Clarice – Get Right With God

By: Kelly Kearney

“Everybody Dance Now” has the awakened the dead, or at least the comatose and imprisoned. If you found yourself moving to the beat, you are not alone, so did Clarice who was ready to dance through the fires if it meant escaping the evil Felker twin’s grasp. Kicking off the best and most intense episode of the series yet, Clarice is forced to summon her inner Dr. Lecter as she not only tries to escape her induced paralysis, but also attempts to crack the river murders and who is ultimately calling the deadly shots.

Trapped in a Bed While Trapped in Her Mind

Last week saw Clarice (Rebecca Breeds) slipping away from the ViCAP team to question Nurse Luanne Felker about her sister and possible killer, Dr. Marilyn Felker (Natalie Brown), over her recently planned trip to Buenos Aires. Apparently, Marilyn never boarded the flight and Clarice thinks her sister might know why. She gets her answer when Luanne attacks the agent the minute her back is turned, revealing the truth: IT’S A TWIN SWAP! It’s not the angel of mercy, Nurse Luanne, but the harbinger of death Dr. Felker! Marilyn plunges an injection into Starling’s neck and she instantly crumples to the floor in a paralyzed state. Now Clarice is swimming through her memories while drifting between consciousness and a medically induced coma. Soon she awakes in a panic in a room full of other comatose patients, including Luanne!  Clarice’s legs are numb so she can’t move. She calls out to the janitor for help, only he cannot hear her through the C&C Music Factory blasting in his headphones! Hearing her pleas, Marilyn returns to administer another injection that sends Clarice off once again to dreamland.

While Starling is being held captive by a probable killer, Ardelia Mapp (Devyn A. Tyler) starts to worry after her roommate doesn’t come home. She isn’t responding to her calls and texts so something must be wrong. Sure, they had a falling out the day before, but it was not bad enough for Clarice to leave her for good. Things are not adding up and, being the superb agent she is, the wheels in Ardelia’s brain start to turn when Agent Esquivel (Lucca De Oliveira) confirms her fears: nobody has heard from Clarice at ViCAP either! Esquivel doesn’t seem to be worried, but after talking with his fellow ViCAP agents about Ardelia’s concern over Clarice looking into Marilyn’s flight log, things start to fall into place. Agent Starling is known for disobeying orders and going rogue, especially if she has a hunch. When Ardelia takes her concern to the entire team, at first, they question if her disappearance could just be the result of Clarice having a life outside work. Ardelia rolls her eyes at that because everyone knows an FBI agent has no life. So, if she isn’t sleeping off a late night, Tomas wonders if Luanne might have seen her. If she went rogue, that would be her first stop.

Back in the coma ward, a dozy Clarice wakes again but this time she manages to rip off an instrument from the nearby wall and hides the would-be weapon under her bed covers. Her lucidity doesn’t last long as the ceiling above turned into a shards of glass raining down upon her courtesy of a swarm of bees. These drugs Marilyn is injecting her with not only paralyze her but cause severe hallucinations making it difficult to tell the difference between her reality and her nightmares. Bouncing between awareness and her dreams, she sees her father (Derek Moran) dressed in his police blues as a younger version of herself confides in him about her hopes of becoming a doctor. When her eyes open again, Marilyn tells Clarice she was dreaming out loud and then changes the subject to the whereabouts of Rebecca Clark-Sherman. When Marilyn doesn’t get the answer she was hoping for, she grabs the defibrillator and tries to torture the truth out of Clarice! Over and over Marilyn shocks her until Clarice admits that Rebecca never revealed any information about the clinical trials before she went into hiding.

Memories Revealed

Drifting off into her dreams again, Clarice goes back in time as we see a younger version of herself (Maya McNair) riding in the car with her father. While their conversation seems innocent enough, there is an underlying tension that is palpable the minute he grabs his daughter’s hand while mentioning the importance of family. Clarice tells him that the animals on the farm are family to her and, as the lambs continue to occupy her mind, present day Starling wakes up to tell Marilyn the bad news: The FBI found evidence in her house of the poison used on Karl Wellig. It was an easy find; too easy and “They” must have planted it to set Marilyn up to take the fall for the murders! Asking Marilyn if she knew the medical trials resulted in birth defects sends the doctor into a tailspin of denial and she calls Clarice a liar. Whether it is the drugs talking or deep down there is a little Hannibal clawing his way out of the incapacitated Agent, Starling starts to laugh in the face of danger, and definitely in Marilyn’s, too. “They always dump the girls,” she says, meaning the moment Marilyn is no longer useful the person using her to do their dirty work will toss her body in the river like the rest of their victims. Death might be hanging over Clarice’s head at the moment, but it is definitely coming for Marilyn. And from the look on the Doctor’s face, she is starting to realize what Clarice was hinting at could be true. The subject quickly changes to Luanne when Clarice asks Marilyn about her sister who is laying in the bed next to her. Marilyn says Luanne can both see and hear, but she cannot move. The Marilyn goes to the bedside of another comatose patient and removes her ventilator tube. The woman gasps for air and as she struggles Marilyn tells Clarice if the woman dies it would be her fault for not answering her questions.

It isn’t long before Tomas and Murray (Nick Sandow) make their way to Marilyn’s house. Immediately, Agent Esquivel notices the photo of the two Felker sisters is missing. This leads Murray to believe the poison they found earlier was planted to set up the Doctor.

Krendler’s Marriage is on the Rocks

While his team is looking for clues pointing towards where Clarice could be, Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz) is out of the loop and enjoying a dinner out with his wife, Mandy (Edie Inksetter). The romance takes a dive when Paul tells Mandy he thinks he should be the primary caregiver to their children from now on. He alludes to the fact she is struggling with alcoholism and is not in the right mindset to care for their kids. She laughs off his concerns and reminds him that is job isn’t exactly a 9 to 5. No judge in the world would rule in his favor. On cue, Paul’s phone rings and it is Murray with the news about a missing Clarice. Knowing he has to go, he turns to his wife to end their conversation only to find her gone and her words ringing absolutely true. Being an FBI agent is not a career that offers up much time for hands-on parenting.

Back to Paul’s favorite agent gone rogue, Clarice asks Marilyn if she was ill when she was a child. Marilyn pauses and the admits she had antibiotic resistant sepsis that resulted in a yearlong battle with paralysis. Now the photo of the two sisters makes sense. It wasn’t Luanne in the wheelchair, but it was Marilyn! The pieces of the puzzle come into place for Clarice. Marilyn’s parents also put her in a clinical trial and the outcome was a life outside of the constraints of a wheelchair. Clarice starts to understand Marilyn’s motivations and offers her some sympathy for the hard life she had. Starling reaches out to Marilyn to offer her a comforting hand and then swings her hidden weapon at the Doctor but misses! Marilyn responds to the attack by driving a syringe right into Clarice’s chest! Instantly, Starling starts gasping for air. Breathing becomes all but impossible to do. Marilyn tells her she needs Clarice to live (maybe she should have thought about that before she tried to kill her) and rushes to reverse the effects of the injection. As Clarice drifts off in a drug induced haze, she wakes to find herself surrounded by syringes and standing at the bottom of Buffalo Bill’s basement pit! Starling goes into a full panic as she looks up to find Marilyn and Precious the dog leering down at her from above.

Saving Clarice

After turning up nothing but suspicions at Marilyn’s house, Ardelia and Shaan head to Luanne’s hospital coma ward to see if the good Nurse Felker has any ideas of where Clarice or her sister could be. Almost immediately Ardelia notices something is off with this place and asks to use the restroom as a way to sneak off and look around. Just as she is about to enter the room her friend is being held hostage in, Luanne/Marilyn intercepts her and asks Mapp what she is doing. Ardelia tells her the dead woman under the sheet moved, but Felker just brushes that off as death tremors from escaping gas. Just leaving a body under a sheet doesn’t sit right with Ardelia, so she asks Luanne/Marilyn what her protocol is when patients die. She tells Agent Mapp that the woman just passed away when she and fellow Agent Shaan arrived.

Without any obvious leads, Ardelia and Shaan leave the hospital and a desperate Clarice behind. When Marilyn removes the tube from her captives’ throat, Clarice asks her about her parents and how they treated her. She noticed in the sister photo that Luanne was clean and well dressed, unlike her wheelchair bound twin. This kicks off Marilyn’s anger, which prompts Clarice to scream for the doctor to kill her. Marilyn runs from a begging Clarice, who then tosses herself out of her bed and starts to crawl across the floor. As she drags her body towards an office phone, she sees her father grab it from her and slam the receiver into her head! She wakes up groggy and back in her bed, just as she hears Marilyn talking to a male voice. Clarice cannot make out the man but does hear him say he has everything ready for her and her sister’s escape. Meanwhile, back at ViCAP Paul tells the team that Clarice’s car has been found and it couldn’t be soon enough because at she is still stuck in that bed and hallucinating about her father. When she comes to again she realizes her fate. Marilyn is readying her sister for their big escape, but not before she shoves Clarice inside the hospital incinerator! That’s all the agent needed hear to know she has to make a move. When Marilyn’s back is turned, Clarice grabs a loaded syringe and stabs her sister Luanne in the chest! She yells, “You’re a doctor, now save her!” Marilyn runs to Luanne’s side as Clarice starts hobbling down the hallways and through her own horrific memories. Her father, the farm and Bill’s basement pit spins like a tornado overwhelming her mind. Disoriented, Clarice falls and lands directly into the arms of Ardelia! The ViCAP team tracked her car to the hospital just as they also figured out the twin swap! Mapp takes off to handcuff Marilyn who puts up a fight which forces the agent to draw her gun. While all of this is going down, Paul does chest compressions on Luanne. Knowing there is no way out for her, Marilyn grabs two needles, ignores Ardelia’s orders to drop them and plunges both into her neck instantly killing herself. Paul manages to bring Luanne back from the brink of death, but her sister wasn’t so lucky. With the threat over, Ardelia goes to check on Clarice who tells her there was a man behind all of this, but she could never make out his face. It looks like ViCAP and Ruth Martin might get their serial killer after all. Once they figure out who he is!