Clarice Theory: Starling's Long Lost Brother Is The Show's Big Villain
Warning: SPOILERS for Clarice season 1.
Clarice season 1's secret shadowy villain could be the long-lost younger brother of Clarice Starling (Rebecca Breeds). Picking up a year after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice sets FBI Special Agent Starling on a hunt for new serial killers as part of ViCAP, the Bureau's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program which was created by Attorney General Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson), who personally recruited Clarice. However, Starling immediately stumbled on a greater conspiracy that may have its origins in her own traumatic past.
Clarice wasn't happy to leave Behavioral Sciences to work for ViCAP and her new boss, Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz), but Ruth Martin forced her into her serial killer-hunting squad because of her very public reputation for "hunting monsters". Starling became a celebrity after she found and killed the serial killer Jame Gumb AKA Buffalo Bill (Simon Northwood) in The Silence of the Lambs, although Clarice was left horribly traumatized by the experience. Starling's contentious beginnings with ViCAP saw her investigate the bodies of women found in the Anacostia River that appeared to be the work of a serial killer. Despite Martin's demands that ViCAP publicly declares a new serial killer as their target, Clarice's instincts told her there was a greater conspiracy at play. Starling defied her orders and told the media that the suspect she apprehended, Karl Wellig (Kris Holden-Reid), was not a serial killer.
In Clarice episode 3, "Are You Alright?", ViCAP was humiliated when Karl Wellig was murdered in their own headquarters on their watch. This proved that Starling was correct about a bigger conspiracy involving drug trials and parents with children with special needs. Clarice continued her own investigation, which led her to Dr. Marilyn Welker (Natalie Brown), who was secretly posing as her twin sister Luanne. Felker attacked and drugged Starling, holding her captive and keeping her sedated in her hospital. Ultimately, Starling outwitted Felker and managed to escape captivity as ViCAP, including her best friend Ardelia Mapp (Devyn A. Tyler), came to her rescue.
However, while she was on drugs and hallucinating, Clarice encountered the actual villain behind the conspiracy, who came to the hospital and stopped her initial escape attempt. Fascinatingly, the confused and sedated Starling thought the silhouetted man was her own father, who died when Clarice was just a child. Meanwhile, Clarice has compellingly expanded Starling's backstory as established by The Silence of the Lambs and the series retconned new details about her upbringing. It's possible Clarice is making everything come full circle so that the horror Agent Starling is enduring now stems from the family she left behind.
Clarice episode 2, "Ghosts of Highway 20", dropped the bombshell that Clarice has a younger brother and a younger sister, although the drama of the episode focused on the little brother she left behind. In The Silence of the Lambs film, Clarice was an only child when her father, a town marshal in West Virginia, was shot by a robber. Marshal Starling held on for a month before he died and the orphaned Clarice was sent to her mother's cousin's sheep and horse ranch in Montana. Clarice then ran away after she was horrified by the slaughter of the spring lambs, and the ranchers sent her to a Lutheran orphanage.
While the film's popularity made this history of Clarice Starling the best-known version, Clarice hews more closely to Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs novel. In the book, Clarice's mother was alive when her father was killed. Her mother tried to keep their family together for two years by working as a motel maid and as a cook, but she was unable to afford it and this is why Clarice was sent to her relatives in Montana. This is the story the young Clarice (Maya McNair) tells her late father (Derek Moran) during her dream in Clarice episode 5, "Get Right With God".
Still, there are numerous holes in Clarice Starling's life story that need to be filled in since details of what happened after she was sent to the orphanage are scarce and all that's known afterward is that Starling went to college at the University of Virginia, where she double-majored in psychology and criminology.
It makes perfect sense that everything happening in Clarice ties into Clarice Starling herself, and the series has heaped lots of clues that the events of Starling's past are informing and even determining her present. Clarice is now dealing with two sets of traumas concurrently; she is haunted by her more recent ordeal against Buffalo Bill but there are also ghosts of her past she has to come to terms with. Starling's PTSD is manifesting in hallucinations like Buffalo Bill's death's head moths swarming her and even finding herself trapped in the stone and dirt pit Bill sent his victims to in The Silence of the Lambs.
Meanwhile, Clarice's memories of her tragic upbringing are also bubbling to the surface. While this was a riveting trick employed by The Silence of the Lambs film where Starling's history informed her hunt for Buffalo Bill, Clarice also seems to be doing the same deft blending of Starling's past and her present hunt for the heart of the conspiracy she's facing. At this point, Clarice only has a few details of how the murder victims and the clinical drug trials tie together, but the fact that, while under sedation, Starling also hallucinated speaking to her dead father has to be more than a coincidence. Something about the mystery she finds herself mired in may well be purposefully triggering Clarice's memories, guilt, and regrets about her life after her beloved dad died. And this could be because the author of her current pain is actually also a member of her immediate family.
The real hook for the theory that Clarice's own brother is the villain is that she misidentified the man as her father when he appeared at the hospital. It could just have been the drugs in her system and her own desperation to escape at play, but Clarice was genuinely confused at the mystery villain's physical similarity to her dad. If Clarice is right that they resemble each other, the simplest explanation may very well be that it's because this is Clarice's younger brother all grown up. This would be set up by why "Ghosts of Highway 20" made such a point of Clarice having a brother in the first place. This also means that Clarice is plotting a complex, long-form story that will not only shed new light on Starling's past but also apply it to her present circumstances the same way The Silence of the Lambs did.
There is so much yet to be revealed about what happened to the family Clarice left behind in West Virginia, and why she was sent to an orphanage instead of being returned to her mother after she ran away from the Montana ranch. Numerous questions would include whether Clarice ever saw the rest of her family again? If not, why not? And whatever happened to them? However, a long-lost or estranged Starling brother who is now an adult would certainly know about Clarice, especially after she became famous for killing Buffalo Bill in the prior year. If the mystery villain behind the conspiracy is Clarice's brother, then she could be facing her most personal enemy yet. And Clarice's brother may just hate his big sister for leaving him behind when he needed her most decades before the events of Clarice.
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