'The Outsider' Episode 7: Anderson refuses to believe in the supernatural while El Cuco lands its next victim
This article contains spoilers for 'The Outsider’ Season 1
The last episode, 'The One About the Yiddish Vampire', saw PI Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo) present her speculations about the connections between 11-year-old Frankie Peterson's (Duncan E Clark) murder and two other child murder cases. Her stand was that each of the accused in those cases, were, in fact, innocent and a supernatural creature dubbed El Cuco is responsible for the murders.
The episode ended with Gibney in danger, as she is in the car with Officer Jack Hoskins (Marc Menchaca) who has a blistering scar at the back of his neck. They are headed to the barn where late Terry Maitland’s (Jason Bateman), the accused in the Peterson's case, clothes were found. This is also the same place that Hoskins got the blistering scar after he was attacked by an unknown figure. Apparently, he's under the control of the supernatural force and has been ordered to stop Gibney, who's has gotten too close to the right answers.
In this episode titled, 'In the Pines, In the Pines' we see Gibney try to help Office Hoskins, who has now become volatile as Gibney's colleagues, Detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) and Alec Pelley (Jeremy Bobb) try to track the whereabouts of the duo. Glory Maitland (Julianne Nicholson), Terry's wife, realizes that going back to work as a realtor is impossible in a town where her late husband was accused of the brutal rape and murder of a child. Trying to secure the financial future of her two children, she decides to sue everyone responsible for falsely accusing her husband, which later resulted in his death.
This episode brought us closer to understanding how the possibility of El Cuco being responsible for the death of children in the town has taken a toll on everyone involved. While in the car with Gibney, Hoskins, who's going insane because of his lack of ability to control his actions, gains sanity for a brief moment. He opens up to Gibney, asking her why the creature chose him, "I very much believe there is something out there, that's worse than I can image," he said. He tells Gibney that "it" has asked him to "cater, shop and spy" for it, and that something is going to happen to him. Gibney assures him that he will be alright as long as she stops the malevolent creature, to calm him and ends up escaping.
While Anderson and Pelley try to track down Hoskins, Anderson is faced with Gibney's rage when she finds out that he did not tell her Claude Bolton was scratched by Maitland, which means he's the next one that's infected - he needs to be found. It seems as though this is how the entity spreads and has people do its work for it. Jeannie Anderson (Mare Winningham), Anderson's wife, has had enough and tells her husband to either help or back off leading Anderson to become a shell of himself.
While this episode focuses on the kidnapping of Gibney by Hoskins, it also unwraps the mentality of so many characters who are now faced with a supernatural being as a suspect in three murder cases. There are many people involved in the case that have either been visited by El Cuco himself or have experienced the snowball effect of the murders it causes. However, there is only one person that's searching for any way that all the chaos could make sense - Anderson is searching for facts and evidence even as the supernatural entity disperses its infection across town right in front of his eyes.
‘The Outsider’ airs Sundays at 9 pm EST (8 pm CST) on HBO.
