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Deborah Ayorinde
“The easiest answer is usually the right one.”
“You never really see a brother in one of these serial killer roles.”
“You seem like a nice guy.” “Well, don’t be fooled by appearances.”
Even before Edmund Gaines wanders around a children’s entertainment facility in a pig mask while carrying a butcher knife, Them: The Scare is not subtle about him. Sure, Detective McKinney’s maxim about always choosing the easy answer is wrong in the case he’s investigating, the murders of Bernice Mott — who, it turns out, was alive for her mangling — and Curtis Maynard (Darnell Jordan), a single dad and low-level drug cook also slain by whatever malevolent entity killed the abusive foster mom.
But the rest is true enough. Rhonda is right that black serial killers are few and far between on the screen — Candyman is the single Black entry in the iconic slasher pantheon — and Edmund is right that his nice-guy appearance is deceiving. Given that he autoasphyxiates while on hold with an unspecified business for what appears to be the 200th time, there’s obviously something very wrong with this guy. But how wrong?
This is not a rhetorical question. It’s one I wrestled with throughout this episode. Would a serial killer jump around his bedroom doing a Hulk Hogan impression, considering how far away the bombastic Hulkster’s personality is from even the most charismatic serial killers we know in real life? Would he need to study the most basic, canonical slasher films to figure out what to do, as if unfamiliar with the genre or the lifestyle beforehand?
Would a person who’s already killed people react with surprised glee to the sight of others cowering from him, the way Edmund does in his restaurant, given the fact that he’d have already scared people almost literally to death? Does he have all those masks and wigs because he’s a psychopath, or because he’s a bad aspiring actor? Do his crisp white underpants and pantyhose mask call Patrick Bateman and Francis Dolarhyde to mind because he’s a murderer, or because director Craig William MacNeil, writers Tony Saltzman and Malcolm M. Mays, and creator Little Marvin want us to think he’s a murderer?
“The natives are restless.”
“Don’t feed the animals.”
“If I’m the one with the badge, shit’s not gonna go down on my watch.”
The former two quotes encapsulate the attitude of the LAPD toward those whom they are sworn to protect and serve. They come from the detective who greets Dawn Reeve when she arrives at the scene of the murder of Curtis Maynard. Reeve, who’s used to not only being insulted but assaulted at crime scenes by angry residents following the Rodney King beating, spotted Curtis right away thanks to his strange but fleeting grin. But when she chases him all the way back to his apartment in a fantastic long take, all she finds is his infant son and his insistence, backed up by the way he’s blocked out the windows (and mirrors?), that they’re being watched.
In a bitter irony, it turns out he really does have drugs on him, just as the racist Detective McKinney keeps insisting despite initial evidence to the contrary. He flushes as much of it down the toilet as he can when the cops come back, but this is just an illlusion. His real visitor is the unknown entity that killed Bernice Mott — and which kills him and stuffs him beneath the floorboards with his stash, after using duct tape to force his baby to watch his death unfold.
The third quote above is from Reeve herself, to her son, who’s been badly shaken by the King footage and wants to know why his mom became a cop in the first place if, as she says, she has first-hand knowledge of how cruel cops are to Black people. But it’s already been shown to be demonstrably false. She’s not stemming the tide of unnecessary death. She’s not keeping her racist white colleagues in line by virtue of her presence; if anything, the likes of McKinney seem to delight in getting a rise out of her and then playing the martyr, while even relatively reasonable guys like Lt. Schiff treat her as overemotional and overinvested.
Fans of the police are fond of writing off abuse, to the extent they acknowledge its existence at all, as the work of a few bad apples. Surely these isolated cases don’t spoil the whole bunch, do they? But even if we agree, then it follows that the reverse must also be true. Let’s agree, for the sake of argument, that Reeve is a good apple. Does she make the apples that surround her any better?
On a completely different note, Reeve is a character with some zip to her. There’s a marvelous moment in the first episode where she throws away a birthday card from her ex-husband, the father of her kid, without reading it. She doesn’t seem furious or jilted or anything like that. It’s more that she’s like, well, okay, he remembered my birthday, that’s nice, it’s the thought that counts, I’ve now acknowledged the thought, let’s move on. She’s neither a pushover nor a grudge-holder. She’s just living her life.
There’s a similarly revealing incident in this episode. At the impressive home of her lawyer boyfriend Reggie (Charles Brice), she listens to Sade (a tip of the hat here to Christopher T. Mollere’s excellent music supervision, which contrasts beautifully with Jason Hill’s menacing score), looks splendid, and fucks him in his pool. Then she backs up off him and just looks at him, eyes afire. Nothing happens in this moment per se, it’s not the prelude to some new sex move or the start of a run of dialogue or anything like that. It’s just a way to depict the intensity of their emotional connection by briefly severing their physical one. A+ stuff.
There’s just one more thing about Reeve, though. It’s this.
Her son Kel, who’s been seeing shadowy figures on and off throughout the episode, comes to the living room to find his mother obsessively watching and re-watching the Rodney King attack, an uncanny smile plastered to her face. When he turns on the lights, she’s not there at all; when he tries to stop the footage from rolling, it takes unplugging the television from the wall to stop it.
Who is that? What is that? Is it an external threat? Is it Kel’s personification of the side of his mother he fears, the side who became a cop because on some level (he fears) she likes what the cops do? Would that be more or less frightening than if she were possessed by a literal demon?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
