The Outsider Episode 3 Recap

Spoilers ahead for this recap of The Outsider Episode 3.

We begin this episode in the barn where episode 2 left off. The local police are scouring the barn and taking the clothes into evidence. Last week, I thought the clothes had been covered in blood, but it’s actually a clear, gooey substance.

Police officer Jack makes his way to the barn to investigate – but not without stopping first at the strip club to drink a beer and be rude and obnoxious. Is this guy an asshole or what?

But once he gets to the barn, he briefly spots a mysterious figure. Then something happens to him – to the back of his neck. He’s in pain, but we can’t quite see what’s going on.

More Mystery, Few Answers

This episode moved slowly, but in a way that really made me feel the weight of everyone’s frustration and grief. And it expertly weaves in small details of the Andersons’ and Maitlands’ stories.

I love how this series isn’t focusing so much on the supernatural, but more on the heavier, somber elements of grief and how families deal with it. The camerawork is also of note. Scenes are often shot through a doorway, at someone’s back or from an odd angle, which makes us feel… just a little bit off.

Jessa is still being visited my “The Man” and she tells her mother she needs to relay a message to Ralph – and only Ralph. Ralph comes over and Jessa tells him he needs to stop or something bad is going to happen. Ralph tries to question her a bit more, but Glory objects.

Ralph’s wife Jeannie relates to Glory and Glory allows Jeannie to talk more with Jessa. This scene was really fascinating because we find out that Jessa is not afraid of The Man, but he makes her angry. This left me wondering if the The Man can somehow influence feelings of the people around him.

And through a wonderful scene between Glory and Jeannie, we learned that Terry was a wonderful father – the kid of father that could make his children feel safe and understood.

Meanwhile, the reports come back inconclusive on the “goo” that covered the clothing found in the barn. Nobody knows what it is. Things get even stranger when they find that the fingerprints on the belt buckle match Terry’s… but a much older version of Terry. Hmmm…

We also see Jack again with some bubbly-looking skin on the back of his neck, and it’s obvious he’s in pain.

Meeting Holly

Holly Gibney, played by Cynthia Erivo, is a private investigator with an intellectual gift for remembering facts and figures, an innate ability to read people, and an eccentric, almost savant, personality to go with it. She is fascinating to me, and I get the feeling there’s a lot more to her than we know so far.

Holly is enlisted by Ralph to investigate the Maitlands’ visit to Dayton. She doesn’t learn much from the hotel or mall security, but she does discover another case similar to Terry’s.

We see brief scenes of a man in prison throughout this episode and we’re not sure where he fits into the story until the very end. He worked at the facility where Terry’s father is living and was charged with murdering two young girls. Interesting!

He gets a piece of mail with a drawing that says “child killer” on it. And we know that his fellow inmates don’t really approve of child killers. We see the man sharpening a lens he popped out of his glasses, and in the end, he slits his own throat just as another inmate was coming to kill him. This hospital worker is obviously not a killer and we get the sense that he didn’t kill the girls any more than Terry killed Frankie.

What Did We Learn in The Outsider Episode 3?

So things are coming together a little more. There is obviously someone – or something – that is “taking people over” for periods of time. My guess is that this entity takes a person’s form, but ages quickly or can’t hold the form for long. The gooey stuff probably comes into play here.

And did something happen at that hospital/facility where Terry’s dad is? Remember Maya said Terry cut his wrist? It’s also extremely curious that they didn’t even know Terry had died and that the dad had started deteriorating more rapidly since Terry’s last visit.

I’m still curious where Jack, and his infected neck, come into play. In Terry’s case, he didn’t have any knowledge of what happened to him. I had thought the same thing was going to happen to Jack, that he would go about his life but later it would be revealed that the “other him” did something terrible.

But it seems like something different is happening to Jack. My sense is that it has to do with Ralph. He’s obviously not going to “stop” like Jessa told him to, so with Jack being someone that works with him, I think he’s going to deliver that message another way. We see him at the end of the episode muttering “Whatever you need me to do. Whatever you need me to do.”