‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Episode 6 Recap: “Buxom Bird”

What did Ed Gein know, and when did he know it?

It sounds like a ridiculous question: Unlike Richard Nixon, who did not conduct the Watergate break-in himself, Ed Gein did a whole bunch of crimes and violated a whole bunch of corpses. But when he is inevitably discovered, arrested, and brought in for questioning, he passes a polygraph test with flying colors even when asked about crimes there is zero evidentiary basis to believe he didn’t commit. But even in the case of Bernice Worden, whose mutilated corpse is found trussed up and decapitated in his barn, Ed sounds like a defendant in the Iran-Contra scandal: He just doesn’t recall.

Is he lying? Boy, it sure seems like it, doesn’t it? Now that he’s busted, that aw gee aw shucks dag nabbit cheese and crackers demeanor sounds not just out-of-place but disingenuous, even smug. This sick son of a bitch thinks he can please and thank you and may I his way out of multiple homicides and a charnel house of human remains that will ring through the ages as one of the worst-ever places to set foot?

But that’s just it: Maybe he does. Monster: The Ed Gein Story writer-creator Ian Brennan has been consistent in his portrayal of Ed as so deep in the grips of delusion that he can dissemble easily one second, then invite the literal police to go see the dead body he has in the upstairs bedroom the next. He seems to have no idea why some people who find him agreeable eventually get squicked out. For god’s sake, when he’s getting the living shit beaten out of him by Deputy Frank Worden (Charlie Hall), Bernice’s loving but lonely son and the poor bastard who discovers her body, Ed seems genuinely confused and upset. They’d always gotten along before, you see.

Not everyone is repulsed by Ed and his behavior, of course. When his crimes are exposed, the press come flocking to Adeline’s door; she receives them with the same blend of chipper sociopathy, glib dishonesty, and delusions of grandeur that have been her trademarks all along. She even affects a pressman’s hat and starts peppering poor Deputy Worden with gruesome questions, before kindly, hunky Sheriff Art Schley (Tyler Jacob Moore) waves her off. 

(Is there any basis in fact for this? No, not really. But I’m in the middle of a rewatch of I, Claudius, the historical-fiction classic in which it’s recklessly speculated that almost every major figure during the early Roman Empire was poisoned to death by the Emperor Augustus’s wife. I can handle a made-up media-sensation pseudo-girlfriend denying Ed like Peter denied Christ.)

The psychological destruction of Frank Worden is one of the episode’s most poignant subplots, because it’s clear no one wants it to happen. During a flashback sequence, Bernice is drunk and semi-inappropriate with her son, who suffers from depression around the holidays following the death of his father. But when she sees what a bad way he’s in, she snaps right out of it and decides to do an old-fashioned Thanksgiving to lift his spirits. After her death, Sheriff Schley and his family do the same thing for Frank, praying for him and holding his hand while they say grace — one of the sweetest and most sincere depictions of religious faith I’ve seen on TV in a minute.

Then they fire up their new electric turkey carver and Frank freezes. Some part of him will never not be in that barn, silently screaming his lungs out in one of the season’s most heart-rending moments.

But before we get to any of this, the house must be entered and the crime must be uncovered. Tracing the evidence at Bernice’s shot-up hardware store back to Gein, Schley and Worden arrive at his house, make their way through it, and…don’t really do much, for a while anyway. It’s not that they don’t see the evidence all around them — the chairs and lampshades made of human skin, the fingernail collection, the belt made of nipples, the dead face masks, the leggings made from a woman’s legs and waist, complete with pubic hair. It’s that their minds simply don’t process what it is they’re looking at.

And why should they? Ed Gein was the first of his kind in America; no one’s mind was leaping to “holy shit, this man makes furniture and clothing out of human remains.” This goes double for anyone who knew Eddie Gein, an odd duck perhaps, but a gentle and thoughtful fella who, as the show cheekily said in an earlier episode while quoting Psycho, wouldn’t even harm a fly. (Or the great flocks of moths that flitter through his home.)

Which makes watching these men slowly get used to things like trying to match the severed and preserved labia to the gap left in Bernice Worden’s corpse absolutely crushing. Is this what American life is going to be, now? A nation’s mania expressed in the actions of mass killers whose crimes are so heinous their names become legend, until there are so many, with weapons so deadly, that the stories barely merit a day’s mention anymore?

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.