You could call it comedy and tragedy. You could call it good cop, bad cop. You could call it the carrot and the stick.
Whatever you call it, this double-barreled approach to storytelling is working sickeningly well for Monsters . Directed with verve by Paris Barclay from a script by co-creator Ian Brennan and David McMillan, this tremendous episode features some of the show’s funniest material yet, including an anxiety-spiking musical montage, a Zoolander -ish escape fantasy sequence, and a camp confrontation between a brassy broad and a blue blood in high dudgeon. And — here’s the real, real rough stuff, so be warned — it also explains that when you’re being molested, you can spike your abuser’s food with cinnamon to improve the taste of his ejaculate.
You see what I’m saying? It lifts you up, and then knocks you to the concrete. In this episode, the brothers’ crime finally catches up with them. Dr.
Oziel’s mistress tips off the cops to the existence of their recorded therapy sessions; not only are they full of confessions, but they also document the brothers’ active threat to Oziel’s life, making them admissible in court despite doctor-patient privilege. (Which he violated anyway by blabbing to his mistress.) Yet they continue to insist that it was Fidel Castro, or maybe “the Bambino Family,” that did it, even after they’re arrested.
Most of the episode, in fact, involves the brothers coming into contact with, and conflict with, the harsh reality of the world outside the one they’d constructed for themselves — first bonded together as fellow victims, then as co-conspirators. Erik subsists on a milk-only diet because he can’t eat the prison food without vomiting. Afraid to use the shower, he starts to stink.
Lyle fixates on maintaining his hairpiece (the other inmates clock it immediately and rip it right off his head for fun), ordering beauty products, and above all acquiring the dimes, dimes, dimes that enable him to make phone calls out of the jail. Much of this is shown in a montage set to the hip-house classic “Dirty Cash,” and it’s like an anxiety attack in a bottle, or Uncut Gems / the Rishi episode of Industry in miniature. Their legal situation is dire.
Their exasperated soon-to-be-former attorney, none other than Robert Shapiro, presents them with a picture of the state’s gas chamber and all but begs them to get serious about their story and their future, which looks gas-chamber bleak. Not only are the tapes admissible, but the brothers looked like dead-eyed psychopaths at their arraignment. They’ve dug themselves a very deep hole.
When a search of Erik’s cell turns up an absurd escape plan that involves a Porsche, a trip around the globe, and plastic surgery to make them look like the vanilla Milli Vanilli, the hole gets even deeper. The only silver lining is Tony (Brandon Santana), a fellow inmate without a violent record. Though his intentions toward Erik at first seem untoward, it turns out Tony’s just kind of sweet on the guy, even if, as it turns out, Erik isn’t quite comfortable saying he’s gay.
Note: This storyline also includes a hot exhibitionistic shower scene featuring two really handsome actors bare-assed naked, if that’s your scene. Outside the prison walls, the brothers’ doting family find a new lawyer in Leslie Abramson (a fantastic Ari Graynor), a high-profile criminal defense attorney who specializes in murder cases in which, well, the defendant did it. This puts her at odds with writer Dominick Dunne (hot damn, it’s Nathan Lane), who hates Abramson for reasons both ideological — he thinks the justice system is biased against victims in favor of defendants — and personal — she represented his daughter’s killer.
Watching the two spar among the ladies who lunch, his clucking righteousness pitted against her crowing confidence, is a pleasure. The pleasures end right about there. Yeah, after that, things get pretty goddamn unpleasant.
Having defended a teenager accused of patricide before, Abramson suspects the dynamic of abuse at work in that case is present in the Menéndez brothers’ as well. She hooks Erik up with a forensic psychiatrist, to whom he reveals that he was molested — by Lyle, starting at age five or six. But it’s okay, Erik later tells Abramson, he doesn’t blame Lyle: Lyle was only doing to Erik what their father did to Lyle.
And when Lyle finally told José to leave him alone, the man turned his attentions to Erik. The horrors that come pouring out of his mouth then, about the physical and psychological measures he’d take to power through the abuse, elicit a gesture of comfort from Abramson, who thanks him repeatedly and sincerely for telling her his story. A self-confessed workaholic who rues how she spent her grown daughter’s childhood and is hoping to adopt a baby to “do it right” now that she’s older and wiser, Abramson is the no-bullshit yet non-judgmental and fiercely protective blonde mother Erik never actually got to have.
But she’s also an extremely expensive defense attorney, and the look on her face in the episode’s final shot indicates she knows a winning argument when she hears one, too. If you knew anything about the Menéndez case going into Monsters , you knew this moment was inevitable. That doesn’t make actually sitting through it any easier.
Speaking personally, my eyes kept overflowing with tears I was fighting to keep in — a lot like Erik himself, come to think of it. And when the credits rolled, it all came out. This is hard, hard material to watch.
But that’s what makes it worthwhile. Keeping secrets nearly destroyed the brothers, and successfully destroyed their parents. Soft-pedaling the details now would only perpetuate the idea that some veil of shame needs to be thrown over not just the abusers but the survivors, like a sheet hiding a dead body.
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.
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