“There comes a point where staying silent costs more than telling the truth.” Thus spake Murray Clark, the short-sleeved dress-shirt-wearing working stiff of the ViCAP team, the throwback amidst a group that’s meant to be the future of the FBI.
From a plot perspective, it’s a pretty simple business.
Sure enough, Julia has something to say to Clarice, even after handing over key evidence: She is trans, and Clarice, through the press whirlwind surrounding the end of the Buffalo Bill case, helped make her life a living hell.
No, the real Bill comes out when he’s taunting Catherine Martin by mocking her screams in the bottom of that well, pulling at his shirt to mimic having breasts in a cruel pantomime of womanhood, one meant to insult and injure.
Giving voice to these concerns, hiring a trans actress to play a trans woman in order to articulate them, making the point that the silences around Bill and his place in popular culture are as damaging in their own way as an affirmative assertion of his illusory trans-ness would have been—these are worthwhile moves to have made.
For Paul Krendler, the secret is allowing himself to fall off the wagon in order to stay in the good graces of his laywer-slash-blackmailer Hudlin, who himself is threatening to out the secret of Paul’s estranged wife Mandy’s own problem drinking.
But this secret comes back to bite him in the form of the dead body of the informant, whose body has been staged to look like a suicide, most likely by Hudlin, the very person against whom she was informing.
But the lawyer on the case is himself a veteran of a discrimination lawsuit within the Bureau, regarding Latinx agents; despite the suit’s success, the climate that resulted was so hostile that he and most of the other agents involved left the FBI soon after.
And for Catherine Martin, who finally emerges from seclusion in her family home only to get re-dumped by the man she’d been seeing when Bill kidnapped her—well, hers is the biggest secret of all: She plans to find and kill Bill’s abusive mother.