'DTF St. Louis' Episode 2 Recap: Did Carol Murder Her Husband?

In the previous episode of HBO’s DTF St. Louis, meteorologist Clark Forrest was arrested for the murder of his friend and co-worker, Floyd Smernitch. As per the toxicology report, someone had mixed doses of pharmaceutical amphetamine in Floyd’s canned drink, which stopped his heart and led to his death. During the course of the investigation, Detective Homer and Detective Plumb found CCTV footage that established that Clark was present at the crime scene at the time of the murder, and his phone records revealed that he was having an affair with Floyd’s wife, Carol Love, which gave him motive to commit the crime. So, with substantial evidence in hand, Detective Homer arrested Clark from his news station and locked him up so he could bring him in to stand trial. However, the second episode turned the entire investigation upside down, as Detective Plumb found out that it wasn’t Clark who had initiated the affair. Instead, it was Floyd’s wife, Carol, who might have honey-trapped Clark, as she was looking for a way to get over her miserable married life. But if that was the case, then she could have simply given Floyd a divorce. Why go to such extreme lengths and kill him? Well, the episode didn’t answer this particular question, but it did reveal a lot of other things, so without any further ado, let’s jump straight into it.

Spoiler Alert

Clark vs. Floyd

One of the things that you need to look out for in these kinds of mystery thriller shows is that much of the detail they’ll feed you is nothing more than a red herring. The initial episodes never give you a complete picture, and spend all their time trying to mislead you, but unfortunately that’s all the information we have right now, so we have to work around it. The second episode suggested that Carol wasn’t happy in her marriage with Floyd; he had been trying really hard to land a decent job, but every interview he walked into went worse than the previous one. The thing is, Floyd was an artist. He wasn’t cut out for a corporate job, but simply being an artist doesn’t pay the bills, right? In the past, Floyd used to model for an adult magazine, but now that he is a family man, he can’t do that anymore. He tried various gigs, but nothing stuck, and it was Carol who had to pay the price of his failure. Along with her day job, Carol had to do some side gigs to keep the family afloat, but still, it wasn’t enough. She was making too many sacrifices for Floyd, and you can say that he was grateful for it, but Carol didn’t want to spend the rest of her life like that. This was when Clark entered her life. 

A week after Floyd started working at WTGK, Floyd and Carol invited Clark and his wife, Eimy, for a cornhole party in their backyard. During their first conversation, Clark told Carol that, other than anchoring weather news, he also owned a deep-sea demolition company (we don’t know if this was true or if Clark was just trying to impress Carol). To Carol, Clark seemed like a man who knew what he wanted from life and had everything sorted. He was rich, famous, and successful, things she wanted Floyd to be. But other than that, in Clark, she saw a man who could easily be swayed. Clark had told Carol that he was a regular at Jamba Juice, which, coincidentally, was right near Carol’s office, Purina Corporate. But you see, Carol wasn’t desperate. She liked Clark, but she didn’t want to cheat on Floyd, not until things got really messed up. Floyd’s 14-year-old car finally gave up, and Carol offered to let Floyd her car instead, which meant she would have to take a bus to work. I know it was Carol’s decision, and it was she who was ready to make this sacrifice, but Floyd shouldn’t have accepted. I mean, he’s not the overthinking kind, but he should at least have considered all the sacrifices Carol was already making to keep the family afloat. Being a husband, Carol expected a few things from him, but when Floyd failed to deliver on those expectations, Carol decided she needed a change. I guess this was all she was thinking about while sitting on the bus on her way to work, and when she saw Clark’s poster on the street, she couldn’t stop herself from entering Jamba Juice, where she expected she would definitely cross paths with Clark. Instead of ordering her usual drink, she ordered the one Clark often bought for himself, and when he saw Carol sitting in a corner, he couldn’t stop himself from starting a conversation. The two started meeting frequently, and Carol dropped hints that she wanted something more intimate from him. They picked a place where they started meeting once a week to fulfill each other’s desires.

Detective Plumb Interviews Carol

Okay, first things first. The show dropped numerous hints suggesting that Detective Homer was sexist, homophobic, and a bit old school. Maybe he wanted to solve one last high-profile case before his retirement, which could explain why he was in such a hurry to wrap up the investigation and put Clark on trial for Floyd’s murder. Homer knew he wouldn’t be able to deal with the wife, or maybe he didn’t want to have to deal with a woman, and therefore, he asked Detective Plumb to interview Carol instead. What was worse, he couldn’t even recall Plumb’s name when he made the request, and called her “Twyla.”

During the interview, Carol told Plumb that Clark lied to her about his demolition company. Well, we still don’t know that, but this company was definitely the thing that intrigued Carol, which is why she brought it up during the conversation. Next, she told Plumb that Clark initiated the relationship. Well, another lie. The second episode established that it was Carol who started the affair, so she was lying through her teeth and trying really hard to intimidate Plumb. I guess Plumb was more of a behind-the-desk person, which was why she was quite nervous during the interview. Carol even lied about the whole Jamba Juice encounter, as she told her that she bumped into Clark, while it was the other way around. She was waiting for him there with a drink he occasionally ordered, which acted as an icebreaker and eased them up. Plumb later found out that Carol only ordered Watermelon Breeze, except for that strange day when she ordered the Go-Getter. Plumb connected the dots and figured out that Carol set up a trap to initiate an affair with Clark, which left her wondering, why?

Before leaving, Plumb asked if she could take a look at Floyd’s stuff, and this was where Plumb found a box filled with old magazines for which Floyd used to model, and the torn page they found near Floyd’s dead body came from one of these adult magazines. Though she still couldn’t figure out why someone, maybe Floyd himself, had scratched his face out in the picture. It could be assumed that Floyd hated the things he had done in the past, or maybe he despised the person he was from the inside but couldn’t do anything to change his feelings? This also brings the possibility that Floyd might have poisoned himself because he no longer wanted to be a failure to his family.

Clark Likely Tried to Help Floyd

Detective Homer’s investigation revealed that Clark befriended, like, really befriended Floyd, and got close to him after Carol told him that she was still in love with her husband and wanted to end the affair. This gives Clark another motive to kill Floyd, because he wanted to get Floyd out of the way so he could get the girl. However, there’s another way to look at things. During Floyd’s concert, Carol mentioned to him that she was worried about Floyd’s weight, and wanted him to get healthy. So maybe that was why Clark asked Floyd to work out with him, so he could lose some weight, which would have indirectly made Carol happy. Or maybe Clark knew from the very beginning that Floyd was interested in men, which was why he set up a dating profile for him so he could get some fun in life. On 14th September, Carol ended things with Clark over a text message, and soon after, Clark texted Floyd, inviting him and his family to a get-together where he eventually told Floyd about DTF. Homer said it couldn’t be a coincidence. But what if Clark really was trying to help Floyd come out of the closet? The reason I am bringing up these two scenarios is because Clark didn’t have any intention of leaving his wife and daughters, so he knew that his affair with Carol would have to come to an end sooner or later. Furthermore, at the end of episode 1, Floyd himself told Clark that he knew about his affair with Carol, but he seemed pretty chill about it. Again, it could be because he was interested in men and likely asked Clark to help him get laid, which could explain why Clark told him about the DTF app and helped him set up the profile. Also, we don’t know whether Carol was aware of Floyd’s sexual orientation or not, though I believe she knew, which could be one of the reasons why she knew that things with Floyd were not going to get any better.

Detective Homer further looked into Floyd’s profile on the DTF dating app and found out that he had matched with two people in the area. One was “Modern Love,” aka Christopher Robert Spurgeon, a small business owner whom Floyd met for breakfast and shared a little intimacy with. In short, nothing much happened. The second profile, named Tiger Tiger, belonged to Clark himself, who posed as a gay man to talk to Floyd on the app. However, there are a lot of gaps here, but because Clark isn’t talking, Homer is forced to come up with the worst possible scenario. He believed that Clark, posing as Tiger Tiger, set a trap for Floyd and lured him to the pool house, where he poisoned his drink with Amphezyne and left him to die. As per the records, Clark had been prescribed pharmaceutical amphetamine 6 days before the murder, which meant it was a premeditated murder, and Clark would likely receive the death penalty for his crimes. The most frustrating thing there is Clark isn’t even defending himself. I so badly want to know what he’s hiding and why. Who is he protecting?

Eimy Finds Out About The Affair

In episode 2’s ending, which took place hours after Clark’s arrest, we found Eimy watching the news about her husband. The police had already released the information that Clark was having an affair with the victim’s wife. At the same moment, Eimy received a call from the sheriff’s department, but she was still processing the information and didn’t take the call. We don’t know if she’s going to help Clark or not, but one thing’s certain: Clark is in a deep mess, and the only person who can save him from getting the death penalty is Detective Jodie Plumb. I believe Plumb has a pretty good idea of what Floyd was going through while he was alive. A pretty jolly guy, who was hiding his real self from the world, came across an app where he could actually express himself. But before this free bird could have its first flight, someone shot it down, because it couldn’t escape the cage so easily. Well, these are my thoughts on the second episode, and I would love to hear yours, so don’t forget to drop a comment below.

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