'DTF St. Louis' Episode 3 Recap And Ending Explained: The Insurance Money And The Key

You know, being different isn’t easy. It’s a lonely path, because no one really cares if you are kind or creative. If you are not like everybody else, then you are just weird. And this makes you question your entire existence. You start asking yourself whether you still want to do the things you believe in, or you want to become like the others so they eventually accept you. By letting Christopher kiss him on the first date, Floyd didn’t do anything extraordinary. It was a personal choice. But you can’t expect homophobic men like Donoghue Homer to understand such acts of kindness, because he has spent his entire life seeing the worst in people. Floyd, on the other hand, could relate to Christopher, because he himself had lived, or you could say had been living, the same life. Not in that he was gay, specifically, but he was indeed a failure in the eyes of society. He was weird. Floyd knew what it felt like to be rejected. He’d walked into numerous interviews but never landed the job. He wasn’t cut out for the corporate crap. As Clark said, Floyd was a wonderful man, and he really “loved him as a friend.” But he was stuck in the wrong time, surrounded by the wrong crowd. And that can make someone really lonely in life. However, the important question here is: who would want to hurt a harmless man? The third episode of DTF St. Louis suggested that it was his wife, Carol, who might have planned his murder for the insurance money, and Clark had been keeping mum because he wasn’t sure if Carol had such ulterior motives. She’d never asked Clark to do anything for her or Floyd, but man, she did her best to manipulate that guy, and I am not sure if Clark’s smart enough to connect the dots, but hopefully there’s someone who knows what Carol might be pulling. So let’s jump straight into the breakdown of episode 3.

Spoiler Alert

Carol’s Lying

Okay, so what DTF St. Louis is doing here is holding back information to give us a version of the narrative that isn’t true. In the second episode, it made us believe that Carol met Clark the moment she walked into the Jamba Juice. But the actual truth was that she skipped work, ordered 6 Go Getter juices (Clark’s favorite), and waited almost 4-5 hours for Clark at the juice store. And why do you think this information is important? Because it shows desperation. The girl really wanted to be a “go-getter,” and by doing all this, she was setting a trap so she could make her life a little less miserable. Sadly, Detective Homer couldn’t see any of that. He’s not very creative. He tries to analyze his suspects using a checklist. If there’s no insurance policy involved, then he thinks the wife doesn’t have a motive to kill her husband. Thankfully, Jodie Plumb could see that it was a big red flag, and it made her certain that Carol had been lying to the cops for reasons unknown.

Carol’s Controlling Clark

They say that a person’s secret desires reveal a lot about their personality. In episode 3, Clark told Carol that he liked being controlled. It’s possible that Clark was attracted to Carol in the first place because she was kinda dominating, or maybe it was Carol who knew from the very beginning that she would easily be able to tame someone like Clark Forrest. It can be assumed that she was looking for someone she could program like a “robot,” and as it turned out, Clark fit the bill. Throughout their affair, Carol had been telling Clark to do things for her, but hear me out: she’s not demanding things or ordering Clark about. She’s manipulating him. The golden rule says that if someone tells you, “It’s not just about the money,” then, my friend, it’s always about the money. After Clark opened up to her about his desires, Carol decided to bring her own worries to the table. She told Clark that Floyd had to pay alimony to his first wife, a fortune teller, and he had five years of tax debt, which was making things really tough for her and the family. A point to be noted, we don’t know if any of that’s true or not, because Clark wasn’t going to check, and he couldn’t ask Floyd, because he would immediately know that Carol told him these things. So Carol naturally took advantage of the situation.

In the previous episode, Detective Homer assumed that Clark really befriended Floyd and started helping him out with his daily workouts after Carol decided to end the affair. However, the truth is, Carol told Clark so much about Floyd’s health issues that he started to worry for him a bit and therefore asked him to join him for morning workouts, and even lent Floyd his handcycle so he could sweat out those extra pounds.

The Mystery of the Insurance Policy

During a dinner date, Carol told Clark that Floyd was taking some medication to lose weight, but it was taking a toll on his heart. Again, we don’t know if that’s true or not. Carol further mentioned that it would make Floyd feel better if he had an insurance policy. The thing is, an insurance policy never helps the person who takes it, it only serves the people he leaves behind, and in Floyd’s case, that’s Carol and his stepson, Richard. But here’s the twist. Floyd didn’t have the means to pay for the premium, and Carol couldn’t afford to pay it either. So she wanted Clark to pay for it. Well, she didn’t say it directly, but she did bring it up twice, making sure Clark understood.

In DTF St. Louis episode 3’s ending, Carol once again informed Clark that the piling debt, the unpaid bills and taxes, were taking a toll on Floyd’s mental and physical health, and she really wanted to help him out. Basically, she wanted Clark to help him. She said, “If he had insurance, I think he would feel better, but no way he could pay those premiums.” So she planted this idea in Clark’s head that the only way he could help Floyd was by getting him an insurance policy and paying for it. But she didn’t want to know how Clark was going to help Floyd, because if the police ever questioned her or found out about this insurance policy, then she could simply deny any involvement, because she knew nothing about it. A classic case of plausible deniability. However, as far as I understand the legal stuff, you can’t take an insurance policy out in someone’s name without their signature, right? So the question you really need to be asking here is, “How did Clark pull this off?” We know that Floyd’s a pretty “rock-solid” guy who would never take money from a friend. He always thought of himself as “Mr. Dependable.” I know he meant to say that people could depend on him emotionally, but unfortunately, the world’s priority is the other kind of dependability.

Anyway, so what do you think: did Clark lie to him about the policy? I mean, he could have told him that he was going to help him take out an insurance policy, but he might not have informed him about the premium, because it was Clark who was going to pay for it, and this was the reason Clark asked for a lawyer, because he knew that if this insurance policy came up, he would have to explain to the authorities why he was paying the premium for a guy he’d only known for the past 12 weeks. The only saving grace here is that the sum of the insurance policy generally goes to the family, so as per Homer’s logic, Clark had nothing to gain from this transaction, which might bring Carol under suspicion. So I am not sure if it’s himself Clark is protecting, or if he still trusts Carol.

Let’s Take A Look At The Evidence

Okay, so the most incriminating evidence Homer had against Clark was that Clark had been prescribed a potentially lethal amphetamine 6 days prior to the crime, which made Floyd’s death look like a premeditated murder. And if I have understood anything from the pattern of this show, then it’s likely it’s holding back information here, just like in the case of the Jamba Juice encounter. I guess it was Carol who requested Clark to get her a dose of pharmaceutical amphetamine, so she could reignite her sexual life with Floyd (or that’s what she might have told Clark). In real life, amphetamines act as stimulant drugs, which make their users more physically active and also help stop binge eating. In Floyd’s case, Carol could have come up with any reason why she wanted this drug for her husband, and Clark would have simply agreed.

The second piece of evidence against Clark was his profile, Tiger Tiger, on the DTF dating app. On the app, he sent Floyd a message to meet him at Kevin Kline on the day of his murder. Now, what I think could have happened here is that Carol might have told Clark that she wanted to surprise Floyd. I mean, you know, spice things up a bit by setting up a blind date for him. We already know that Floyd wasn’t getting any messages or matches on the app, so he was getting impatient. And in the midst of this disappointment, he found out that his wife was having an affair with his best friend. I am not sure how much it affected Floyd, but Clark must have really felt guilty when Floyd confronted him with the truth, so he had his reasons to make things right for Floyd and Carol. In brief, Clark used the app to fix a date between Floyd and Carol, where only she knew whom she was going to meet and why.

The third piece of evidence was Floyd’s recumbent bike. In the first episode, the sports store guy told Jodie Plumb that he had only sold 2 such bikes in 3 years, and both to the same person, Clark Forrest. In episode 3, Clark confirmed that he purchased two, one for himself and one for his wife, Eimy, but she never learned to ride it. So it’s likely that Clark gave one to Floyd, and it was used by both him and his wife. Now, coming back to the crime scene, Floyd was already at the location when someone showed up on the handcycle. This meant it could either be Clark or Carol, but Clark said numerous times that he wasn’t at the pool, which leaves us with only one person, and who’s that? I believe it wasn’t Floyd who scratched his face out on the magazine cover. It was Carol, who likely had developed so much hatred against Floyd that she couldn’t stand the sight of his face. So, the question that remains is, why is Clark still protecting Carol? Needless to say, I came up with all these theories based on the information revealed in this episode. It could be possible that the fourth episode of DTF St. Louis paints a completely different picture, and we find out that Carol isn’t the real monster we believe her to be. I mean, it’s possible that Floyd killed himself so his family would be taken care of with the insurance policy after he was gone, which really would have made him “Mr. Dependable,” wouldn’t it? Well, I might be in for a surprise.

The Key and Where It Leads

In episode 1, Jodie found a bunch of keys at the crime scene. One of these five keys was marked with a question mark, and Jodie had been trying really hard to figure out what it unlocked. In episode 3, she asked Clark twice about the key, and judging by the look on his face, it seemed like he knew about it. My best guess is that Clark had arranged a locker or a safety deposit box for Floyd where he could keep his personal stuff, things he didn’t want Carol to find out about. And it could be possible that he kept his insurance policy inside this locker, which was why Clark was quite hesitant telling the cops the truth about this key, as he didn’t want them to discover that he was paying for his insurance policy. He requested a lawyer so he could seek counsel about the mess he had pushed himself into. But even though this key could simply be a red herring, we know that an insurance policy exists, because at the end of the episode, Carol assured her son that she had made sure they would be okay financially. Well, you know what that means, right? So these are my thoughts on the third episode, but if you have anything else to share, feel free to comment below.

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