'The Outsider' Episode 3 pits macho officer Ralph’s facts against intuitive detective Holly’s philosophies
The following story contains spoilers for the third episode of ‘The Outsider’
HBO’s adaptation of Stephen King’s southern gothic horror novel ‘The Outsider’ can be seen from two perspectives -- one from that of the skeptic, who doesn’t believe in the inexplicable, and one from that of someone more attuned to the unworldly. Both those perspectives come face to face in episode 3, ‘Dark Uncle’.
One the one hand we have detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn). Ralph is a man with demons. From the loss of his son Derek, to an angry violent streak that he tries hard to suppress, to the guilt he feels about the deaths of Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) and his killer Ollie Peterson (Joshua Whichard), who he killed, he is haunted by many things.
But he will not allow himself to be haunted by the unearthly, despite the possibility of something strange at play. The sleepy Georgia town of Cherokee Creek wakes up to a start when the ravaged body of 11-year-old Frankie Peterson is discovered in the woods. Mauled, raped and murdered, it was the kind of crime no one for miles ever expected to take place in this small town.
Ralph’s investigation found Terry Maitland as the prime suspect, with multiple witnesses tying him to the crime. He was spotted offering Frankie a ride in a van. Later he was spotted covered in blood. The crime scene, too, was painted with his fingerprints and blood type. Only if it were that simple.
Not only did Terry have a solid alibi, but he was also captured on video in a different town at the time the crime was committed, attending a teaching conference with several colleagues who could all vouch for his presence. And his fingerprints too were found at the conference site.
Here, Ralph has the grapple with the inexplicable. Things get more baffling in episode 3 when a farmer alerts the cops about something he discovered in his barn. The evidence included bloody clothes and a belt buckle that Terry was supposedly wearing in surveillance footage that was found at a strip club, also substantiated by the club owner.
State police lieutenant Yunis Sablo (Yul Vazquez) tells Ralph that while some of the prints were too faint -- the labs said faint prints like that could only belong to an elderly person -- they were the same as Terry’s in their patterns.
Further in the episode, Terry’s daughter Jessa (Scarlett Blum), who has been claiming to see a strange “man” in the dark of the night, said that he told Ralph to “stop” and if he didn’t, “bad things will happen”. This man, according to Jessa, first looked like her dad Terry, then less so -- “He looked blurry, like someone tried to erase him” -- and finally completely different and more muscular.
While we as viewers have a shape-shifter theory that makes more sense now with what Jessa said (and some other things that happened in episode 3), it is Ralph who needs convincing that what he is dealing with is beyond the realm of the natural.
On the other side of the conversation, we have Holly Gibney, a recurring Stephen King character from his ‘Bill Hodges’ trilogy. Holly is played by Cynthia Erivo in ‘The Outsider’. While Ralph describes Holly as “unique”, that is a bit of an understatement.
Holly is a private detective who suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, synesthesia, and sensory processing disorder. Holly is also on the autism spectrum. She can tell the height of buildings just by looking at them for seconds. She can tell the make and model of cars passing by her window. She knows every lyric to every rock and roll song written since the ‘50s.
And she, unlike Ralph, has broader horizons. To paraphrase Shakespeare, she knows that “there are more things in heaven and earth” than could be dreamt of in Ralph’s philosophy.
When she goes to the Dayton hotel where the Maitlands had stayed for a while, she can physically see them there. She has a strange way of knowing things without having witnessed them. It’s a gift that she has that she seems to have embraced without questioning anymore.
And here the philosophies of the show clash with each other. A macho hardboiled detective, who only accepts facts, faces an intuitive woman who can sense the otherworldly. It’s a tightrope that the show has so far managed to walk, only teasing that there might be something sinister and magical, while not really revealing what is going on.
Perhaps, as Ralph and Holly investigate further, their friction will combine these two philosophies, and open our eyes to the bigger picture.
‘The Outsider’ airs Sundays, 9 p.m. EST (8 p.m. CST) on HBO.