Andrew Cunanan was cool.

Like, really cool.

Sincerely, legitimately awesome.

That’s the tragedy of “Creator/Destroyer,” the penultimate episode of this extraordinary season of television. By the time we see Andrew in his full glory as one of the wildest guys at his high school, we’ve also seen his father Modesto, who debuts in this episode, get his hooks deep into the kid. Andrew has seen his father harangue and assault his mother. He’s borne the weight of all his dad’s dreams, knowing this comes at the expense of his siblings, sensing on some level it’s not right to have this kind of pressure placed on him but, because the pressure is couched as praise, not knowing how to fight back. He’s been…well, the show is cagey on this, but saying he’s been molested by his father would not be out of bounds.

And even now, as an ebullient and confident teenager, he’s begun certain behavior patterns that will get him in trouble in the end: he has a sugar daddy, and he becomes fast friends with Lizzie, his future bestie, because she shows up at a high-school house party pretending to be a kid rather than the married adult she really is. (“I’m an impostor.” “All the best people are.”) He’s picking up little tidbits on how to deceive (including his go-to pseudonym, DeSilva, the name of the people who own the house where the party takes place) and why (because “when you feel special, success will follow” as his father teaches him).

But for a brief time, he’s just a cool, slightly weird, slightly obnoxious, slightly closeted teenager, and if you weren’t at least two of those things during your high school career I don’t wanna know you. He stands up to homophobes in a familiar way, by camping it up even further, going so far as to pose for his class photo with his shirt all the way unbuttoned to show off his (impressive!) torso. He’s prophetically chosen to be “Most Likely to Be Remembered,” and equally prophetically selects “Après moi, le déluge” as his yearbook quote. He rolls into the parking lot like a refugee from Less Than Zero (complete with that movie’s soundtrack staple, the Bangles’ cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter”; the film was his IRL fave) and shows up at the house party in an Eddie Murphy red-leather jumpsuit. (Finally it’s clear why so many of his music cues over the course of the ‘90s portion of the series were anachronistically ’80s: The ’80s were his time.) This Andrew could be loved. This Andrew could be saved.

In that sense, Andrew’s not so far away from our episode-opening glimpse of Gianni Versace as a kid, though that’s the least successful segment of the episode, if not the whole season. This has been a bugbear of mine all season long, but for real: Anytime native Italian-speakers start talking to one another when there’s no one else around, those conversations scenes reallyshould take place in Italian. It’s next to impossible to feel a connection to young Gianni and his mother when they’re talking in absurdly accented English like they’re doing a nostalgic spaghetti-sauce commercial. The old-country lighting and color palette doesn’t help either, nor does the dialogue that Mama Versace and Young Gianni are forced to spout — an uplifting, after-school-special lesson about not letting bullies and homophobes and sexists stop you from pursuing your dreams, the importance of hard work, yadda yadda yadda.

Knowing this show, the excess schmaltz here is probably deliberate, intended to drive home the contrast between Gianni’s genuinely supportive mother, who instills in him the belief that effort, talent, and success are all interconnceted, with Andrew’s faux-supportive parents, who treat him like a god when they’re not terrifying him with pressure and spousal abuse and who brainwash him into believing that success is handed out to innately special people like a party favor. I get that, I appreciate that. But in a time when shows from The Americans to Narcos can spend half an episode or more using another language — or when shows like Game of Thrones shoot scenes in languages that are completely imaginary! — going with the “when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza-pie” approach displays a baffling lack of confidence in the audience. (This is the only episode where Tom Rob Smith shares the writing credit with another person, Maggie Cohn, and I wonder if that’s got something to do with it.)

Fortunately the show is on firmer ground with Andrew’s father. As Modesto “Pete” Cunanan, Jon Jon Briones faces the daunting task of airdropping into the series in its penultimate episode, in a role with no more or less responsibility than revealing the foundational traumas that turned Andrew Cunanan who and what he is. He makes it work so well that it starts to feel like he’s been there all along. He inhabits the era perfectly, for one thing: With his impeccable coiffed hair, double-breasted suits, tight-fitting leisure ware, and grown-ass-man mustache, he looks like every uncle in your family’s old faded photo album. He has a fireplug physicality and a crisp vocal cadence that can project confidence and dynamism one moment, then weirdness and menace the next. Frequently he’s called upon to shift between modes almost within a single sentence, as when he chokeslams Andrew’s mother Mary Ann to the ground and then immediately starts celebrating the purchase of his son’s new car once again.

And like many Horatio Alger cases, his belief in pulling himself up by his own bootstraps (as his superiors at Merrill Lynch put it) comes with undue contempt for those he considers weak. He brings up his childhood poverty in the Philippines as a talking point; he brings up Mary Ann’s postpartum depression and hospitalization as a weapon. Unsurprisingly for such a figure, at no time does he seem capable of addressing or even acknowledging his own weaknesses, his own pain. For one thing, he’s clearly experienced anti-Asian racism; that’s the unmistakable subtext of his interview with Merrill, where he’s the only candidate who isn’t white, as well as his relentless drive to assimilate and Americanize. It’s hinted at in the way he refers to his family home as a place his would-be employers could purchase with the cash in their wallets; when we finally see it, it’s not a mansion to be sure, but it’s no hellhole either. It’s a house, but it happens to be a house in a place other than America, which makes it a hovel in his eyes. He passes this self-hatred on to his son, who when asked by a relative in Manila if this is his “first time home” can’t even bring himself to respond. Only by concocting the legend of his father the pineapple magnate (plantations “as far as the eye can see,” he tells his Filipino boss at the pharmacy, for whom he holds nothing but contempt) can Andrew reconcile his heritage with his and his father’s hunger for the American dream.

Moreover, while Modesto’s justification for why the feds are out to bust him for theft but not his bosses — “They’re all stealing. My crime was that I stole too small…If I had stolen $100 million, they would have promoted me” — is pretty much completely accurate, it doesn’t explain why he left his family holding the bag. Watch him when he returns to his cubicle after learning his fraud has been uncovered: He grips the desk, grimaces, puts his head down for about two seconds, and by the time he raises it again he’s decided to buy tickets to Manila and abandon his wife and children. Not even his wall full of photos of Andrew (the style of which should look familiar at this point given all of his son’s similar shrines to Gianni Versace, and what does that tell you about this relationship) prevents him from telling his travel agent to book that flight.

I think there’s a moment that portrays the damage Modesto does to his son more clearly and powerfully than the car incident, than the bit where he pretends not to have gotten the job at Merrily Lynch and then berates Mary Ann for believing him, than his escape and exile, than his homophobic confrontation with his son when Andrew (in a rare and genuinely impressive display of hard work and emotional uncertainty) tracks him down in Manila, or even during the bedside scene that very heavily implies child molestation (implied again when, in ostensible reference to becoming reaccustomed to the Manila heat, he purrs to Andrew that “You can pretend you belong somewhere else, but the body knows”). And Modesto’s not even on screen for it at first.

In a scene that’s achingly familiar to any former young overachiever waiting for confirmation that they’ve gotten the thing they’re supposed to want, Andrew grabs the days mail directly from the postal worker and flips envelopes to the floor until he finds one from Bishop’s School, the prestigious secondary school Modesto has made it his life’s mission to get Andrew into. The next time we and his mother Mary Ann see him, he’s in tears. “Why are you crying?” Mary Ann asks, her toothy grin shaping the words. “You got in!”

Andrew is crying the way you might cry when you hear a certain test result came back negative, or receive word that your kid is alright after a bus accident. The pressure of being Modesto Cunan’s special son — so special that his father literally gets down and kisses his feet upon hearing the news — was slowly crushing him. Now that he’s made it, he’s sobbing from the decompression. What misery it must have been for him a few years later, then, when he realized he’d fought all his life to live up to a fraud. “I’m the world’s greatest opportunist,” his father once told him. We’ll see about that, Dad. We’ll see about that.

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