Summary
DTF St. Louis goes from good to great in “The Go Getter”, really delivering on its character depth and dynamics instead of twists and turns.
DTF. St Louis has been pretty good since it started. Odd, sure, and unconventional enough for its ultimate destination to feel sometimes worryingly elusive. In Episode 3, though, it becomes great. The murder investigation, which took a major recent turn into positioning Carol, not Clark, as the prime suspect in Floyd’s death, largely takes a back seat to contextualising flashbacks that aren’t immune to the weirdness that has characterised the first two hours – there are a couple of visual beats here that are as bonkers as anything the show has produced thus far – but have such a rich sense of character and depth that I’m suddenly more invested in what happened than a thousand last-minute twists and turns could have made me.
The absurdity of “The Go Getter” is its not-so-secret weapon. It makes the funny parts funnier and the sentimental bits oddly powerful. But it also exposes a sort of mundane quality that underpins what is by all accounts a murder-mystery, and that grounding makes it feel deeply human, despite the wacky asides. Clark Forrest’s innermost sexual fantasies are revealed in this episode, and it’s just like I said last week; he’s an uptight guy whose illicit budget motel role-playing extends to the Amazon position and pretending to be a sex robot. Can anyone with such Milquetoast fantasies be capable of murder? Almost certainly not.
A lot of “The Go Getter” is about clarifying this, and the way it accomplishes that is largely by depicting Floyd as the nicest, most well-meaning guy in the world, someone Clark loved so much – platonically, I think – that he couldn’t have possibly brought himself to kill him. That love didn’t stop him from sleeping with his wife, granted, but Clark’s internal justification is that he never loved Carol the way he loved Floyd; she was just a means to an end, a way for a deeply unfulfilled middle-aged man to feel something, even if what he wanted to feel was being folded up by a gruff-voiced – but not too gruff – Little League umpire.
But in clarifying Clark’s innocence, this episode is also strongly suggesting Carol’s guilt. It even threads a motive throughout this hour, revisiting a number of Carol’s early meet-cute scenes with Clark, including her initial Jamba Juice deception, but in the context of her steadily planting seeds in Clark’s malleable mind. Floyd was paying alimony to his fortune teller first wife, he had tax debt, he didn’t have life insurance, he had a curved penis, and had put on a few pounds. If only his bills were paid, she wouldn’t have to worry about his well-being. She could, feasibly, abscond with his best friend, knowing he’d be fine. It’s obvious what she’s doing, but equally obvious why Clark would fall for it.
In the present day, in the harsh light of an interrogation room and the clearly misguided accusations of Detective Homer, Clark is clearly realizing more and more that he was a patsy. But he’s also realising if he didn’t kill Floyd, someone else did, and that someone else was probably Carol. His warring instincts to clear his own name and cover for his mistress intermingle with his inability to allow anything untoward to be said about his best friend, for any misapprehensions about his character to be made, and that gives the sequences a compellingly unusual contour. The way the hour is edited and framed makes it totally unambiguous that Carol was using Clark to fulfil her own self-aggrandising agenda – confirmed by a preachy self-help audiobook imploring her to take something from every relationship that requires her investment, and a late assurance to Richard that she’ll always do whatever to make sure they’re okay – but there’s still tons of mystery around what Clark knows and what he doesn’t.
One of the things that Clark is adamant about in DTF St. Louis Episode 3 is that Floyd wasn’t using the dating app to meet men. And thus we get to see Floyd’s “date” with “Modern Love”, the Peter Sarsgaard-played small business owner who claimed to have had a “French kiss and ass play” encounter with Floyd that, at least to Homer, confirmed his homosexual double-life beyond a shadow of a doubt. The reality, though, turns out to be much funnier and more quietly charming. Floyd, without his reading glasses, thought Modern Love’s profile picture of David Bowie was a woman. As soon as he realised he was incorrect, he had already committed, and in fear of making Modern Love feel awkward or bad about his sexuality, he played along. David Harbour is really wonderful in this scene, and it’s the story of this encounter that Clark recounts to Homer to prove how fundamentally decent Floyd was. That’s why Clark is annoyed at the insinuation that Floyd was meeting men; it isn’t to protect his reputation as a straight guy, but to protect his reputation as someone so pure that he’d do virtually anything to spare another person discomfort.
This idea manifests most obviously in Floyd’s heartbreaking scenes with Richard, where he uses the concept of hostile architecture to typify how harsh and cruel the world can be to people who are different. But he also uses the hostile architecture to pull off a hilarious parallel bars routine to make the point that small improvements over time can deeply benefit a person, and that’s all Richard needs to do with his manners in order to make a friend, however long that might take. Floyd’s whole thing is that the kid needs to become comfortable with himself rather than change, and that was clearly the breakthrough Richard needed. It just so happens that almost as soon as he made it, the person responsible for it died, possibly killed as part of a complex get-rich-quick scheme orchestrated by his mother.
It’s difficult to look at Carol’s precise engineering of events – up to and including remaining completely in the dark about the insurance plan Clark set up for Floyd, for plausible deniability’s sake – as a murderous master plan. But it’s still early days yet, and it’s very likely that there’s much more still to be revealed. I can’t wait.
