Episode Report Card LuluBates: A | 9 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Bad Santa
By LuluBates | Season 1 | Episode 9 | Aired on 05.30.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Up on the rooftop, click, click, click, down thru the chimney with Good Saint… oh god that’s not Santa Claus at all. That’s a cold-blooded crazy-eyed murderer who jumps through the hole in the rooftop, hides under a bed and grabs a woman by her ankles, drags her underneath and slices her face into a horrific smile that would make the Joker jealous. When the FBI team is called in, Will Graham accidentally contaminates the crime scene by getting way way way into the killer’s mind, more or less recreating the crime. As Graham washes off the blood, Crawford tells him that he needs to hold it together. If this job is too much for him, he can leave.
Graham doubts his mental health and decides to go talk to Hannibal Lecter about it. He knows he is crazy, but he’s not this crazy. Lecter suggests a neurologist and they go to get Graham a MRI. The doctors quickly realize that Graham has encephalitis, and that's making him hallucinate and lose time. They also realize that they are total unethical A-holes who have no intention of telling Graham his test results because it’s more educational and better for the common good if they study him and record the results. As Graham’s symptoms escalate, he goes back to the crime scene and finds the killer hanging out. After Graham peels the skin off her arm accidentally (also: BARF) the FBI realizes that she is not just mentally ill, but is also physically sick. After the killer shows up at Graham’s house, they are able to grab her and put her in the hospital.
Speaking of hospitals, the neurologist may have had a moment of conscience, because he called Graham back to the hospital for a repeat MRI. Unfortunately, he was brutally murdered (and left with a giant smile) before he could give Graham the good news that he was physically ill, not mentally ill. Who murdered him? Two guesses.
Come back later for the full recap.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!In the perfect horror movie set up, a girl walks into her isolated home deep in the woods with no neighbors within sight. Why does she live there all alone? Because she likes to get murdered. It's really the only reason I can think of. She doesn't look quite old enough to be a homeowner... plus, she has a parakeet, which no grown woman has as a pet except in movies where they are about to be murdered and/or have a gas leak caused by a major corporation. She is a mystery, this one.
After she tucks herself into her twin bed (maybe she's a nun?) a drip in the ceiling catches her attention. There's no way this is going to end well. She grabs a flashlight and heads to the attic. The good news is that the drip isn't blood. The bad news is that there's a huge hole in her roof and mysterious footprints across the rooftop. She doesn't see those, but I'm guessing it's not Santa. She patches the hole, goes back to bed and notices some wet footprints. She tracks them to her bedroom and then gets dragged under her own bed and is dispatched in a sprinkler of blood. Hope you weren't planning on sleeping tonight, single ladies! Eh, just hook up at a bar and blame this show.
Will Graham is having a hard time coping with the fact that the innocent little Abigail Hobbes killed a man. Hannibal Lecter, to whom he is speaking, points out that he killed a man, too. Graham can't help but note that Lecter also killed someone. They are all even-steven on the murder front. Except that Lecter is a sociopath who has killed a mazillion people (guesstimate) and Abigail helped her dad kill a bunch of lovely lookalike ladies, so Graham is looking pretty mentally stable with his lowly body count of one. He's going to have to work on upping that if he wants to maintain his street cred with this crew. Then Lecter asks whether Graham is still losing time, and has him draw a clock face. The clock that Graham hands him is totally janky with all the numbers clumped in one half. He doesn't notice, but Lecter does.
Graham wakes up covered in blood with a fishing knife in his hand and a girl with an extra-wide smile dying underneath him. He runs panicked out of the room and finds the entire FBI crew waiting for him. He's investigating the woman's Santa Claus murder, but got extra involved in recreating the crime and ended up corrupting the entire crime scene with his historical reenactment. Jack Crawford is not impressed. He looks Graham up and down and you can just see the "SMDH" thought bubble form over his head. After Graham cleans up, Crawford warns him that he has never seen him this shaken and he doesn't want to see it again. The woman bled to death in a grisly crime, which the camera has no problem zooming in on a bunch. Graham explains that she was dragged under the bed. The killer knew her and was trying to peel a mask off her face. Remember that scene in Beetlejuice where Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis want to scare the beejeezus out of the family and pull their faces way apart? This is like that, but really freaking disgusting and not at all funny. The killer also scratched out all the faces of her in the family pictures, which is television shorthand for "completely crazycakes." Well, that and the supremely gruesome murder.