WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for HBO's The Outsider.
As HBO's The Outsider continues to have the shape-shifting Grief Eater evading the Georgia authorities, bit by bit the cops are losing their handle on things. They can't explain how people are being framed for child killings and as much as they're garnering evidence based on science, Holly (Cynthia Erivo) keeps trying to tell them they're facing a supernatural enemy.
However, after the Grief Eater, also known as "El Coco," starts mentally assaulting her to the point her sanity's being eroded too, it seems the show's running out of worthy investigators. All this changes, though, in the sixth episode "The One About the Yiddish Vampire," as two new unofficial detectives pop up.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF JEANNIE
Ralph (Ben Mendelsohn) is officially off the case of Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) but he's still helping the Cherokee City cops as they know Terry was elsewhere when the Grief Eater took his form. However, he's been corrupted himself with memories and dreams of his son's death by cancer, and ignoring warnings from the Maitland girls about the monster coming after him. It explicitly sent a message through them to tell him to stay away but adults think the girls are just experiencing PTSD and not actually getting visits from the Hooded Man the Grief Eater sometimes takes the shape of.
His wife Jeannie (Mare Winningham), though, is sat down by it one night in her kitchen, thinking it's a dream. It's really the monster, however, as she cuts her foot on broken glass and has proof this happened, and once more, he tells her to tell Ralph to stay away or their family will be slaughtered. She sketches the Hooded Man the next day but Ralph ignores it. However, when she finds another sketch of the same person, she realizes she was right. This was drawn by a kid who saw the Hooded Man next to a van Terry was accused of keeping to kill kids, so seeing as both Jeannie and this kid from Tennessee never met each other, the fact they drew the same person says a lot.
Jeannie eventually works with Holly as she knows what they're dealing with and they use blue light on the chair in their dining room to prove someone did visit her that night. She now has DNA to trace to the Maitland incident as clues were found indicating the creature was shedding. Ralph's team has DNA from that murder so Jeannie wants them to match it up and see what new strands will appear as she knows everything she experienced can help take the killer down.
THE SMARTEST COP IN DAYTON
Andy (Derek Cecil) struck up a romance with Holly as she scoured Dayton for video evidence on Terry, which opened the can of worms about a shape-shifter existing. She's gone cross-country tracking cases and when she does meet up for trysts with Andy, he can tell this case is wearing her down. He sneaks some information from her, however, and starts digging into the spate of child murders himself to aid her.
His latest breakthrough comes when he goes back into decades of killings with doppelgängers used as the excuse of these perps. The criminals were executed or died otherwise, but Andy notices a pattern that not even Holly deciphered. It's around three weeks to a month before similar killings occur so he's cracked the vicious cycle of feeding. He also starts working on when the shape-shifting occurs as he realizes it has to find a new host to carry on with the mission.
However, he can't tell exactly how it corrupts pawns and mind-controls them, as he doesn't know this info from Holly just yet. But seeing as Jack, a Georgia cop, is working under the thumb of the Grief Eater, and he currently has Holly as his hostage, Andy could be poised to get more intel once she survives. He's never doubted her so they could become a Dynamic Duo if she lives, given he's already blown her other colleagues out the water in terms of how fast he works and unlocks doors.
Starring Ben Mendelsohn, Cynthia Erivo, Bill Camp, Mare Winningham, Julianne Nicholson, Paddy Considine, Jeremy Bobb, Yul Vazquez, Marc Menchaca and Jason Bateman, The Outsider airs on HBO on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.