I caught the flu the day this episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace aired. In the (almost) a week it’s taken me to write this review, I’ve (almost) gotten over the illness. I have not gotten over the episode.

Journey back in time to the third and fourth slayings in Andrew Cunanan’s five-person killing spree, “A Random Killing” bears a half-truth as a title. Victim number four was random indeed, needlessly slain for his truck after a careless leak tipped Andrew off that his stolen car was being tracked. The need felt by victim number five’s surviving loved ones to paint his murder, too, as random — and Andrew’s need to make this impossible for them to do — is the crux of the story. The resulting hour is as menacing, as moving, as good as live-action drama about murder can get.

Any discussion of this extraordinary episode of television must begin with the casting of its two new principals, millionaire Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin and his beauty-queen turned home-shopping entrepreneur wife Marilyn. Hiring Mike Farrell, M*A*S*H‘s B.J. Hunnicutt, and Judith Light, Who’s the Boss‘s “Angeluhhh,” isn’t quite the stunt showrunner Ryan Murphy pulled off when, say, he made John Travolta and David Schwimmer part of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s defense team and made a masterpiece out of the result. For one thing, the career peaks that trio were hitting around the time of the actual O.J. Simpson case added to The People v. O.J.‘s ’90s-retro frisson. For another, Farrell lacks the “hey, it’s that guy!” cachet held by the others for today’s viewers, while on the other hand, shows from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to Transparent have given Light ample opportunity to show off her dramatic chops.

What matters, then, isn’t merely the fact that famous faces animate both Andrew Cunanan’s closeted client and target and that target’s determined yet devastated widow. What matters is what those faces do, and the remarkable degree to which writer Tom Rob Smith and directer Gwyneth Horder-Payton allow them to do it.

As Lee, Farrell is revelatory, his kindly face registering a heartbreakingly familiar range of emotions. Pride in his wife’s accomplishments and gratitude for her pride in his. Coldness at the prospect of actual physical intimacy with her but comfort and relief for her continued friendship. The agonizing, eroticized decision to lie to her and allow her to make a business trip without him so he can arrange a liaison with his young escort lover. (His strange, hard-to-watch mini-breakdown when she asks him to join her and he realizes he’s going to refuse is just unbelievably strong work.) The unshakeable religious guilt he feels as an older Catholic man keeping his orientation in the closet, a pain akin to a chronic illness. (“I try,” he whimpers to Jesus and Joseph in his private basement chapel. “I…try…”)

Puppydog enthusiasm for Andrew’s presence and affection, so strong that not even Cunanan’s sour sarcasm and cruelty about the transactional nature of their relationship can truly dampen it. (“I feel alive! You make it seem so real!”) Genuine, almost childlike love of architecture, particularly his world’s-largest-building dream project and his vision of anonymously hanging around on the observation deck, enjoying others’ enjoyment of the results.

It’s this last bit more than anything else that triggers Andrew’s homicidal rage, not that it would take much at this point at any rate; Andrew actually holds his gun on Lee behind the man’s back, just to feel the power he imagines Lee feeling. “I want it to inspire people to reach up,” Lee says of his “Sky Needle.” “It’s about that, not about me.” To Andrew, the very idea that any achievement is not about the immediate glory of the person responsible for it, much less the tallest building in the word, is a heresy of the highest order, and must be punished as such.

So Andrew drags his aroused, oblivious partner into the garage, tools arrayed ominously in the background, and debuts the face-tape routine we remember from the previous episode’s “Easy Lover” sequence. “You like being pathetic, don’t you?” he sneers, before showing Lee how truly helpless he is by suddenly smashing his face in. By now that marvelously expressive face is totally obscured by the tape, so we are only left to imagine the horror, panic, and pain in his eyes by cross-referencing it with his muffled whimpers — worse, perhaps, than seeing it straight up. As Lee lies there, Andrew announces that he’s killed two people already, he’ll stage his soon-to-be corpse with women’s underwear and gay porn, outing him through the act of murder. “You know, disgrace isn’t that bad, once you settle into it,” he says, before lugging over a bag of concrete mix, staving in the man’s chest, and then stabbing him repeatedly. To add insult to this fatal injury, Andrew uses Lee’s beloved blueprints as a placemat for a meal of meat before burning them up. No dreams get out of here alive.

Farrell’s role is interactional, emerging from conversations with his wife, his killer, and his God. It’s a dialogue. Light’s Marilyn is a monologue. She’s constantly speaking to other people, to be sure — to more of them than Lee, in fact. She’s got an television audience for her home-shopping show, a live crowd for her speech introducing her husband at a fundraiser where she touts him as the embodiment of the American Dream, a host of neighbors and cops with whom she must interact as they first discover and then investigate the crime. She even has a son, on hand as glum-faced comic relief when she touts his ostensibly burgeoning acting career. (“He plays a pilot!” “A Russian pilot. There’s lots of pilots in the movie.”)

But except in the few intimate moments she shares with Lee — and even then she’s arguably more focused on her behind-the-scenes suspicions than the here and now — Marilyn’s main task is the Sisyphean labor of maintaining outward appearances. She’s not shy about this, either. “How can a woman who cares so much about appearances appear not to care?” she rhetorically asks at one point, when she realizes her lack of visible signs of grief must be apparent to others.

What makes this character, and Light’s performance, so crushing is the opposite of what you’d expect, though. It’s not that she’s a perfectly put-together Woman With It All who’s trying to cover up her husband’s homosexuality by any means necessary — the kind of part Light, with her severe facial structure and stentorian voice, could play in her sleep. It’s that she’s trying to reveal the real bond she had with this man, despite what she knows to be true and cannot say — a bond that Cunanan’s actions have made it harder and harder for her to get other people to believe in. She finally breaks down not when confronted with evidence of Lee and Andrew’s preexisting relationship, contra to her preferred narrative of a break-in and burglary, but when she starts telling a cop about the “adventures” they had together back in the day, all hot-air balloon rides and romantic desert rescues. “I loved him,” she sobs, starting to smear her makeup. “I loved him very much! There. Is that betterrrr?” Her bitterness stretches out that terminal -r like she’s ripping flesh from a carcass. “Am I a real wife now?” Her pain isn’t over the lie, it’s over what was true. During the harrowing opening sequence, when Marilyn returns home from her trip and realizes something is amiss when Lee fails to pick her up from the airport, that truth is what haunts her face the whole time.

I’m glad, in that beautiful terrible way tragedy can make you glad, that she gets the last word of the episode, even as Andrew continues shopping and driving and killing on the way to his appointment in Miami. (Cunanan misses the chance to carjack and older woman and winds up hunting down and shooting truck-driving family man William R. Reese instead, pulling the trigger almost as soon as the frightened father tries to turn his assailant’s heart by saying he’s a married man with a son. He had no way of knowing how little Andrew wanted to hear that particular song. With a taste for killing in his mouth, he’ll destroy stability on sight.)

Marilyn returns to her gig hawking her signature line of fragrances on the home shopping channel almost immediately — a gutsy move with which the show challenges us to continue to feel empathy for her as she slips into the uncanny valley between sincerity and showmanship, just as the mere presence of any older woman with a glamorous background triggers our societally induced suspicion and revulsion at female failure to remain young. “He believed in me,” she tells her audience, completely honestly. “How many husbands believe in their wive’s dreams? How many treat us as partners? As equals? We were a team for thirty-eight years.” That’s what they were, even if it’s all they were. That’s an achievement. That’s what Andrew destroyed.

Marilyn ends the episode by recounting the advice she got when she first began selling stuff on TV, a technique for connecting with the camera and the people on the other side. “Just hink of the little red light as the man you love.” She stares at the light, at the camera, at us, and as the impenetrable black mascara of her wet eyes closes and the scene cuts to black, her thoughts are ours to imagine.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 3 Recap: A Death in the Family

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” may not hit the tear-down-the-sky heights of the previous two episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, but simply not feeling like a letdown after those two magnificent hours is itself a victory. The grim tale of how the dehumanizing Clinton-era policy on gays in the military destroyed Jeff Trail’s dreams and helped place him in Cunanan’s crosshairs isn’t as stomach-churningly chilling and sad as the show’s depiction of the last hours of Lee Miglin and David Madson, to be sure. But the stakes wind up being just as high, as is the cost in wasted human potential and life.

“DADT” is one of the most temporally complex episodes of the series so far, bouncing back and forth in time and between protagonists. In out-of-order fashion, it traces the life of Jeff Trail from the waning days of his career in the military through the night he first meets Andrew to the hours after his murder, with special attention paid to his and David’s interactions with Cunanan in the days leading up to their killings. (Andrew has a blowout fight with Jeff and has his marriage proposal rejected by David. There’s also a polka bar.) Meanwhile, a side plot chronicles Gianni Versace’s decision to come out as gay in the press, with the support of his partner and to the chagrin of his sister.

But with Andrew himself pushed mostly to the margins and no threat of new murders hanging over our heads, it falls to Finn Wittrock to carry the weight of the episode as Jeff, investing the story of how institutionalized homophobia helped lead to his death with the same sense of tragedy and intensity as a serial-killer narrative. It’s a testament to his note-perfect casting — he simply has the exact physical and psychological mien of a military man, from the cadence of his voice to the way he walks around in his nondescript civvies — that he pulls it off.

With Wittrock’s Jeff as the bedrock, a thematic layering emerges that’s even more impressive than the time-shifting storyline. Throughout the episode, Jeff is painted as a parallel figure to both his eventual killer and his killer’s most famous victim. The comparison with Versace is as direct as possible: Writer Tom Rob Smith structures the episode by juxtaposing Gianni’s triumphant coming-out interview with the Advocate with Jeff’s anonymous, silhouetted testimonial in a CBS News special about closeted soldiers and sailors. Both interviews take place in hotels, though Versace’s is in the Ritz Carlton while Trail’s is in a seedy motel. Both men are also shown talking with their clearly beloved sisters, each of whom is deeply concerned about her respective brother. Donatella advises Gianni not to go through with the Advocate profile (I do wish they’d speak Italian with subtitles in their scenes together — trust your audience, Ryan Murphy! — but whatever), while Jeff’s very pregnant sister, herself career military, jokingly issues “a direct order as your commanding officer” for him to finally come out to their parents years after the recording session.

Jeff and Gianni’s fates following their respective interviews were as divergent as their accommodations and their sisters, yet Andrew finds something equally infuriating about both. His beef with Versace is obvious enough. The stalker-wall of newspaper and magazine clippings that Andrew maintains, many of them about Gianni’s life as an out and proud gay man with his longtime partner Antonio, indicates resentment. Why should this man have it all, while Andrew has to lie about fame and fortune and can’t find anyone who loves him back?

Jeff, by contrast, is a crash-and-burn case. The military’s discovery that he was gay has left him “a washed-up queer in a shitty job and a shitty condo, bitching about how you could have been somebody,” as Andrew cuttingly puts it. “You’re not wrong about that,” Jeff replies fatalistically — he won’t even bother to deny it. Of course, you’re not wrong to see shades of Andrew himself in that description, except insofar as he has no job and no condo at all anymore, not even shitty ones.

But it’s not self-recognition that drives Andrew to kill Jeff, or at least not self-recognition alone. Earlier, we see Andrew advise Jeff not to do the interview at all, unwittingly playing Donatella to his Gianni. Like Donatella, he’s concerned about career fallout for his friend. More importantly to Andrew, though, Jeff’s interview is pointless because he’s just some sailor and nobody special or famous. “Who cares what you have to say?” he asks incredulously, not even noticing the insult he’s delivering. He genuinely doesn’t understand why anyone would be interested in a non-mover-and-shaker’s thoughts on the topic, or why a non-mover-and-shaker would be interested in sharing them. “It’s something I need to do,” Jeff replies. “I can’t explain it any better than that.” For Jeff, it’s a question of honor: being true to himself, to the Navy, to his country, to the lifelong dream that binds them all together for him. He might as well be speaking an alien dialect for all Andrew is able to understand that kind of idealism.

So Andrew appears to first formulate murderous intent toward his former friend and protégé when he watches a VHS recording. The belief in a cause bothers him. Jeff’s stated belief that saving a fellow gay sailor from a vicious beating at the hands of their crewmates gave his own homosexuality away — leading to an attempt to carve away a tattoo that could incriminate him and a failed suicide attempt as well as his eventual discharge — bothers Andrew even more intensely.

It’s during this portion of the interview, where a stricken Jeff says “I did a good thing, the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed about taking that moment back and letting him die, just so people wouldn’t know about me,” that Andrew, wearing the white hat from Jeff’s uniform, points Jeff’s gun at the screen, starting to psych himself into the idea of murder.

Watching Jeff’s final confrontation with Andrew prior to the murder is painful, then, both because of what he gets right and what he gets wrong. “I don’t know what you stand for,” he shouts at Cunanan. “I don’t know who you are. You’re a liar. You have no honor.” Correct on all counts — possibly lethally, so if you figure this contrast in their outlook is a big part of what drove Andrew to kill. But when Andrew rightfully points out that he believed in and supported Jeff while his beloved Navy treated him like shit — “I saved you!” — Jeff bitterly retorts “You destroyed me. I wish I’d never walked into that bar. I wish I’d never met you.” He says he wants his life back, as if Andrew took it from him, instead of Bill Clinton and Uncle Sam. Andrew does take his life away, eventually, mere hours from that moment in fact. But in a sense, he was just an accessory after the fact. Jeff signed his own death warrant the moment he decided, in the face of society’s hatred, that some principles are worth fighting for anyway.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 5 Recap: Navy Blue

“You can’t do it, can you?” “I can’t what?” “Stop.”

The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story is what Matt Zoller Seitz once described, by way of a subtitle to his blog, as “a long, strange journey toward a retrospectively inevitable destination” — the titular murder, seen in the cold open of the very first episode. We’ve already seen where we’re going; what’s left to the show is to depict how we got there. Even those swept along and killed by Andrew Cunanan during the journey seem to sense it. Hence the exchange above. Promising young architect David Madson is the love of Andrew’s life, to hear Andrew tell it. He’s a man to whom the murderer is so fanatically committed that he not only slaughters his rival for David’s affections, his own former love interest Jeff Trail, with a hammer, thus beginning his murder spree, but then manages to convince the shellshocked David that he has some how become an accomplice to the crime and must flee by his side. As time wears on and the shock wears off, David grows less pliable to Andrew’s nonsensical advice and admonishments, but also more honest with himself about where his journey as the Bonnie to Andrew’s would-be Clyde will end. He has no more hope of survival than Andrew has a chance of shutting the fuck up and telling the truth. He can’t do it, can he.

Or can he? “House by the Lake” is the second “murder spotlight” episode of ACS Versace in a row, revealing the fate of victims one and two and tantalizingly hinting at the paths the two men walked to put them in Cunanan’s crosshairs in the first place. They’re old California acquaintances since relocated to Minneapolis, where David seems reasonably well-situated to begin a career on a par with the soon-to-be late Lee Miglin’s. Andrew can’t have that — not unless he can have David too, which Jeff renders impossible. So Andrew hoodwinks David into luring Jeff to his death, venting a lifetime of frustration, resentment, and hatred into the man’s skull. “I lost control,” he manages to reassure David half-apologetically, after he bathes the stunned witness clean of all the blood he’s been splattered with. “I love you.” Later, as they walk David’s dog together to keep up appearances, Andrew says “I promise you no one else will get hurt as long as you’re by my side.” They begin a road trip. You can guess how it ends.

The most compelling contrast between “House by the Lake” and its predecessor, “A Random Killing” — as well as the assassination of Gianni Versace itself — is that at this point, Andrew may well believe what he’s saying. He killed Jeff to punish Jeff, yes, that’s clear enough. But he also killed him as a means to an end: a fantasy life with David over the border into Mexico. The operative word there is, of course, life. At this early stage in the spree, Andrew still harbors delusions about being able to move on, escape, perhaps even thrive. To paraphrase his final words to Lee Miglin before he crushed the man’s chest with construction materials, he’s not out to simply destroy. He still wants to build.

What brings it all crashing down is David’s ability to see through it, even if Andrew himself can’t bring himself to do so. Eventually, David realizes that Andrew sent him to let Jeff into his apartment building that awful night rather than doing it himself so that he could incriminate David in the eyes of the law. (Which indeed he did, as well-intentioned but obliviously bigoted cops treat David like a suspect and sex freak at every point in their investigation, wasting time they could have spent saving his life.) He unsuccessfully seizes the wheel of their getaway car, demands they call the police about the murder even as Andrew draws a gun on him in the middle of nowhere. “It’s not real,” he insists. “It could have been,” Andrew replies. “No,” he insists once more. “It couldn’t.”

The episode is structured by writer Tom Rob Smith and director Daniel Minahan (an early Game of Thrones veteran) to contrast the flight of fancy constructed by the murderous Andrew, and David’s ability to see through it, with this relationship’s flipside: flashbacks to earlier times in David’s life, when he feared his deviation from traditional masculinity would incur his father’s anger, only to discover his dad was a loving, forgiving figure. When Mr. Madson takes little David hunting and the kid freaks out, it’s no big deal — hunting’s not for everyone, and besides, they can just go for a walk together. When David graduates college at the top of his class and uses the occasion to finally come out, his dad’s a bit taken aback from a moral perspective, but that takes a serious back seat to his abiding love for his son, which he expresses in no uncertain terms. He’s so sincere and supportive, in fact, that he wonders why David chose now of all times to tell him, leaving the younger man almost embarrassed at the crude “good news/bad news” approach he’d chosen to adopt. During David’s fatal flight from the law, the cops keep insisting to his parents that he’s up to no good, and that he has deep dark secrets from them. The fact that they don’t know shit is one of the most sadly satisfying moments in the whole sordid affair.

There are many darkly funny moments along the way as well. There’s Andrew’s absurd attempt to blow off David’s concerns about getting caught at the border: “Well I’ve been moving product across the border for years.” (This takes place during a lunchbreak that had me thinking the inane phrase “A man, a plan, a sandwich, Cunanan.”) There’s the entire grim splatstick routine that takes place at David’s apartment as various cops and friends and neighbors try to figure out exactly whose ruined corpse is rolled up in a carpet. There’s David’s heartsick, self-contemptuous monologue about being more worried about being disgraced than being killed, which we now know Andrew will plagiarize virtually word for word when he murders Lee Miglin in a few days. There are all the different ways the police mangle Andrew’s last name (my favorite is “Cunainoon”) and the ridiculous descriptions of himself he threw around in front of David’s friends (“a Jewish millionaire from New York”?). Here’s also as good a place as any to praise the casting of Cody Fern and Finn Wittrock as David and Jeff respectively: two all-American boys.

But I’m saving my final praise for Darren Criss as Andrew one more time. Not just for the delicate balance he must strike around David between unpredictable violence and careful reassurance throughout the episode, nor even for his final act of tenderness toward his victim (who’d hallucinated a reunion with his father before dying) — curling up with the corpse for a last embrace before driving away. No, the highlight here is the endless closeup on Criss/Cunanan’s face as he listens to a roadhouse performance of the Cars’ “Drive” by guest star Aimee Mann while his beloved victim sneaks off to the men’s room, debating whether or not to try and flee. He breaks before your eyes, there’s no other way to put it, and he does so over the same sentiment David will eventually express to him, getting himself killed in the process: “You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong.”

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 4 Recap: Drive