Summary
DTF St. Louis continually turns the mystery on its head in “Snag It”, with multiple new suspects and possible motives emerging.
DTF St. Louis is that rarest of things, a mystery that is genuinely mysterious. I have no idea who killed Floyd, or why, or what his prior career as a nude male model or his curved penis might have to do with any of it. And that’s just the way I like it. The premiere of HBO’s highly unconventional series suggested a fairly likely suspect, and a pretty coherent motive, but Episode 2, “Snag It”, is a cautionary tale about jumping to obvious conclusions. Now, the person who seems least likely to have killed Floyd is the person who spends most of the episode being the prime suspect. Funny how that happens.
It’s all a matter of perspective. Netflix was paddling in these waters recently with the excellent Vladimir, and the unreliable narrator conceit works just as effectively here. Not that any of these characters is strictly a “narrator”, per se, but the episode is divided up into the respective testimonies of Clark, who is being interviewed by Homer, and Carol, who is being interviewed by Plumb. And while the broad strokes of their accounts are the same, the details — including, tellingly, who initiated the affair in the first place — are wildly divergent.
As far as Clark is concerned, Carol was basically throwing herself at him. Sure, he told some rather self-aggrandizing lies, including the hilarious fabrication of a demolition company that he oversees, earning himself the nickname “The Bang Master”, but there’s no ambiguity about who the aggressor was, so to speak. It was Carol who hung around in Jamba Juice, waiting to bond with him over their mutual order of “The Go Getter”. It was Carol who proposed that Clark take her along to a Cardinals game, on the pretense of learning a bit more about umpiring. And it was Carol who proposed a rendezvous and made it repeatedly clear that Floyd wouldn’t be there. What’s a guy to do?
Speaking of Floyd, whenever he crops up in Clark’s memory, he comes across like a dork. To be fair, he has been a dork pretty consistently, but there’s an exaggeratedly ridiculous quality to him in Clark’s recollections — just check out his dance moves in the intermediate hip-hop dance class he bought Richard, only to attend it himself when the kid showed no interest — that a part of me thinks might be embellished in Clark’s memory. What we’re seeing is, probably, Floyd as Clark saw him, like an evolving justification for why he was banging his wife.
“Banging” is probably a bit of an oversimplification. Clark refers to his liaisons with Carol as “dream meetings” — in other words, meetings to make each other’s dreams come true, sexually. But there isn’t an enormously sexual element to the stuff we see. Clark’s fantasy is Carol sitting on his face while she makes banal business calls, but it’s face-sitting with underwear on. Clark isn’t contributing beyond almost dying of asphyxiation. The general impression is of an affair that started out quite hot and heavy, introduced the idea of anything-goes experimentalism, and then fizzled out when the fantasies ended up being deeply weird and mundane.
I hate to bring this up — at least in part because I couldn’t remember the name of the condition, so I had to Google “curved penis” — but I do believe that Floyd’s kinked member may be oddly integral to all this. It’s called Peyronie’s disease, for what it’s worth. In Clark’s flashbacks, we get the beginnings of an explanatory backstory involving Floyd being in Chicago for a job interview and saving a mentally ill man from killing himself in traffic, which gained him a brief TV spot as a local hero, but we don’t get to hear the end of the story. Something to look forward to.
In the meantime, DTF St. Louis Episode 2 checks in with Plumb, who is tasked with interviewing Carol. According to her, it was Clark who pushed for the affair. It was she who ended it, since she loved Floyd so much. In her testimony, she was almost a bystander. This doesn’t correlate with any of the flashbacks we’ve seen, and it doesn’t ring true with Plumb, either, who finds a box of Floyd’s belongings in their “hutch” that contains various copies of Playgirl magazine, like the one that was found alongside Floyd’s corpse. But Plumb notices something that Homer never did, probably because he couldn’t stand to look for too long. The Indiana Jones-style cover model is Floyd. In his prime, he was a model.
This leads to the revelation that Floyd was using DTF St. Louis to meet men, including one named Christopher Robert Smurce, who is played by a recognisable guest star and is briefly interviewed by Homer. He confirms the meeting, though doesn’t provide many details. At no point does anybody show him a picture of Floyd, which seems like a bit of an oversight to me, since it also turns out that Clark was also on the app posing as man called “Tiger Tiger”. In more contextual flashbacks, we see that Clark was already active on the app under this pseudonym before he even pitched the idea to Floyd. His setting up his own profile with him was all a ruse; Floyd’s “first match”, now revealed to be a man, was Tiger Tiger.
Given that Clark was prescribed the amphetamine that was ultimately used to kill Floyd, all of this seems like a smoking gun. But not so fast. Clark is adamant that Floyd wasn’t meeting men. Plumb asks around at the Jamba Juice about Carol and learns that she habitually ordered the Watermelon Breeze, not the Go Getter, casting down on her testimony and suggesting the truth is closer to Clark’s version. Given the presence of the old Playgirl magazine, it seems like there’s something weirder at play here. Carol is beginning to seem a likelier suspect than Clark. And even Eimy, who is seen at the end of the episode screening Clark’s calls, may have an important role to play. Either way, things clearly aren’t what they seem. And thank goodness for that.
