Jimmy Keene can’t take it anymore.
It’s not the guard, Carter, who breaks him. Carter demands to know what government agency Jimmy is working for and offers to help him take down his presumed target, Larry Hall. Jimmy, rightfully suspicious of the smilingly sadistic guard, refuses to say. With that, his days may well be numbered.
It’s not the other inmates who break him either, now that word is out that he’s a snitch. They mean-mug him in the mess hall, and mob boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante himself shows up at his cell, telling a threatening story about how you just never know when you’re going to die.
It’s not the lack of contact with the outside world, either. His father, Big Jim, has another stroke, but there’s no way for him to know because Carter cut off his phone account. The prison psychiatrist who knows he’s undercover is on vacation, and his replacement isn’t contacting him on Jimmy’s behalf like she’s supposed to. And there’s no way for Jimmy to reach the FBI, especially once he’s thrown in solitary after his big blow-up.
But what breaks him, in the end, is prolonged exposure to Larry Dewayne Hall, the mousy Civil War reenactor, janitor, gravedigger, and serial killer. Eager to prove to Jimmy that — no matter what he may say — his stories of rape and murder are, in fact, true, he shows Jimmy his trove of sculpted birds: 21 in total, one for each of his victims. They correspond to dots on a map Larry has drawn — dots representing the burial sites Jimmy has been sent to unearth.
First gently, then insistently, Jimmy begs Larry to send the map to his victims’ parents so that they can know peace, sleep, and release.
“Never,” Larry says. Why? Because he’s about to get out of prison on appeal, and his life — his whole routine and all it entails — can continue as it did before.
That’s when Jimmy loses it.
“You’re not gonna win your appeal,” he says, with a force that surprises Larry. “No fucking way!”
“You demented fucking monster!” he says to the man he befriended.
With that, Larry attacks, knowing that Jimmy was sent by the district attorney (Robert Wisdom), who put him away. The two are dragged apart. Jimmy winds up in solitary, as directed by the prison psychiatrist, who has Larry’s best interests at heart. Denied a pen, a pencil, and ultimately food by the sadistic guards, he gnaws off his own fingertips and draws what he can remember of Larry’s map on the cell wall in his own blood. Even when he’s finally liberated by his psychiatrist, Dr. Zickerman, and Agent McCauley, all he wants is a pen so he can recreate the map — “before I’m no use,” as he puts it to one guard before breaking down in sobs.
Black Bird and its final episode wound up being about many things. It’s about the relationship between Jimmy and his ailing dad Big Jim, whose tears when he’s finally reunited with his freed son (Jimmy may not have been able to secure the locations of the bodies, but he gleaned enough details from Larry to put him away for good) mark one of the late actor Ray Liotta’s career-defining moments and brought me to tears myself.
It’s similarly about the relationship between Larry and his own family — his brother Gary, finally shaken out of deep denial about his brother’s misdeeds, begging Larry to confess in part to salve his own conscience over the time he and his brother raped a drunk hitchhiker together, at which point Gary first saw the killer in his brother’s eyes. And his stern, silent father, who burns the map and the carved birds rather than turn them over to the authorities — a sinister figure whose surface we barely scratch. (Larry and Gary’s mother, confined to her room due to her weight, remains completely and pointedly unseen.)
But ultimately, it’s about Jimmy Keene’s desperation to help the girls’ families Larry murdered. In other words, his discovery of a cause much bigger and more morally meaningful than his own freedom should his mission succeed. That’s why he could no longer sit there and listen as Larry detailed his crimes and gleefully anticipated his own likely release. That’s what made him blow up at Larry, what made him scream for the doctor or the warden or the FBI, what drove him to repeatedly infuriate his guards despite the punishments they doled out to him, what caused him to scrawl all over the cell walls in his own blood like a madman, what made him cry and feel like a failure even after McCauley tells him he’s nailed Larry. Even after he’s free, the judge commutes his sentence while wondering aloud where Jimmy’s overwhelming sense of entitlement went while in that “hell” he went to.
Those girls, their lives, their deaths, the love their families felt for them, and the love they felt for their families: These things are real to Jimmy in a way nothing else, not even his own plight, is.
That this shift in Jimmy works as well as it does is a testament to the brilliant acting of Taron Egerton in the role. On the one hand, it takes real skill to carve your body into the Greek-god shape he’s in for the course of the series and then, on the other hand, project a vulnerability and despair so total that this alpha male becomes like a babe in arms. His ability to lead Larry where he wants the conversation to go, then find himself totally overwhelmed by the result? That’s a two-step of confidence and panic that few actors could pull off.
And Paul Walter Hauser’s work as Larry is obviously singular stuff. He inhabits the role so totally, the wheezy high-pitched voice and the strange patterns of movement and slackness that define his body language, that you almost forget he’s acting at all. In this episode, he displays a viciousness only hinted at by his “stories” before; you now see what his victims saw before they died, which is horrifying.
In the end, we’re left with Jimmy on a plane, flirting with a flight attendant as though nothing about his fast-living, womanizing life has changed — but as “Lucky Man” by the Verve plays on the soundtrack, he looks out the window, down at the square-patterned fields that dot the American landscape. As Larry once told him, anything could be out there, waiting to be found. Jimmy’s ultimate punishment is that no matter how successful he winds up — Jimmy becomes both a businessman and a profiler of serial killers — he’ll never be free of the knowledge Larry shared with him during their awful friendship. Neither will we.
