“I called y’all for months! Now y’all finally came and it’s too late! You came too late!”
That would be the first time during this episode of Dahmer that I burst into tears.
“You knew he was a monster.”
“I knew. But nobody heard me.”
“I hear you, Glenda.”
That would be the last time during this episode of Dahmer that I burst into tears.
But there were times in between, and times afterwards, times after the episode ended and left me alone with what I’d just seen. Once again directed by Jennifer Lynch, from a script by co-creator Ian Brennan, Janet Mock, and David McMillan, this installment — titled “Cassandra,” after the prophetic figure from Greek mythology doomed to see the future without anyone every listening to her about it — is the most emotionally taxing thing I’ve seen on television all year. In terms of my visceral reaction to it, it’s one of the most emotionally taxing things I’ve seen on television ever.
I know, I know, I’m sounding like a broken record over here. I just got done telling you that the previous episode was a melancholy masterpiece. But it’s the truth. Just when it seems Dahmer can’t top its microscopic examination of just how fucking miserable and sad the entire story of the killer and his victims was, it does so again and again.
The credit here belongs almost entirely to Niecy Nash, who returns to prominence as Dahmer’s neighbor Glenda. Used as a composite of several of Dahmer’s real-life neighbors, she is the Cassandra figure of the episode’s title, and the hour chronicles her long struggle to get somebody, anybody, to listen to her when she says that something bad is happening in the apartment next door.
The cops, as we’ve seen, ignore her habitually. A 911 dispatcher doesn’t even bother to get the number of the apartment where she’s hearing screams, and warns her that if she keeps calling them it’ll be a boy-who-cried-wolf situation. The building manager, who’s also blown off her calls about the screaming and the power-tool noises, just kind of throws up his hands when she reports that another tenant was last seen with Jeff before disappearing off the face of the earth. He does, at least, agree to evict Dahmer on account of the smell coming from his apartment, which is frankly impossible for anyone to ignore. And even after the news breaks, she gets evacuated from her apartment along with everyone else in the building, and is subjected to both reprimands and grotesque curiosity by her company’s human resources department, which is upset about the statements she’s made to the press about the cops’ incompetence…and really wants to know if she ever saw any of those zombies Dahmer was making.
There’s an almost Rosemary’s Baby vibe to what Glenda goes through. There’s the apartment-building setting, for one thing, and the sinister neighbor aspect, and the pure terror of knowing something is wrong but being unable to convince anyone else. But there’s an element of some of the great grim slasher movies too, a Texas Chain Saw Massacre tone that emerges from the sound of the saws and drills, the sight of Jeff lugging garbage bags to the dumpster at all hours, the stench (which you can all but smell through your screen).
And finally there are the actions toward Glenda of Jeff himself. Once he’s served his eviction notice, he realizes who the main complainant must have been, and goes to visit her. Glenda lets him in, an unimaginable act of courage that perhaps she saw as preferable to leaving an angry Dahmer pounding on her door. Jeff seems conciliatory, and hey, he’s even brought her a present. A sandwich.
“I used to be a butcher,” he says. “It’s just meat.”
Glenda refuses to eat it, of course. And then we see a side of Jeff we haven’t really seen before: a guy who’s deliberately trying to frighten someone. He keeps insisting that she eat the sandwich. He demands that she take back her complaint to the building manager. (She offers to do so if he’ll divulge the location of the missing tenant.) When he finally leaves, her fear washes over her like a wave.
And sure enough, he keeps bringing guys back to his apartment, and the saws keep buzzing, and the screams keep ringing out. The sounds and the smells nearly make Glenda throw up.
That’s the last we see of her misadventures before the episode’s gutting and graceful final scene, which we’d cut away from for these flashbacks. It involves, much to Glenda’s surprise and awe, Rev. Jesse Jackson, who’s come to Milwaukee because of the civil rights implications of the murders and the police department’s atrocious handling of them. (The police chief and mayor aren’t callous about it, but they’re also almost completely useless, which is almost worse.) It’s he who finally listens to Glenda when she speaks, a gift beyond price, though of course it came to her too late.
“It’s a metaphor for all the social ills that plague our nation,” Jackson says of the case to the authorities, though he could be speaking about the show itself. “Bad policing, underserved communities, the low value we assign our young Black and brown men, especially if they happen to be gay.” Nailed it, Reverend. Fucking nailed it.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.