The trick with this season of American Crime Story is that we know the who, and the how, and the when, but we will never be able to do anything but speculate on the why. Cunanan left very few breadcrumbs. So the show turned to Maureen Orth’s book on the subject, which she by all accounts reported as well and throughly as anyone could, to fill in some of the empty spaces on the canvas. That meant making some leaps, which in the premiere led to the scene in which Versace and Cunanan chill in a club and at the opera in San Francisco, which never felt real even as we watched, in a funky way where you almost questioned whether it was a dream sequence. (Orth believes they had met at least once before, but — and this is partly because Cunanan was a skilled pathological liar — it’s impossible to know if it happened, much less if the version he did tell friends is true, or the one the show imagines of him pushing his way in with a cool falsehood about Italy, etc.) And here, it’s the HIV subplot.

The Versace family has always denied that Gianni Versace had HIV; to this day, per Vanity Fair, Donatella says he had ear cancer that forced him out of the public eye, only to have it declared cured six months before his death. That same story lays out that he became ill in 1994 and ceded some control of the company to Donatella, then rebounded and reclaimed his position six months before he died. That gels with the timeline of HIV/AIDS patients beginning to see results from a new drug cocktail. Both the producers and Orth had various sources off-the-record saying he had HIV, and that it was the reason the family rushed to have him cremated, but the dots can’t really connect beyond that.

Ergo, the show goes all-in on it, but the quotes about why in the VF article are much more impactful-sounding than the way it actually plays out in the episode. I thought the show seemed very disconnected from the idea the writers discuss about how Versace was a creator of life and of art, who’d confronted his mortality and then thought he’d risen again. To me, the sense of his sickness and health were very passively presented, and mostly just provided building blocks for tension between Donatella and Versace’s lover Antonio. The more poignant scene came from the parallel tale of Max Greenfield’s Ronnie, a wan junkie who meets Andrew Cunanan and he details the weird loneliness of being an unexpected survivor of the drug cocktail — and of believing you were going to die, then finding out you have a second chance and having nothing to use it for — while Cunanan alters his backstory once again to try and paint himself into that picture.

Darren Criss makes a good Cunanan, slipping coolly from one lie to the next, at times not wholly believable but in ways that suggest that’s deliberate (as he did, in fact, not entirely get away with it). In defending his admiration of Versace to Ronnie, he says, “When they told him what he wanted wasn’t possible, he just made it himself…. The great creator. The man I could’ve been.” By the end, he’s stalking Versace to a club, then repelling a man’s advances with a gaggle of intentionally obvious fake backstories that includes one truth (“I’m a serial killer”) before announcing, “I’m the one least likely to be forgotten,” and then, as we cut to black, whispering, “I’m ANDREW CUNANAN.” Given that there was an FBI manhunt going on for him already by this time, it seems silly at first that they’d write him so cavalierly trumpeting his real name, but it drives home Cunanan’s total insanity — both the sense that he might’ve believed himself bulletproof, and that maybe didn’t want to be, hungry as he was for a notoriety that he felt the world denied him any other way.

Oh, and also, this show LOVES close calls. There’s one with the dude Cunanan robs who balks at calling the cops, one at a sub shop where an employee recognizes him from a poster, and kind of one with the cop played by Dascha Polanco. The FBI, already searching for Cunanan for his other crimes (which I didn’t even know!), wants to focus on Fort Lauderdale and its supposedly wealthier group of marks; she eye-rolls that and then runs off a bunch of WANTED flyers on the sly because she thinks he’ll be in Miami Beach. I have no idea, obviously, how much ANY of that is accurate, but: Score one for the lady, even if they didn’t get him in time.

This is actually Versace and Antonio sneaking into the hospital to discuss HIV treatments, but it LOOKS like a still from his music video, “(I Want Your) Measurements.”

It’s a continual delight to see that Versace embraced such subtlety in his interior design. I bet that wasn’t even his bed; just a fainting place.

I really need to work in having a more attractive sick bed. (Having said that, he comes home and flops down and everyone sniffles about his illness, and then he’s TOTALLY FINE later and we don’t really hear about his miraculous recovery, so… I guess this was a good nap.)

Ricky Martin spends a lot of time looking perplexed in front of elaborate tile work.

And Penelope Cruz makes a good, but also distracting, Donatella. What I mean is: She nails the voice, from what I can tell, but it also sounds like she is acting around some kind of false teeth that is giving her a slight lisp. Which she MIGHT be. Or she’s just really hitting that hard on her own.

This is one of the few times we see Donatella NOT in black, and I wish it was a better shot of it. Gianni, here, is also a Fug National in training.

Everyone Grieves Hotter in Sunglasses.

Th Donatellas in this are not that far apart in the timeline – just days, months, etc – so I guess maybe we’re meant to think here she just hadn’t penciled in her eyebrows, rather than that she was entering into her bleached phase? I don’t know. I honestly think it’s mostly a visual cue that you’re looking at post-killing vs pre-killing Doantella. Then again, it’s hard to mix that up, given that she’s in all her other scenes WITH Versace.

In death as in life, Versace loved a pattern.

This is the point on Passions when someone rescued Theresa’s coffin. They waited a good long time. Also, she was still alive, so it was a bit more important. But I look at this and think how EXPENSIVE all that makeup and the coffin was, for them to just immediately send him into the flames. I guess one’s final wishes are one’s final wishes.

And here is his final resting place. This scene of the ashes being wrapped  upa and packed for customs and then tucked into an ornate box reminded me vaguely of Rowan Atkinson wrapping the gift in Love, Actually. It needed more pot pourri.

Darren Criss managed to be a pretty good facial likeness for Cunanan, and this shot also underscores that he ALSO may have slipped past people’s notice for so long because he looked like SUCH an everydude – here, a secondary character with no actual plot in an early 90s teen movie.

I cannot think of anything I want to drink LESS on a road trip.

The sets are so good. I don’t know how much was created on soundstages and how much was from actual locations, but everything here feels SO Miami Beach – the font on the address over the door, the pink walls, the floor. I lived in Miami from 1990-92, so I missed this, plus I was pretty far removed from South Beach. So I can’t offer any real insight. This does just feel really correct, though.

And the flamingo pen on the desk! My dad’s office balcony had standing water on it that no one would fix, so he got an inflatable flamingo and put it out there to register his discontent. He named it Placido Flamingo. One day, he came to work and someone had murdered it with a screwdriver. IT WENT UNSOLVED. That could be season three?

Max Greenfield did a very good job shedding the Schmidt. His Ronnie character felt fairly well-realized and sad, like a person whose past meant he’d forgotten how to see a future for himself – versus Cunanan, who simply reinvented his pasts in the hope that one of them would give him what he sought.

Naturally, in the midst of their serious conversation about HIV and life and Versace, Darren Criss rinses off in a Speedo.

He also picks up a cruiser on South Beach so that he and Ronnie can get cash for crack (and I guess other things). “I can be submissive,” the man offers. “You have NO IDEA,” Andrew replies, and then wraps his ENTIRE FACE with duct tape.

As the dude begins to panic and tear fruitlessly at his face tape, Andrew dances to “Easy Lover,” which is REALLY on-the-nose but also rather amusing (his Hedwig background comes in handy here a bit). And, it’s more Speedo time. Cunanan does of course eventually give him a breathing hole, having asserted his control long enough and also scoured the hotel room for stuff he can swipe. 

And then he eats a room service steak. (The poor old dude seems super traumatized, and chickens out on calling the cops, which is a bit of a lame “SEE LOOK HE COULD’VE BEEN CAUGHT SOONER” thing that is unnecessary given the later one at the Miami Subs shop where the kid calls the cops but Cunanan leaves.)

I didn’t know about this final couture show, which was apparently a battle between Donatella’s girls – the waifs – and Versace’s, which per the show were women he thinks looked fuller and like they loved life. (That being, Naomi Campbell, so… obviously only fuller by certain standards.)

And indeed, apparently Donatella cast Karen Elson to close the show, but Versace thought she was too skinny and replaced her WITH Naomi.

And it was in this outfit, roughly. They were not able to get a super great facial approximation for Naomi Campbell, although… IS there even one? And so they shot her from a great distance.

Victory for Versace…

… and sadness for Donatella, who at least flashes him a half-hearted thumbs-up after none of her clothes or models got the same warm reaction as his. Of course, this show conveys that by having the crowd applaud during the entire show, which is WHOLLY unaccurate and annoying to me. Also annoying: We never get to see this outfit.

Speaking of things in silver, while Ronnie os monologuing about opening a vending cart on South Beach with his new pal Andy, Cunanan is in the bathroom wrapping his face in duct tape, or maybe putting ON the tape helmet he’d earlier taken off the dude? I don’t know.

Ronnie thinks this is as weird as I do, but he has no other friends really and might want more crack, so.

Ricky Martin remains artfully burnished, and has a matching robe and swim trunks. His whole storyline is: Donatella hates him because he and G had an open relationship, and she thinks that introduced G to HIV/AIDS without giving him any of the things he wanted from life – like kids. Antonio then does some soul-searching and realizes he wants to stop swinging and marry Gianni somehow, because the oldest tragic plot device ever is to have your central couple realize it’s True Love right before one of them dies. (This might be accurate, though; I don’t know.)

I just thought you needed to see the tiling at the BOTTOM of the Versace pool.

Cathy Moriarty owns the pawn shop where Cunanan sells a stolen coin, and she is appropriately skeptical. I assume she’ll pop up as a witness as we go. This facial expression is my inner monologue almost all of the time.

There’s also a bit where Versace is on his front-facing balcony jawing jokingly with a drag queen dressed as Donatella (“I can’t let you in! One Donatella is enough!”). It really is amazing to think how accessible he was, and how safe he must have felt in this city that loved him. You just never see that anymore. 

Although it is crazy to me that he didn’t have more security, even wandering around in plain clothes. Because Cunanan is here pictured skulking around outside, after having spent a day taking close-up photos of the gate and the house, and then he sets up camp and reads his Vogue book. A good guard or three might have noticed that.

And, here is the lace blouse Versace wears when Ricky Martin realizes he wants to stop banging random men and be monogomous and get married. Love is lace-blind, I guess.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace’s Second Ep Tackles HIV Rumors