Clarice – You Can’t Rule Me

By: Kelly Kearney

For Clarice family was always a weighted word full of traumatizing memories and a childhood filled with loneliness, but that all changed with her friend and roommate, Ardelia. The love between the two women goes deeper than sharing a flat or supporting each other’s work. When Ardelia is pulled into an investigation on ViCAP after the assassination of their prime suspect Wellig, the familial bonds between Clarice and her best friend become strained. In “You Can’t Rule Me,” Agent Starling is forced to recognize her privilege in the workplace and how it plays a part in her success at the FBI. It is a privilege her best friend isn’t offered and because of it, cracks in their relationship start to open up into caverns of pain the two must overcome.

VICAP is in the Hot Seat

When we last saw Karl Wellig (Kris Holden-Ried) he was dying on the floor of the FBI interrogation room thanks to a hefty swig from a poisonous root beer. His pleas for protection from whomever hired him to kill went unanswered and now ViCAP is on the hook for not keeping him safe. The team is being investigated by none other than Paul Krendler’s FBI rival and Quantico classmate, Special Agent Anthony Herman (David Hewlett). Herman’s team, or as Murray (Nick Sandow) eloquently calls them “Team Douche,” seems to have it in for Krendler (Michael Cudlitz) and AG Martin’s (Jayne Atkinson) favorite serial killer catchers, even offering them better paid positions if they transfer to another division of the FBI. One by one they are called into Herman’s office to answer questions about who allowed a fake Baltimore City police officer into the building with Wellig’s poisoned lunch and how the agents fall for his fake I.D. All valid questions but it seems the smug and weaselly Herman has a grudge against Paul and that is what is driving him to take it out on the entire team. The Special Agent’s main goal is to dissolve ViCAP before they can catch their first killer and it all has to do with professional jealousy. Herman is exactly the kind of bureaucrat Krendler is not and from the moment the two cross paths the difference is evident. Where Paul thrives in the field, Anthony avoided it for a safer and friendlier work environment and the agents do not respect his easy path to power. They sneer at his cowardice as he looks down his nose at them. Murray, who manages to get all the laughs when it comes to making fun of Herman, might be privy to the issues between Paul and Anthony, but Clarice (Rebecca Breeds) and Tomas Esquivel (Lucca De Oliveira) are not and the two agents take his accusatory tone personally.

It isn’t long before the ViCAP team is relegated to desk duty while the investigation into where they went wrong with Wellig continues. Taking agents out of the field and forcing them to tackle paperwork and answer calls leads to some laughs and a much-needed injection of light into this dark procedural drama. Cracks about porno magazine collections and incoming calls on the location of Jimmy Hoffa’s body, helps to soothe their anger over their demotions. Those laughs quickly crumble into an awkward and regretful mess when Clarice’s need to get to the bottom of Wellig’s death takes precedent over her friend Ardelia Mapp’s (Devyn A. Tyler) job.

Clarice Wants to Catch a Killer when REALLY, She Should be Catching a Clue

Was Agent Starling always this self-centered? Apparently so because when she is forced off the Wellig case she asks Ardelia to risk her own career to help her solve it. This is when we learn that Mapp was one of the top two graduates out of their class at Quantico but continues to struggle at achieving the same success as her roommate. A black woman in a career run by white men has made her climb to the top more of a crawl just to be noticed and the one person in her life that should have recognized this is her best friend, Clarice! Now she wants her to risk it all to break the chain of command since the Agent discovered Wellig didn’t die from the poisoned soda, he had a heart attack. Ardelia is offended and rightly so. Clarice’s self-centered request not only compromises Mapp at work but complicates their roommate relationship. Outraged by how clueless and selfish she is being, Ardelia calls her best friend out. Clarice’s inability to put their friendship above her work is only complicated more by the fact Herman has pulled Ardelia off of her cold case assignment and added her to his investigation into ViCAP. This move by Herman is no accident. He later admits to Paul that his main goal is to take him and the team down, so this move to drive a wedge between the FBI’s star agent and her roommate is just the start of this all-out war at the bureau. Herman is using Ardelia in similar ways Clarice is and it’s just pouring more salt into the wound of a woman who has to fight systemic racism just to keep her very competent head above water. If that isn’t bad enough, she finds herself forced to fly under the bureau’s white ruling class radar when she turns down a request for a meeting with of her fellow black agents who could be a supportive shoulder to lean on. Instead of socializing with those who understand her, she has chosen to not bring any attention to herself in hopes she can prove to her superiors that she is a team player, even if that team isn’t a welcoming one.

Good Twin, Evil Twin

With the news that Herman is now using Ardelia to get to Clarice and ultimately to Paul, he is now enemy number one for the ViCAP team. They unite to rally behind Krendler and it pushes Starling and Esquivel to sneak away from their desks to get to the bottom of the Wellig murder. The two agents, along with fellow Agent Tripathi (Kal Penn), head to the Baltimore Herald to do some digging on reporter on the now in-hiding Rebecca Clarke-Sherman. She was the person Wellig was hired to kill to keep quiet and is the link between the killer and their victims. In their search of the reporter’s office, Agent Tripathi finds some paperwork in the trash that points to the doctor, Sherman was writing about. Dr. Marilyn Felker was heading the clinical trials that linked all three of the victims in the river killings. Not only did they find the name of the doctor but also discovered she lost her medical license before she started working on the trials. The question is, how? More on that later, because Esquivel cracked the case on how the BPD officer who we now know was just an assassin in disguise, was able to get into the bureau. He stole a cop uniform from the dry cleaners and his image was picked up on security footage from a nearby ATM. These discoveries prompt ViCAP to get a search warrant for Dr. Felker’s apartment where they find a list of the murdered women’s names and a bottle containing the same poison found in Karl Wellig’s root beer. If this seems too obvious it’s because it is so it is strange how Clarice, who is usually smart enough to realize these things, never questions it and it could be her ultimate downfall.

Paul Takes One for the Team

With ViCAP busy breaking orders to lead their own investigation into saving their hides, Ardelia is tasked with the job of trying to find any evidence Herman can use against them. With all of her speeches about the hardships of black women trying to get ahead in a white male dominated field, seeing her jump at the chance to impress her new boss as if it would fix those systemic problems seem to trivialize her own struggles. Be that as it may, she is ready to prove herself invaluable and dives right into the FBI logs on the day Wellig was killed. Any discrepancies she makes note of and one in particular jumps out at her: Krendler altered the logs! Always the protector, Paul tried to cover up for the agent who let the assassin slip by them. When Ardelia takes her findings to Herman she expects to be praised for her work, but instead her boss dismisses it and she never gets the recognition she always hoped for. Systemic racism strikes again! Realizing her mistake was in assuming she could dismantle such an insidious culture eventually reunites her with her often clueless, but now thoroughly woke, friend Clarice. The two make up and tell the other they love each other, but the scars of their battle go deep. We can only hope they can heal them together.

If it took Clarice a while to see the truth with Ardelia it took much take longer to see it in the Wellig case. After talking with the doctor’s twin sister, Luanne (Natalie Brown), a coma nurse, Clarice starts to put the pieces together and the outcome is as surprising as that very obvious lingering shot of a photo between the two sisters. Luanne Felker was the wheelchair bound twin to Marilyn in the photo, so why isn’t she in a wheelchair now? That’s the first clue that something is off with this Felker but still Clarice and the team do not question it. It isn’t until she is fresh off of Krendler yelling at her to stop putting herself in the path of danger, that the possibly deaf Starling starts to put the pieces of this twin puzzle together. She finds out Dr. Felker booked a flight to Buenos Aires and never boarded the plane. When she goes to ask her sister Luanne why Marilyn never left, the answers to this case fall into her lap.  Luanne is Marilyn, and this is a twin swap with deadly motives! Marilyn realizes Clarice is moments from figuring out she switched places with her sister and in a surprising attack, the evil twin drives a needle right into the agent’s neck! Clarice falls to the floor just like Wellig did as the scene cuts to black. Nobody has a clue where Clarice is since she was supposed to be on desk duty, which means she is on her own with this doctor killer. There is no big rescue coming and not even her gun can save her now. What is she going to do? Is Paul going to lose his job? Will ViCAP be dissolved? Where is Catherine Martin and her piddle-pad-puppy, Precious?