The Place I Lie – As the 5th episode of Black Bird begins, we hear a young girl talking about her grandmother dying when she was six. Her father drove them to Wiggins, South Carolina for her funeral. Jessica Roach says it didn’t mean much to her since she didn’t know her grandmother very well, but it made her father very sad. She frightened her in that coffin because it was something she wondered about. Jessica was worried she was looking down and not liking them because they were young. In the present, Jimmy Keene (Taron Egerton) walks through the prison while imagining the other inmates looking at him. Once he makes it outside, he realizes that they’re not. He is taken to the shrink’s office where Dr. Amelia Hackett (Melanie Nicholls-King) is waiting for him.
Jimmy seems worried that his original doctor, Zicherman, isn’t there. Amelia says he is on vacation even though Jimmy believes there is more to the story. He keeps asking her why she is there. Dr. Hackett finds it odd that Jimmy visits whenever he wants. She asks why he is there. First, he says he had an appointment. Then, he tells her about his charges. Amelia is there to treat mental illness so she doesn’t concern herself with the crimes of the men she treats. She explains that some people’s psyches are more fragile than others. He is likely of fairly sound mind, but many of her patients are not. She claims they are one bad thought away from losing their minds. They sometimes become ghosts in their own bodies. Amelia is asking Jimmy for compassion when he deals with some of the men in here. She wants to make sure he isn’t a threat to the mental health of any of her patients, but she won’t say which patients.
She gets up and leaves. Jessica says her father drove them to the ocean after her grandmother was buried. It would be the only time she’d see the ocean. Brian Miller (Greg Kinnear) talks to Lauren McCauley (Sepideh Moafi) about Marion PD searching for the body with Larry Hall. Lauren mocks Larry’s speech before Brian says they took Larry back out to that area the night before he takes him to Illinois. Miller speculates she is out there somewhere and that is why Larry (Paul Walter Hauser) took them out there another time. Lauren says she’ll try to get those reports. The next day, they head out to the area in question. Lauren is surprised to see a nice gas station in the middle of nowhere. At the prison, Jimmy joins Larry first thing in the morning. They discuss the previous day as Larry mentions Gary visiting him. Gary is into cars, but not as much as Larry. As for the Civil War stuff, he didn’t stick with it.
Larry reveals he married a stinky b!tch who thinks it is playing dress up. In return, Larry told her she’d be a grandmother in Civil War times because brides were young and unspoiled. In other words, people married younger then. Larry’s great-grandmother had his grandmother when she was just 14. It was perfectly normal back then until the government saw a way to make money by raising the age of consent. Nobody attended a high school back then because there was no such thing. Once the government saw there was money to be made in high school, greed trumped everything. Larry doesn’t think it is about education and instead believes it is about forcing kids to delay growing up. Their parents will spend every dime on tuition and it’ll bankrupt the country someday. Jimmy admits he could be onto something. He asks how old the brides were before Larry says twelve or thirteen.
Jimmy jokes if they’re old enough to pee, they’re old enough for me. Then, he asks what the youngest Larry has had. Larry urges Jimmy to tell him first, but Jimmy says he asked first. Once Larry tells him to go first again, Jimmy says 14. Larry asks if she fought back, but Jimmy says no. He questions whether Larry had fighters. Jimmy goes on to say he was 17 and she was 14. Larry finds that funny. They’re interrupted by an officer telling Larry that the drip has turned into a leak. Brian says Larry had the cops drive up and down 400 East several times while 440 South, 250 East, and 375 South are mentioned four times each. He took them down 550 East the most. Lauren argues that this is pointless.
Lauren suspects they might’ve stopped at the gas station for drinks and bathroom breaks, but Brian doubts it was there at the time. The report mentions something about construction at the 550 and 400 intersection. They stop at the Tri Region EZ Fuel to talk to someone. When they ask the clerk about the manager, he says Dale only comes in a couple of times a week. It is just him and Keith who works from 3 to 11. He has only been here for a few months, but Dale has been here since the beginning so he’d know more. While Lauren calls him, Brian learns they do not work on cars here and the clerk doesn’t know anyone local who does. The clerk tells him about John Dickey who is like a Mr. Fix It. Outside, Lauren tells Brian that the station opened in the spring of 1994 and they likely broke ground around midsummer of 1993. Brian cruses Larry Hall.
Jimmy plays with Vincent Gigante (Tony Amendola) out in the yard before he is asked about trying to get product in here. Vincent tells him not to shrug because it is a disrespectful non-answer. Jimmy claims he thought about it but couldn’t get it in here. Vincent doesn’t see how it would help him if he smuggled it in and helped someone on the outside. He points out CO Carter (Joe Williamson) and says a man who can’t get help anywhere else will eventually come to him. Then, he is in Vincent’s debt. Jimmy apologizes. Vincent admits he asked around about Jimmy in Milwaukee and he checked out. Everyone knew someone who knew and spoke highly of him. However, no one could remember laying eyes on him directly. Jimmy suggests they need to get out more. Larry talks to Dr. Hackett and asks if she has kids, but she won’t answer.
He is reminded that she doesn’t discuss her personal life. Larry asks if they can reverse the roles so she can talk about herself. She asks what he’d say to her if he was her daughter. In a deep voice, he says, “b!tch tell me your dreams” before laughing. He bets her children smell good. Amelia asks what is troubling him only for Larry to say nothing. He thinks she doesn’t like the fact that this is the best mood he has been in for years. If he got better and told people how he got better, she would no longer have a job. She says she’d retire. Larry says she’d retire, have tea with her daughters, and watch them bend over to do their gardening. After she asks what is making him feel good, Larry says his appeal. He claims there are positive signs if you know how to read them. Amelia says that would explain his confidence to the point of being cocky. Larry says a man sometimes has every reason to feel that way.
She has seen him confident when he talks about car parts and Civil War reenactments, but she has never seen him cocky. That seems more like his friend James. She sees what he responds to in him since he gives off the aura of someone who’s never known regret. Larry thinks he has known regret and pain but doesn’t let it warp him. When she asks if he sees himself warped in pain, Larry says not lately. She wonders if that is because of James. Larry says he is not alone anymore. When Jessica was in the 7th grade, Cooper Ross told her she was so nice. Lauren and Brian meet with John Dickey Hansen or JD. He admits he might sell auto parts here from time to time. When shown a picture of Larry, he admits to knowing him. Although he doesn’t know him well, Larry is memorable. JD (Bill Martin Williams) calls Larry creepy as all heck. He sold Larry a pair of slotted brake rotors for a ’79 Dodge B200 back in 1992 or 1993.
He seemed harmless and had the look of someone who had never been hugged not even as a baby. JD thought he was too kind to him because he started coming back even when he didn’t need a part. Larry started hanging around and talking up young girls. Nothing ever happened because they ran him off after a while, but JD sometimes wondered what became of him. After Lauren asks why they ran him off, JD admits he made too many of the girls uncomfortable including his own girl named Audrey. She was a teenager at the time and Larry took a shine to her. They decide to wait for her to return. When Jessica was twelve, she and her sister got new sneakers.
They had to wash them in the water because they stepped in cow pies almost immediately. She remembers that they were happy. Jimmy tries to make a call, but the system won’t accept his account number. He tries it over and over until a surly con (Austin Naulty) yells at him to hang up the phone. Jimmy gets in his face and tells him to be his guest before leaving the phone off the hook. Once outside, he overhears CO Carter telling other inmates that he is a snitch. He tells Vincent next. Big Jim (Ray Liotta) complains to someone on the phone that he paid with the credit card himself. As a result, his son cannot make or receive calls. Sammy (Robyn Malcolm) follows him out, but Big Jim wants to go for a drive alone to clear his head. A guard tells Jimmy that Larry was last spotted in the woodshop. He joins Larry there moments later.
He finds that Larry has whittled some wooden birds. He has been working on these birds for weeks and will send them home. Larry changes the subject to Jim almost getting into a fight earlier. When Jimmy tells him what happened with his account, Larry wonders if he made an enemy and it could be someone who works here. Larry asks if he had any disagreements with anyone lately. Jimmy claims he had minor words with a guard yesterday because he kept busting his balls. When asked about what, Jimmy says it was nothing. Larry doesn’t think so. He believes Jimmy should trust him. Jimmy says it was about him because the guard said he was a kid-diddler and kid killer. Larry begins laughing even though he doesn’t mean to before repeating kid-diddler. Once Larry says he has never raped anyone in his life, Jimmy questions what he did. Larry says he had sex with them and they weren’t children until recently.
He goes on to say they weren’t children back in the 1800s. After Larry asks how many women he has slept with, Jimmy guesses 80. Larry wonders how he managed that and whether there is a line he uses, but Jimmy says he just talks to them. They talk to him and they eventually take their clothes off. Larry says no woman will ever just talk to him. Jimmy says the younger girls will. Larry admits some of them will. Then, Larry says she was nice at first before mentioning the name Jessica Roach. He explains that her bike had a flat when she was driving up a gravel road. Larry just offered her a ride even though they make it sound like he jumps on these girls and attacks them. He claims they like talking to him. He showed her his bike and they talked about that. She was nice until she wasn’t. She turned on him like a rabid squirrel. Eventually, he begins talking about how she got into his van and looked at his bike.
She asked good questions so he kissed her. Jessica turned mean and started hitting him. He had to rag her with the starter fluid. He drove for a while to find a quiet place although he didn’t know where he was. He went back into the van to rag her a few more times and she scratched him. When he cleaned out the flesh from her nails later on, there was a lot of him under there. He doesn’t totally remember whether he had sex with her. Instead, it was like he was in a dream where he saw himself beating her and ragging her. Once he woke up, they were naked so he thinks they had sex. Jimmy admits it sure sounds like it. Then, she started crying. Jimmy says they do that sometimes. They thought they wanted it but change their mind after the fact. Larry reiterates that she was crying for her mother.
He didn’t like that because it ruined everything. He took her out of the van and walked her pretty far back in the field where he found a tree. Larry had made a tool by putting two leather belts together. He made Jessica sit down with her face toward the tree since he didn’t want to see her face. Larry tells Jimmy how he used a stick and the two belts to strangle her to death. Audrey tells Brian and Lauren that he never said anything gross, but he was always off. He’d tell her that she had pretty ankles or that her earlobes were very ripe. He’d stare at them and say that most cleaners contain lye.
Larry wanted them to come to his van to look at the list of ingredients, but none of them would ever go to his van. He gave her a pair of earrings, a locket, and a pair of used ballet flats. There is only one thing that she didn’t throw away. She takes them to the bike Larry gave her and confesses it makes her want to take a shower. Jessica’s mother said she was never any trouble unless she was fixated on something that she wanted. The biggest thing she wanted was a mountain bike. Jessica talks about the time she lived. Edmund Beaumont (Robert Wisdom) tells Brian and Lauren that it isn’t enough because of the chain of evidence. Edmund mentions that there is no serial number because it was removed with acid so there is no way to prove it was Jessica’s. He tells them that they did top-notch work, but it still isn’t enough.
He doesn’t know what enough would be even though this isn’t it. Jimmy and Larry return to their cells. In the middle of the night, Larry begins calling James’s name. James doesn’t answer because he is busy crying.
Black Bird Review
The fifth episode of Black Bird wasn’t as good as the prior four although it got better near the end when it started focusing on the confession. I really didn’t understand what they were trying to do with Dr. Hackett so it really just fell flat. The whole conversation between Jimmy and Amelia was cheesy and unbelievable. If I am being honest, I couldn’t get through the first 10 or 15 minutes fast enough.
Besides the conversation with Dr. Hackett, we also had Jimmy walking around the prison imagining everyone is after him for three or four minutes. There was a whole lot of nothing going on when that time could’ve been used for something more important.
At times, the scenes with Lauren and Brian could be considered filler since they’re likely not going to amount to anything. I suspect this is why the writers have decided to find a way to make those moments mean something in the end. Jessica’s bicycle was found lying in the roadway by her sister who told her father and he called the police.
As a result, there is no way the bicycle could’ve been Jessica’s. Larry also mentioned showing Jessica his bike so he may or may not have had one of his own. Still, the detectives would’ve known that it wasn’t Jessica’s bike because the first report would’ve indicated this important detail. After all, they’ve painstakingly scoured through the evidence for hours and hours.
Regardless, the last 40 minutes of the episode were solid while the first 15 or 20 could’ve been edited out. It might’ve been better as a four or five-episode season because it would’ve cut to the chase quicker. Black Bird has been an enjoyable series with excellent performances from Paul Walter Hauser. It is just enough of a tease to make me want to dig deeper and find out more about the real case.
Not all episodes are going to be perfect though and this one wasn’t as close as the others. It scores a 7 out of 10. Recaps of Black Bird can be found here. Learn how to support our work by following this link.
