Blood on Their Hands

The pattern moves into Catherine's basement: men brought home, drugged, strangled, dismembered, the smell explained away as taxidermy until even his grandmother demands answers. The episode is honest about the household's complicity — Catherine catches a drugged survivor, Ronald Flowers Jr., alive on her floor and puts him on a bus, and still the family closes ranks.

Flowers reports it and is not believed; Somsack Sinthasomphone escapes and is, briefly, believed — Dahmer's sexual-assault conviction earns him a year. Lionel's letter to the judge, asking for treatment, goes unread. Every institutional failure the season will spend seven more hours documenting gets a rehearsal here.