‘Dahmer’ Episode 3 Recap: The First Time

When you already know the details of the case, Dahmer is somehow more upsetting, not less. Every fifteen minutes, if it even takes that long, you’re brought up short by one more step along Jeffrey’s slide into madness and murder. “Oh, his parents hate each other and are constantly having knife-brandishing fights. But I’m sure he’ll get through it.” “Nice, his dad is teaching him to gut fish while asking him about girls. Should teach him some healthy habits.” “Hey, look, now they’re abandoning him. Maybe he’ll learn to live independently.” “Cool, a hitchhiker. Maybe he’ll make a new friend.” I keep having to stop just to collect myself, grab some kind of beverage, force myself to soldier on. It probably took me three hours to get through this episode. As, perhaps, it should.

Directed with a sort of miserable beauty — it’s all sunlight through courthouse windows, police flashlights reflected in Jeff’s huge glasses, a lavender dawn the morning after his first kill — by Clement Virgo, this installment of Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy’s so-far masterful examination of Dahmer’s life and crimes focuses squarely on his youth. Indeed, it begins with Jeffrey in utero, as we learn that his mother Joyce, already very clearly suffering from debilitating mental illness, was prescribed upwards of 26 pills a day during her pregnancy. She was hardly the only pregnant woman in America to be overprescribed harmful medications during pregnancy in the 1950s, and the resulting children did not all grow up to become Jeffrey Dahmers, but still, you have to wonder what might have been.

We then enter his unhappy high school years. His mother pulls a knife on his father Lionel as Jeffrey watches, because Lionel refuses to believe that she’s seen, and chased with her car, a UFO. His dad namedrops Playboy as they carve up fish they’ve caught, leading to an unhappy masturbation session during which Jeff brushes aside a casually racist spread entitled “Pleasures of the Orient” in order to climax while reliving the way the fish guts felt in his hands. In school he becomes famous, or infamous, for mimicking the symptoms of cerebral palsy (this becomes known as “Doin’ a Dahmer,” which is the episode’s title), for borrowing an extra dead piglet from science class and taking it home to dissect in his spare time, and for openly drinking beers in class, like audibly cracking them open and everything.

Meanwhile, his parents acrimoniously divorce. Lionel leaves home. Joyce leaves home too, and takes Jeff’s kid brother with her, abandoning Jeff in the now-vacant family home because, in part, he never asked her for help with his “fucking disgusting” dissection hobby. (“It’s sick!” she screams, “And it would have been nice of you to ask me!”)

So Jeff drinks, and works out, and drinks some more, and works out some more, his body becoming toned and conventionally attractive even as his mind is reduced to an alcoholic mush. He cruises around in his car, eyes a jogger, nearly brains him with a baseball bat before the jogger runs away. (This last bit is something of a dramatization; Dahmer said that the jogger he intended to kill with the bat failed to jog past him on that fateful day, so he gave up on the plan.)

But eventually, an opportunity presents itself. Jeff picks up a handsome young hitchhiker on his way to a rock concert and convinces him to stop by his place for a few “brewskis,” some weed, and some weightlifting. The hitchhiker, Stephen, takes him up on the offer, but eventually realizes Jeff has no plans to actually drive him to the concert, a sense reinforced when Jeff tries to kiss him. Stephen drops a homophobic slur (again, I believe this to be an invention of the show, but I could be wrong) and demands to leave; Dahmer brains him from behind with dumbbell, then strangles him to death. 

For a moment, Jeff caresses the body, smiling as if he’s feeling relief for the first time in his life. Then the reality sets in, and he panics, cursing himself and realizing life as he knew it is over. He drags the corpse into the crawlspace under the house, then thinks better of the idea, dragging it back out and into his taxidermy station in the garage. The rest, I’m sure, you can imagine.

Harder to imagine, stranger than fiction, is what happens next. On the very night of his first murder, with his victim’s dismembered body stuffed into trash bags that fill his car’s back seat, he gets pulled over by the cops for swerving all over the road. He’s screamingly obviously drunk behind the wheel, as the cops acknowledge — but given his young age, they choose to let him go with a warning so as not to “ruin his life.” As he already learned from the teachers and guidance counselors that let his public drunkenness slide, as he would learn again years later when the cops returned a victim to him after believing his bullshit, Jeff discovers that in some ways he’s living life on the Easy setting, and he can some how skate away from the consequences of his behavior. Needless to say, this is an important lesson, one he would take to heart.

Dutifully returning home on the cops’ instructions, he removes the bags, flushes what body parts he can down the toilet, burns what he can’t to a crisp in the oven, pulverizes the leftover bones with a hammer, then scatters them in the wilderness. This last is depicted in, again, a perversely beautiful shot, like he’s making an offering to whatever dark gods concern themselves with the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer. (There really was a pseudoreligious element to Dahmer’s crimes; he would confess to police that had they waited a few months before arresting him in the end, they’d have unearthed an altar he planned to construct out of skeletal remains, where he hoped to meditate and draw out newfound powers of control, just like the telekinetic villains of Return of the Jedi and The Exorcist III.)

We’re only three episodes deep into Dahmer’s ten-episode run, and already the accrual of brutal, depressing incidents has become difficult to endure. The fantastic, committed performances of Evan Peters as Jeffrey and Richard Jenkins and Penelope Ann Miller as his parents manage to make everything both better and worse. These are real, recognizable people with real, recognizable hopes and fears — the scene in which an astonished, joyful Joyce is offered a job counseling women at the center where she was once a patient is a genuinely touching moment of kindness towards an otherwise resolutely unpleasant, if very ill, person — that Jeffrey’s deeds will pulverize as surely as his hammer smashed those bones. It’s not going to be easy to watch, but then, that’s the point.
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.