Summary of Episode 3 of ‘Adolescence’: A Discussion

This episode is nothing like the one from Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. It’s quite different, really. As Francis Ford Coppola once remarked about comparing his influential film The Conversation, which delves into surveillance and subjectivity, to Michelangelo Antonioni’s related thriller Blow Up, he said, “What’s similar about them is obviously similar, and that’s where it ends.” The focus here is mainly on a woman in a room questioning a young man about a murder he committed and the culture of toxic masculinity that played a role in it. And that’s pretty much the extent of the similarities.

One significant contrast is the role of the camera — a vital third element in both these intense one-on-one scenes. It’s much more dynamic in this instance. In the fifth episode of Monsters, the camera slowly zooms in on Erik (played by Cooper Koch) as his attorney, Leslie Abramson (portrayed by Ari Graynor), encourages him to open up about the abuse he endured from his family. The camera essentially grips your head and forces you to witness the horrors unfolding before you. The narrowing frame creates a sense of suffocation and confinement, leading everything towards a singular point with no means of escape.

The team behind this episode — including co-creators and co-writers Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, director Philip Barantini, cinematographer Matthew Lewis, actor Owen Cooper as Jamie Miller, and Erin Doherty as Briony Ariston, a psychologist evaluating him — faced a more intricate challenge. While a static camera slowly closing in on Erik Menendez served its purpose in the previous episode, the complexity deepens here. There are varying sympathies, emotions, and intensities to navigate, not to mention Briony’s movements in and out of the interrogation room throughout the episode. Despite maintaining the appearance of a continuous shot, it demands a more dynamic camera approach to capture these shifting dynamics effectively.

So as Jamie and Briony talk — as he banters with her, confides in her, mocks her, shouts at her, stalks her, frightens her, throws tantrums in front of her, apologizes to her, and finally begs her to tell him she likes him — the camera is fluid. For long periods it will simply show us the pair in profile, or focus on one or the other as they talk, but it shifts from place to place in the interim, sometimes dramatically and sometimes so subtly you don’t even realize it until you notice Jamie’s on a different side of the screen now. This mirrors the easy, naturalistic way the two characters’ conversation flows between amity and hostility. 

The episode’s more complicated still when you factor in the journeys the audience is supposed to take with each character. When we meet Briony, we see that she’s determined to give the boy the most accurate assessment possible, even if it means putting in more work than her colleagues. We see her grimace her way through awkward interactions with Victor (Douglas Russell), an over-friendly guard at the mental health facility where Lyle has been imprisoned prior to sentencing, naturally eliciting audience sympathy. The guy’s not as bad as he seems — he’s not an out-and-out sleaze like, say, Dr. Chilton is to Clarice Starling at the asylum in The Silence of the Lambs, he’s just a lonely guy who hates his job and acts weird around  but you can feel her eagerness to get away, and you share it.

And in an enormously smart bit of business, we see that she’s brought a container of tiny marshmallows with her, to sprinkle into the kid’s hot chocolate. When she finally greets him for what we learn is their fifth session together, she’s all smiles. Given her clear competence and the mere fact that she talks to criminals and troubled children for a living, you’d expect nothing less.

How do you get this woman from there to where she needs to be at the end of the episode: unwilling to tell a desperate, pleading Jamie she likes him, not even as a lie?

More complicated still is the problem of Jamie himself. In several ways, the show has labored almost invisibly to keep him a sympathetic character, despite the horrific murder we’ve seen him commit. For one thing, we’ve only seen it from a distance, without sound, on a stationary security camera — this on a show that gives you a you are there view of basically everything, from arrests at gunpoint to putting marshmallows in hot chocolate. Adolescence could have presented the murder just as viscerally, but so far at least, they haven’t. 

We’ve also only ever seen his victim, Katie, as a photograph, on screen during the opening credits or slid across a table in an interrogation room. We’ve never heard her voice, and know her thoughts only in the form of emojis left on Instagram posts. Her best friend, Jade, is atypical compared to the usual sympathetic sobbing friends and family of a murder victim on a procedural — she’s angry, violent, at one point seemingly suicidal. She also says little about Katie beyond the fact that she was her only real friend. Katie’s family is absent altogether. I’m not even sure what their name is. In every way it can, Adolescence has made Jamie a more vital presence on the show than his victim, reflecting Detective Sergeant Frank’s comment that his story, not hers, would be remembered. The show is aware of what it’s doing, in other words.

Back to Jamie himself, our last glimpse of him was him crying in his devastated father Eddie’s arms after the screening of the footage. Eddie recoiled physically from Jamie’s touch at first before first barking at him, then holding him close. It’s a heartbreaking image irrespective of his guilt. Prior to that, he spent the entire episode as a terrified little boy, wetting his bed and calling for his dad. 

Again, this is atypical for murderers on TV, in a calculated fashion.

So now, when we catch up with him 7 month later, we can see that he’s calmer, we know that he’s older, and we hope that he’s wiser. Maybe he’s come to grips with the gravity of what he’s done. Maybe whatever acute crisis that provoked the killing has passed and he’s no longer that guy. Maybe he’s expressed regret, remorse, a desire to make amends. Nothing he says or does at first changes this impression.

Again, how do you get this boy from there to where he needs to be by the end of the episode: A Sméagol/Gollum-like creature so upsetting to encounter and think about that you actually understand Briony’s refusal to placate him by acting like he’s earned her affection, or anything but pity and disgust?

All of this falls on the shoulders of Cooper and Doherty, who deliver performances people will be thinking about all year. It’s simply astonishing that this is Cooper’s acting debut. He’s up, he’s down, he’s hot and cold, he’s brutish and vulnerable, he’s witheringly sarcastic like a teenager and desperate to please like a toddler. 

Doherty, by contrast, is what devotees of lucha libre refer to as a base. It’s her job to be solid, strong, and balanced, providing a human platform for her high-flying opponent to perform all his dazzling maneuvers. She emotes only when out of Jamie’s presence, or when his physical explosiveness simply batters down her defenses — or, in the end, when she can hold it back no more and grills him about what death really means before abruptly ending their sessions as he’s pulled away screaming by the guard.

What changes her so dramatically? Jamie does. He does it with his repeated insistence that he didn’t kill her — the video is “fake news,” he says — which is what prompts her to lecture him about how Katie’s death “extinguished the possibility of her future life.” We’ve already seen she can’t outright contradict her patients — she won’t tell him his dad wasn’t ashamed of his lack of athletic ability when he says he suspects this, she won’t tell him he’s not ugly when he insists that he is — so she can’t simply say “Yes you did kill her, you awful little shit.” This lecture, and her subsequent cutoff of their contact, is as close as she can come to telling him what she really thinks.

Briony is horrified by Jamie — by his vacuous insistence on his innocence, by his victim-blaming, but also by his intake and regurgitation of manosphere hate speech regarding women. Even though he doesn’t consider himself redpilled or an incel — this after all is why he killed Katie — he’s still bought into a lot of that bullshit, mostly as a way of reinforcing his idea that he’s fundamentally ugly and unlikeable by girls. This kind of poisonous masculinity messes up the men who hear it first before it makes its way via those men to their female victims. I think Briony is gutted and sobbing and saying “Oh God” by the end of the episode because she’s seen what thinking people, women most especially, are up against.

What seems to get to her the most, what seems to be the reason she calls it quits as if she’s heard everything she needs to hear, is the rationale that almost accidentally escapes from Jamie’s lips regarding the killing. He had the knife to scare Katie, yes, but with a purpose: He had formulated at least a vague plan to rape her. Instead, he “only” murdered her. But here he sits, considering this a moral victory, a mark of the superiority of his character to the classmates he believe would have sexually assaulted her. 

In fact, the entire Jamie/Katie dispute has its origins in a previous sexual violation of Katie. She’d sent a topless photo to a classmate on whom she had a crush, and he promptly spread it around the school, leading not only to having this intimate photo exposed in and of itself but to cruel comments about the size of Katie’s chest. 

Because he’s internalized manosphere talking points about how most men need to “trick” shallow, contemptible women in order to get the sex they want, because he believes he’s one of these irredeemable losers and has no other choice, because he’s heard it’s easier this way — whatever the case, Jamie asks Katie out after all of this happens, figuring she’d be “weak” and thus more likely to accept. 

The use of the word “weak” is the growl of a predator coming out of the mouth of a self-perceived three-legged house cat. But his eventual performance of the role of a predator was all too real. It’s also projection, in that he obviously thinks he’s weak and undateable. Her laughing rejection of him — “I’m not that desperate” — reinforces this belief. 

A healthy society would teach young men “Hey, there’s plenty of fish in the sea, and oh also maybe next time don’t clumsily try to take advantage of an emotionally devastated and vulnerable fish while you’re out there.” This is not a healthy society, however, and Jamie brings its sickness home for Briony. She even gags slightly after the interview, nauseated like she’d just ingested something toxic. Which she has. We all have.

This is the best hour of television I’ve seen all year.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.