Last week’s episode of “Black Bird” largely focused on Jimmy (Taron Egerton) and Larry (Paul Walter Hauser) cementing their friendship and digging into their respective pasts. And it concluded with Larry’s hinting at the fact that he wasn’t guilty of sexually harassing and killing one girl. He is guilty of doing so to many of them. But before Jimmy could get more out of him, their meeting came to a close, and they went their separate ways for the day. The episode ended with a conversation between Larry and Gary (Jake McLaughlin), which led Larry to believe that his release from the jail was imminent.
Spoilers Ahead
McCauley And Miller Find One Of Hall’s Potential Burial Spots
“Black Bird” Episode 5, titled “The Place I Lie,” opens with Jessica Roach’s (Laney Stiebing) narration, where she talks a bit about her life and the concept of death. Then we cut to the present day, where Jimmy is making his way to the therapist. And on his way, he thinks everyone in the jail is looking at him in a shifty way. But it becomes clear that that’s all in Jimmy’s head because he’s unsure if his truth is out in the open. Upon reaching the therapist’s office, he finds out that Dr. Zicherman (Christopher B. Duncan) is unavailable and someone else is filling in for him. Jimmy is apprehensive about the whole situation but eventually starts talking to her. He realizes that the doctor is subtly hinting at his relationship with Hall and tells him to tread carefully in that direction.
Roach’s narration resumes where she talks about going to the beach. Then we see McCauley and Miller (Greg Kinnear) going over the Tricia Reitler (Rachel Looney) case and how Hall drove the police in circles. Miller is apparently convinced that Reitler is actually somewhere along that route. So, McCauley says she is going to go through the reports again. We briefly see Jimmy looking at Hall’s empty cell before the narrative cuts back to McCauley and Miller driving on the route that Hall took the police. They do notice a solitary gas station but don’t think too much about it. Jimmy and Hall sit down for a conversation, and he gets him talking about his Civil War Reenactments. And Hall quickly comes to the topic of consent and the youngest girl he has ever been with. However, that conversation is interrupted by a CO.
McCauley and Miller eventually zero in on the construction at one of the intersections on the route, i.e., the gas station. They get the employee at the counter to talk about his tenure at the place, how long the station has been open, and the contact details of the owner. While McCauley calls up the owner, Miller gets some more information about car repair shops or auto parts dealers. He does mention someone called John Dickey Hansen, who works up the road. McCauley gets off the call and tells Miller that the gas station opened in the Spring of 1994 and that they started construction in the middle of Summer ’93. Miller curses at Larry Hall, thereby confirming that their suspicions are true. Hall was driving the police in circles around that particular area because that’s where Reitler’s body is buried.
Jimmy Finds Out How Truly Horrible Hall Is
Gigante (Tony Amendola) confronts Jimmy about his plans to peddle drugs through the jail. Jimmy says that it failed in the conceptual phase. Gigante points out that Carter has returned and says that when a person has nowhere else to go for help, they come to him and remain indebted to him forever. Jimmy apologizes to Gigante for his indiscretion, and he accepts it. Then he comes to the topic of looking into Jimmy’s life in Milwaukee. He says that he is popular there, but nobody knows Jimmy directly. Jimmy makes a sly joke about it, and Gigante laughs at it, but in a disapproving way, which indicates that he knows that Jimmy isn’t who he is posing to be. Larry has another chat with the therapist, and he reveals that he’s in a good mood because of his legal appeal and his friendship with Jimmy.
Jessica’s narration resumes as she talks about her first romantic experience. McCauley and Miller arrive at Dickey’s shop. Miller asks if he knows Larry, and he recognizes him. He says that he thought Larry was creepy, how he looked like someone who was unloved and talked to young girls. Dickey mentions that after Larry hung out for a while, they had to shoo him away because he used to make the girls uncomfortable, including his daughter Audrey. McCauley says that they’ll wait there to talk to Audrey. We briefly hear Jessica talking about the time she and her sister got sneakers before going back to Jimmy’s efforts to get in touch with Zicherman, or James, or anyone. But it doesn’t work, and he gives up. In the courtyard, he sees Carter telling every group in the jail that Jimmy is a snitch (because Jimmy didn’t get him the money).
James (Ray Liotta) has an unproductive call with the credit card agent, which angers him a lot. So he goes out for a drive. Jimmy pays Larry a visit at the woodshop (because he’s the only person he can trust in there now). They talk about the wooden birds Larry makes. Jimmy brings up the topic of Larry being a child molester, and Larry starts laughing at him. He does say that he hasn’t raped anyone in his life. He thinks he had sex with them. He rationalizes his “hatred” towards women because of his unlikability, while comparing Jimmy’s attractiveness with his own. And finally, he starts to talk about Jessica Roach. Initially, it seems like he is talking about how he approached Jessica, and she just got away. However, then he gets into the horrid details about how he essentially raped and killed her. The details are so scary that Jimmy literally tears up.
‘Black Bird’ Episode 4: Ending Explained: McCauley And Miller Find Jessica Roach’s Bike
Audrey talks to McCauley and Miller. She says that Larry never said anything particularly gross. He always sounded “off.” When Miller asked how “off” he sounded, Audrey said he would talk about their ankles and earlobes, and then he would sit at one of the benches in the park and stare at them. She says that when they confronted him about it, he talked about cleaners containing lye and intended to show them the stuff that was in his van. But they never went with him. McCauley asks Audrey if she knows someone who did go with him to his van. Audrey says that there’s no one there who did because they were all creeped out by him. She mentions that, after a point, Larry started to give her stuff, which ranged from earrings to ballet flats. Miller asks if she still has them and Audrey says that they were put up in a lost and found sale.
Audrey says that there’s one thing that’s still there. She takes the officers to the storage unit behind the shop and reveals the last thing Larry gave her: a bike. McCauley and Miller realize exactly what that is. Jessica resumes her narration one last time, and she talks about all the things that she wanted to own. She says that when she was six, she wanted to have a goldfish. When she was nine, she wanted to have a pack of butterfly hair clips. And the one thing that she had to wait for until her thirteenth birthday was her mountain bike. Finally, she says that she has lived for around 5000 days and that all that time belongs to her. She says that one can die, but they can’t “unlive.” She recaps all the memorable moments in her life, thereby establishing the fact that she isn’t defined by what Larry did to her. She is more than that incident.
The episode of “Black Bird” ends with Edmund Beaumont (Robert Wisdom) saying that the discovery of the bike is not enough to keep Larry in jail. So, McCauley asks him, what will be enough? Beaumont says that he doesn’t know. Jimmy and Larry return to their respective cells. James sits outside the jail. Larry calls out to Jimmy, but he doesn’t respond because he is crying uncontrollably as he is unable to digest the kind of monster Larry is.
See More: ‘Black Bird’ Ending, Explained – Does Jimmy Succeed In Getting The Confessions Out Of Larry?
