her to go out and tell the lies he fed her.
Clarice then tells the press the truth: that the women died trying to tell a story. “They weren’t random victims of a serial killer,” she confirms, and “I’ll be here until we close the book.”
What did you think of the Hannibal-free premiere of ClariceRate the episode below and let the sound be heard in the comments!