WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Clarice Season 1, Episode 5, "Get Right With God."
CBS' Clarice has given fans a deeper insight into the mind of Agent Starling (Rebecca Breeds) as she tries to get over her Buffalo Bill trauma. She's bringing a lot of baggage to the job in Baltimore as she tries to prove to her VICAP unit in the FBI that she's worth the gamble and not just someone who lucked into solving the nation's biggest case. But in the show's latest episode, it becomes clear Clarice's mental health is as frail as ever when she's forced to relive her worst nightmares.
Clarice is adamant about following through on her conspiracy theory regarding a drug trial that scientists and politicians are covering up, and the trail leads her to Marilyn Felker, a doctor that's gone missing. However, when she visits Marilyn's twin sister, Luanne, at a desolate medical facility for people on the verge of dying, she discovers Luanne's actually comatose and Marilyn's parading as her, using the home as a cover-up.
Marilyn's worried Clarice will expose her, ruining her chances of getting her and Luanne out the country, so she knocks her out and drugs her up until her shadowy superiors tell her what to do. As it turns out, Marilyn did have something to do with the trial that went awry, but while Clarice warns her she's being set up and will soon be discarded by her bosses, she ignores her. Marilyn keeps abusing, torturing and upping the doses, fracturing Clarice's mind even more.
At the center of her hallucinations, she sees her dad, who got killed in the line of duty years ago. He appears as a zombie with a gunshot hole in the back of his head as they talk about her issues with the rest of her family and how she got scarred seeing animals being put down on the Virginia farm. On one occasion, as she escapes, she ends up running into Marilyn's handler, thinking he's her dad, only to get knocked out because she couldn't distinguish the blurred lines of reality.
Clarice even starts hallucinating Bill, who spits the moths he kept at her, and she ends up in that suffocating well from The Silence of the Lambs. It's a mind-bending trip, with Marilyn not caring one bit about how her psychosis affects her. Delirious or not, she needs answers from the FBI agent, but thankfully, Clarice is able to get rescued by her comrades.
Unfortunately, when she tries to patch things up with her friend, Ardelia, she tells her now's not the time. It's not because she's still bitter over their dispute in the office, but because she knows Clarice is broken, which informs why the titular character will be resuming therapy when the series starts back up.
Starring Rebecca Breeds, Michael Cudlitz, Kal Penn, Nick Sandow, Lucca De Oliveira, Devyn A. Tyler and Marnee Carpenter, Clarice will return Apr. 1 and air Thursdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
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