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There’s no point in beating around the bush when it comes to recounting the story of Jeffrey Dahmer, no percentage in soft-pedaling the nightmare. The second episode of Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer centers on the most infamous incident in the story of arguably this country’s most notorious serial killer. It entails the murder of a 14-year-old Lao kid, Konerak Sinthasomphone (Kieran Tamondong), whom Dahmer picks up in the process of buying booze (Boone’s Farm, specifically and heartbreakingly). It turns out Konerak is the older brother of a kid Dahmer had previously molested; Dahmer doesn’t recognize Konerak, but Konerak sure recognizes him.

But this doesn’t stop Konerak from following Jeff back to his apartment. Why? Because Jeff offers him $100 for photos, and his family needs the money.

In short order Konerak is drugged. A hole is drilled into his skull. Water and acid are injected into his brain. Awakening from unconsciousness while Jeff is gone, Konerak staggers through the apartment, out into the hall, and down into the street, where concerned neighbors led by recurring character Glenda gather in hopes of lending him a hand.

Then the cops show up. Hostile to Jeff’s Black neighbors and bigoted against his Asian victim, they dutifully escort the kid back up to Dahmer’s apartment, either fully buying into his story that Konerak is his 19-year-old inebriated boyfriend or too disgusted with the prospect of fully investigating a crime involving gay men that they let it all slide. (Their constant jokes about needing to take a shower or get de-loused following the encounter are all pulled directly from the case files, as is the hideous final call to the police that Glenda makes, in which the cop who took the initial call basically tells her not to worry and mind her own business.)

It’s a fucking case study in police bigotry and negligence, and in Jeffrey Dahmer’s ability to use his whiteness as a shield to protect himself from the authorities, and his homosexuality as a sword to keep them at arm’s length. It’s one of the most singularly depressing stories in the annals of serial killers, and believe me, I’ve read quite a few.

But it isn’t the episode’s sole concern. Flashbacks to Jeffrey’s elementary-school childhood are rich with informative details. As a loner an outcast, he bore witness to the way more popular kids would torment their one Black classmate. He would capture tadpoles and gift them to his teacher, who regifted them to a more popular kid, into whose house Jeff would sneak in order to retrieve them. They were his first kill, it seems, as he poured motor oil into the jar in which they swam to watch them die. 

Jeff’s parents, Lionel and Joyce (here depicted by Josh Braaten and Savannah Brown), were constantly at each other’s throats: Joyce was a pill-popping, suicidal horror show, and Lionel was an alternately verbally abusive and avoidant workaholic. Noticing his son’s budding interest in dead animals, roadkill, and, uh, biology, I guess, he’d help Jeff dissect dead raccoons retrieved from the side of the road. It’s his way of connecting with his son, who he feels has never been quite right since a hernia operation in which the anesthesia may have injured the kid’s brain. Not that this stopped Jeff from calling the ambulance after discovering his mother’s latest overdose, while his kid brother screams in his playpen from neglect.

Does his unpleasant upbringing excuse his nightmarish deeds as a teen (when he made his first kill by murdering a hitchhiker, an incident I’m sure we’ll see eventually) and adult? No. But we see how he slowly drifted out of the mainstream world as a grown-up: We catch up with him during a lonely and unsuccessful attempt to relocate to Miami after getting out of the Army. In neither place, where you would think homosexual (if clandestine) relationships were readily available, did he come out of his shell. And when he moves back home to live with his dad at his grandma’s place, he winds up stealing a mannequin from a menswear store and sleeping with it in his bed. 

This is what he wants: a physically ideal, completely compliant specimen to make love to. It’s why he steals the mannequin. It’s why he drills holes in his victims’ heads in an attempt to lobotomize them. It’s why he’s obsessed with, of all people, the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, even buying contact lenses to make himself look more like the sinister Sith Lord. He wants control, he wants the Dark Side to make men and boys into his pliant playthings, he wants to never, ever be left behind like he was by his feuding parents. 

Once again, cowriters Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy, led by director Clement Virgo, create a gruesome portrait of a broken person who can only find wholeness by breaking other people, quite literally down into their constituent body parts. He is both sad and contemptible, a shattered person who finds his meager pleasures only in shattering other people. The degree of difficulty inherent in handling this material is astronomical, but so far, they’ve pulled it off. I’m darkly excited to see where this ten-episode limited series goes. I’m anxious. I’m frightened. I’m sick. I’m watching good television.

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.

Tags Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story Netflix

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