There’s something about the sight of a gaggle of FBI agents standing around looking at a painting like students at an art critique that tickles the funny bone — for me, anyway.
The painting in question, seized as evidence in a massive raid at Alastor Pharmaceuticals’ headquarters, appears at first glance to be nothing more than vivid crimson blocks divided by a darker slash — sort of like something Mark Rothko would have painted during a goth phase.
But when viewed under crime-scene-style UV light, the real painting reveals itself: There is the cannibalistic Titan, caught in the very act that Goya famously depicted during his own dark period.
When those portions of the painting are chipped away and sent out for analysis, they’re revealed to be made of fetal tissue from five separate miscarried fetuses, all of them with abnormalities — presumably akin to those that Alastor Pharmaceuticals’ wonder drug Reprisol causes, the very abnormalities that the whistleblowers died to expose.
Which leaves the team with a question: How can even a multimillionaire keep on fathering miscarriages without anyone getting wind of it? The answer is darkly simple: because his son, the oh-so-genteel nonprofit organizer Tyson Conway, is bringing women from war-torn countries to the States on one-way tickets, procuring them for his father’s sinister needs.
And who should come calling at Clarice’s apartment when her roommate Ardelia and the whole ViCAP team are uncovering the truth about Nils Hagen and his son? Well, this simply wouldn’t be a story about Clarice Starling if she didn’t wind up alone with a killer — and this time around, the killer, Tyson Conway, has come to her.
Throughout the episode, she’s been struggling with anger issues brought on in equal part by the more retrograde elements of the Bureau — she literally breaks the nose of a rival agent who spouts sexist and racist rhetoric about her and Esquivel — and her own fractured memories of her father.
On the supposed “greatest night of life,” her father made her his “little deputy” by telling her to deliver a payoff envelope to local gangsters, one of whom holds a gun to her head when the envelope is revealed to be light on cash.
But then a funny thing seems to happen, just as her therapist predicted it might: Clarice appears to realize that she doesn’t need an idealized father to be the person she is.
But given that her arc has been one of repairing the trauma brought on by her experience in Buffalo Bill’s basement, how will she handle the horror coming right into her home? Clarice has grown in quality episode by episode, and as much as I’ll now miss it, I’m excited to see it to its conclusion.