Clarice – Motherless Child

By: Kelly Kearney

In “Motherless Child” we once again find Catherine Martin’s hero grappling with her past in an attempt to answer the question: Is evil born or is it made? The answer to Martin and Starling’s unanswerable question might be found in the woman who started it all: Lila Gumb.

Bingo!

In a Bingo hall is where this Catherine-centric episode begins. The young Martin woman has been locked up in her mother’s home since Clarice (Rebecca Breeds) helped pull her out of Bill’s pit and now she is finally taking back control of her own life. To move on from her kidnapping, Catherine (Marnee Carpenter) has expressed an interest in locating Bill A/K/A Jame Gumb’s (Simon Northwood) mother in hopes to figure out who he was and why he became the seamstress from Hell. Mommy Skinsuit, a recovering alcoholic with a love of Bingo, has changed her name and moved to a different city where nobody knows of her son’s crimes. Nobody but the friendly and curious woman sitting across from her in the game hall. Lila Gumb (Maria Ricossa), who mentions how familiar Catherine’s voice is, does not realize the smiling young woman sitting across the table has been stalking her for weeks.

It is not long before Catherine follows Lila home from the Bingo hall and knocks the woman unconscious. When Lila comes to she manages to pull a gun on Catherine the second she lets her guard down. The two struggle and Catherine takes the weapon from her, using it to force Lila to talk. What she learns from Bill/Jame’s mother only leaves her with more questions.

Revisiting Trauma

While Catherine has taken a page out of Clarice’s book and gone rogue, Ruth (Jayne Atkinson) is at home increasingly worried about her missing daughter. She contacts Clarice who tells her about Catherine’s obsession with finding Bill’s mother, something she purposefully did not tell Ruth about before. Irate for keeping that shocking tidbit a secret, Ruth orders Clarice to pause her work and “bring my daughter home.” With some digging Clarice finds Lila’s home and the buildup as she approaches is intense. Flashbacks of the last time she graced the threshold of a Gumb residence almost paralyze her, but she manages to make her way to the front door. Inside Lila is lowkey fat shaming Catherine with a, “I didn’t recognize you, you lost weight.” But outside Clarice is having no luck getting either of them to answer the door. Knocking and announcing herself does not work because of the hostage situation inside, so Starling sneaks around back to find another way in. The scene unfolding in the house begins to take an eye-opening turn when Lila tells Catherine Jame’s crimes could not be her fault because she hardly knew him. She tells the story of a woman who never wanted to be a mother, but a famous actress. After her husband left her alone and with child, she fell deeply into the bottle with her son paying the price. At age two the state took Jame from Lila after she split a bottle of cough syrup with the toddler and abandoned him on a bus. The boy went on to be a victim of the foster care system; bouncing between his grandparents, who he murdered at age 12, and living in a dozen or so foster homes throughout his life. Catherine, who is unspooling faster than any thready fashion fail made by Lila’s boy could, listens to this woman’s tale but does not buy it. If the two were not close than why did Bill use the same lotion in his mother’s bathroom? Everything in the house smells of it and him and Catherine is triggered. According to Lila there is a simple explanation for the moisturizer. Her father (Jame’s grandfather) forced his wife to use it because he liked the smell, and apparently brand loyalty is everything with this family. If you are thinking that is a pretty lame excuse, you are not alone. Catherine does not buy a word coming out of Lila’s mouth, but could she be telling the truth? Maybe Bill/Jame was just a product of the system that robbed him of the maternal love he so desperately needed? Unlikely, according to foster kid turned famed serial killer hunter, Clarice, who manages to crash this sad party and aim her gun on Catherine. Being raised in a foster home does not automatically make you a killer, and she should know, Clarice was in the foster cate system and she came out just fine…kind of. Sure, her new doctor pointed out that she is a risk taker who leaps before she looks and never hears the warnings from her superiors, but her father was the same and he is fine… sort of. Ok, yes, he is dead, but alive and well in Clarice’s delusions and that is enough for her to prove this foster kid turned killer theory does not track. Catherine might have mommy issues, but her trauma comes from that one experience with Bill. Like her, Clarice has a Daddy complex, but she has lived through many traumas not cosigned by a serial killer, but for Jame, his trauma was not solely born of neglect, something was broken in him from the start. Everyone handles these experiences differently but not everyone is born to kill; Bill was, or at least that was a concern that haunted his mother. The path the three of them walked down. Catherine, Clarice, and Jame might look similar, but the battle between their nature, and how they were nurtured, is an outcome unique to each of them. While Catherine and Clarice are not racking up any victims (yet), the thread that tied them to their trauma was like a noose around their necks, and Lila will not be the one to help them untangle the knots even if she wanted to.

Mom and Dad Disagree

While Catherine is dragging Clarice and Lila down memory lane her mother, Ruth, is going ten rounds with Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz) while they wait for news at her townhouse. Paul reminds the distraught AG about his concerns with Starling. She isn’t the right one to lead another Martin rescue mission. He has seen the risks Clarice is known to take; ones that not only put herself in danger but also the lives of every agent on the ViCAP team. She is not a team player, and Paul warned Ruth of this the minute he was told she would be joining ViCAP. Since then he has seen firsthand the kind of fantastic investigator she can be but she takes risks, and Pau is not comfortable with that. She has natural born instincts and the moral code he can respect, but her mental state makes her a liability. Then there is the other issue he has: being under the new AG’s thumb. When Ruth ordered Paul to add Starling to ViCAP, it was only partly based on loyalty for rescuing her daughter. Ruth is not saying the truth, but what Paul seems to pick up on is that one of the main reason she wanted Clarice in her D.C. orbit was so that she could be Catherine’s one-woman support group to act as a guide through her trauma and a confidant for Catherine. Krendler and AG Martin (who at this point seem to be acting as parental figures in Clarice’s life) will never see eye to eye on what is best for their agent, so it is not any wonder why Clarice tends to ignore them both and follow her gut. Unfortunately, this time her gut did not include an unhinged lotion-crazed Catherine with a gun. Nor did it peg Lila as a guilt-ridden woman wishing she could erase the pain her offspring unleashed onto the world. In the end, a truce is called. The bullets never fly and the basement never opened up to swallow them whole, but it did give Clarice and Catherine some perspective on the man who turned their dreams into a nightmare. It forced them to see that living in the past has consequences that for now, Catherine will be the one to face.

When Clarice calls Ruth to let her know she found Catherine, she refuses to listen to the woman’s orders to bring her daughter home and instead turns her into the local police for the crimes she committed against Lila. Ruth is furious, Paul is definitely ready to sing the “I told you so” song and ViCAP will be happy to get their star agent back on the Hudlin case since Julia (Jen Richardson), Murray (Nick Sandow) and Tomas (Lucca de Oliveira) have not covered much ground besides a few transphobic misunderstandings and another Easter egg tying Murray’s missing sister to the whistleblower murder case.