‘DTF St. Louis’ Episode 5 Recap: There’s No ‘I’ in Threesome

What Floyd Smernitch, Clark Forrest, and Carol Love-Smernitch had together is a hard thing to categorize, and each new revelation makes it even harder. This episode of DTF St. Louis sees our intrepid investigators Donahue Homer (amazing name) and Jodie Plumb dig deeper into the nature of this unusual arrangement, while flashbacks show us things even the detectives don’t yet know. The result is a portrait of people who grow more interesting to look at by the week.

Speaking of looking at these people, the episode beings with an incredible cold open, consisting of nothing but Ken Burns slo-mo camera pans over Floyd’s old “nude Indiana Jones” Playgirl shoot while Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” plays on the soundtrack. It’s funny, because this is clearly not what Bob had in mind when he wrote the song. But it’s also poignant, because when Floyd Smernitch hears “Forever Young,” isn’t this exactly what he’d think about — a time long ago, when he was in great shape, before his penis got smashed?

We never learn how that happens, by the way, despite his tantalizing promise to Clark and a continuation of that whole shaggy dog story about saving someone from traffic on his way to a job interview. Now it also involves getting smash flat onto the concrete when a car knocks a street sign onto him, discovering the joys of ASL with casts on both wrists from the sign incident, and having a hook-handled umbrella ripped from between his legs when the wind from a passing motorcycle blows it into the air. (He catches it like he’s Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain.) The story goes on for so long he never even gets to the dick-smashing part, which apparently occurred much later, after Carol reads him the riot act for coming back from a job interview with nothing but two broken arms and some rudimentary sign language.

That right there is the trademark blend of humor and pathos that makes the Clark/Carol/Floyd love triangle so fascinating. It only gets more interesting when we finally pick up from the premiere episode’s cliffhanger and learn what happened when Floyd tells Clark he knows about him and Carol. Apparently, Carol already told him about it, and he just wants there to be honesty between him and his best friend. Well, that, and he’d like to watch. It would make him feel included, like they’re sharing the experience together.

That works great for a while. If anything it deepens Clark and Carol’s affection for Floyd. His way of describing how their happiness feels to him is so heartfelt and genuine. He offers sex tips and helps them get a retroactive discount on their hotel room. At one point they watch in awe as he leaps from his closet hiding spot and saves the life of some poor deaf and blind kid, who nearly stumbled into the hotel pool while trying to find his way to the homecoming dance in the hotel ballroom.

Floyd, however, has a problem: He can’t get “full on” — if he uses this phrase for “fully erect” once, he uses it fifty times — due to his “weird dick” and his lack of attraction to Carol thanks to her umpire gig. After hearing Clark’s description of what he finds beautiful about Carol, he wants to feel that same closeness for himself. (He’ll also wear his readers, per Clark’s suggestion that worsening vision among middle-aged men makes sexual details harder to discern and thus less arousing than they used to be. It’s a theory!)

When Floyd makes his pitch for renewed intimacy to Carol, she’s both moved by his desire and fully into it. Clark’s appearance on the scene breaks the spell, since the ask also includes Clark watching from the closet just like Floyd has been doing. You can see how crestfallen she is at this, realizing that in some ways, the two men are closer to each other than she is to either. 

Then Floyd turns it around. He makes it clear to them both that he’s concerned Clark may feel guilty about fucking Carol and thus making Floyd feel “small and insignificant”; this would be Floyd’s way of putting Clark’s conscience at ease. Clark buying that life insurance policy for him set Floyd’s heart to rest in much the same way. 

“You’re the sweetest guy,” Carol tells Floyd with all sincerity. “That’s why I fell in love with you. There’s no one anywhere like you.”

Then Floyd signs back and forth to Clark, who can understand ASL while Carol cannot, and the spell is broken again. The next thing you know she’s asking what a high dose of Amphezyne, the boner medication Floyd very much isn’t supposed to mix with the blood thinners he takes for his curved penis, would do to him. Oh, it would kill him? You don’t say!

All of the evidence is pointing to Carol, obviously. She knew about the Amphezyne. She had the second recumbent bike, which Homer and Plumb discover in her garage. She had the life insurance policy in place, and stood to make money from the death of the man whose innate goodness is, to Carol, his only worthwhile quality. That’s a lot, obviously, but it doesn’t pay the credit card bill.

Then there’s her own behavior to consider. Motivated by her weird self-help tapes, she acts like a real weirdo when meeting with Plumb and Homer, repeatedly asking that they speak up and cussing to establish dominance or something. She lied about the Jamba Juice order. (She’s a Watermelon Breeze, not a Go Getter.) She hid the bike. She pretended not to know about the life insurance policy at all, which is a half truth at best. I’d suspect her too.

(At this point I’d like to throw out my dark horse candidate for the killer, Eimy Forrest, the one person party to all this who’s not involved in “the experience” and, you’d think, would therefore be the most pissed off about it. But this is a scurrilous and unfounded accusation…for now.)

There’s one more piece of the puzzle to consider. During one of her not-at-all-suspsicious-sounding chats with the cops, Carol loudly proclaims it’s illegal to ask her about any prior legal convictions. This, they figure out from the statute she listed, is because whatever she did has been expunged or sealed. I’m guessing her first husband, “a real asshole” according to Floyd who has not been seen or heard from once during all of this, may have gotten what was coming to him, but again, this is scurrilous and unfounded speculation.

It may not be for long, though. The episode ends with Plumb reluctantly employing a quasi-legal workaround for receiving sealed records. If you fake a job application to your police department or unit in someone’s name, that person’s full record, sealed or unsealed, is sent to the head of that unit automatically. As the head of her suburb’s special crimes unit, Plumb can easily exploit this loophole in the system, one which makes that stuffy old pussycat Donahue Homer feel a lot less benign than he used to.

17:39 IT FOLLOWS SHOT

While this episode isn’t quite as visually powerful as some of its predecessors, it still contains several fascinating flourishes. Shots of the characters are used as interstitials, with the juxtaposition serving as commentary about their involvement in the events being depicted. The appearance of a guy wearing sunglasses and a tuxedo standing in the middle of a green field and marching slowly toward our threesome in broad daylight is mightily unnerving, in a Kubrickian/It Follows way, at least until Floyd figures out it’s just a perfectly nice disabled high school kid. Interiors are set in rooms with bold colors and shot from interesting angles that highlight the furnishings and architecture of the space. 

That last bit is a distinctly David Lynch flourish, one that pops up many times in Twin Peaks. The constant repetition of certain phrases — “that’s a lot,” “no way José,” “full on,” “that was weird, she was weird” — also has the air of Lynch and Mark Frost’s proto–cringe comedy awkward dialogue on that show. Homer, who is on an odyssey into suburbs he felt would be safe and normal compared to the cases he’s worked in big cities like Chicago and St. Louis, is much like Agent Cooper, discovering that my blue heaven is a strange and interesting place.

10:12 FLOYD GOING LIKE “WELL?”

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.