Woebegone

Oh interesting. May not be about the rape though. It could be about the call he made that lured Taylor to the attack.

Which promo is this? I've only seen one that shows someone with pale skin having handcuffs put on. While this could be Eric, it could also be Becca who we know gets arrested for sure.

I think there are a few mitigating scenarios for rape from a moral standpoint, if not necessarily a legal one. If both partners were equally intoxicated for example or if one party didn't know or fully understand that the other party wasn't able to consent. But let's look at it from another angle. Say we were introduced to Taylor much earlier in the timeline, before the party so that the only thing we knew about him was that he was cheating on Evy and was even planning on taking her to a party so he can cheat on her there. Is there any justification for his behaviour then? A lot of people think she's awful because she won't let it go, but I don't think that what he did to her should be forgotten just because he was raped in the same way that I don't think that what Eric did to Taylor should be forgotten just because his mom is awful.

Yeah, I get the feeling that if we were to play all nine hours of this show in front of a jury, they'd still acquit Eric because the evidence just isn't there. Even going on the assumption that Taylor is being 100% truthful, there are still issues about the reliability of his testimony given his drugged state. And yeah, we're totally playing into the hands of the writers. Taylor is a school shooter and they have the audience hoping he doesn't get any prison time because we got to know him well in advance of his crime. They've played a different game with Eric. They fingered him as a suspect much earlier, but always left just enough room to doubt the accusation. And they've given him such a sympathetic storyline that he's probably the secondary protagonist after Taylor.

I think she was acting as a mouthpiece for the audience at that point because I don't think we care about what Taylor really felt about her either at this point; we just want to know about what really happened with the rape. I think I'll have to see the final episode to know for sure, but his answer had a certain definitive quality to it. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the last we ever hear about the subject. Eric did it. The whys or hows of it may be still left up for debate, but he did it. And yeah, it still doesn't make 100% sense, but not everything in real life does either. I've probably spent more time than I should have thinking about what it means for a show as socially conscious as American Crime to portray a rapist sympathetically. I think my conclusion from all this, what I think American Crime is getting at, is that victimization isn't a zero-sum game. It doesn't take away from the validity of what Taylor has gone through by saying that Eric is also just a confused teenager trying to figure things out. That Eric isn't a two-dimensional, grinning sociopath doesn't make what he did to Taylor any less monstrous. That we can and should sympathize with both because neither has had it easy. It's strange, but I think what we've seen this entire season is people being at their very worst when they let themselves demonize other people, make them out to be monsters, to justify their hatred of them. We saw that with Couch Dan ranting about Anne to the reporter and again when he told off Leslie. We saw that when Terri barged into Anne's diner to call her son a whore. We saw that when Michael tell Terri how vindicated he felt when Taylor turned out to be a murderer. We saw that when Kevin ranted to the team about that 'little bitch' Taylor. When we make people out to be monsters, that's when we become monsters ourselves.

I'm reminded of an episode of Poirot where the titular detective watches a murder mystery play and is convinced a certain character was the killer, only to be very upset when it turned out to be someone else. The writers did a bad job, he said. The murder did not match the facts. I wonder how much of that is applicable here. According to Eric, Taylor was not only not incapacitated, he was directing the action, telling Eric what to do. I can't reconcile that version of events with Taylor's, where he was unable to call out or do anything more than weakly crawl. Someone is lying or misremembering or something because they can't both be true. Aside from that, the other major discrepancy in their stories is who gave Taylor a drink. Eric says he didn't. Taylor said he did. Again, both can't be true. Interesting fact though: both versions are consistent with Evy's story. The only testimony not consistent with hers is Kevin's. He says when he saw what was going on with Taylor, he tried to help him. But according to Evy, "No one was helping him." Fascinating, eh?

I don't really remember Dekker's role too well, but it seemed like he just played a sweet and supportive best friend character? It didn't seem particularly iconic at the time and he was only on that show for part of the first season. What I remember more was controversy over him or maybe his agent not wanting the character to be gay and butting heads with the Heroes writing staff over this. I think it might have been a big misunderstanding, but the takeaway a lot of people may have gotten out of it was that he Dekker was difficult and possibly also homophobic.

I agree that Kevin could have known that Eric was gay without Eric explicitly telling him. Kevin did say that Taylor was at the party looking like a bitch who wanted to be 'turnt out' and this intuition might have led him to direct the team independently of whatever Eric and Taylor were planning. I thought you meant that there was some kind of conspiracy between Eric, Kevin, and the entire team to sexually assault Taylor, which didn't seem probable if Eric hadn't trusted Kevin enough to let him in on his secret. The team didn't seem to know that Eric was gay either until he came out. I'm still not sure the team had anything to do with what happened to Taylor at the party beyond taking photos and putting them online. I think, as you've guessed, what they're really worried about is people finding out what happened to the girls at the party. The "making the team" tradition and date rape drugs being present at the same party seems to point to this. And I think the team is mad at Eric, because not only is he a pervert, but also because his indiscretions with Taylor managed to bring police attention to a party that they would very much like everyone to forget. I think only Kevin's smooth-talking managed to redirect their hostility back to Taylor.

It's really hard to discern until we've seen the entire season what is a clue and what is a plothole left by the writers. Like, I thought the fact that Taylor had brought Evy to the party he was planning a hook-up with Eric as something that was really unlikely, but then the show explained it later. I agree that Taylor's behaviour at the start of the show is odd. Yeah, you can explain it has him as being in denial or not being remembering what happened until after the photos came out, but he contradicts this theory himself when he said that he contacted Eric the very next day to accuse him of rape (Taylor does not specifically mention when he contacted Eric, but Eric says that it was the very next day and the police have access to his texts, so he is unlikely to have lied). I think we have to wait and see. It's possible that the writers just wanted all the major teenage characters in the same room at the start of the show. Why would Eric get enraged and attack Taylor if Taylor was doped and incapacitated? Also, Eric never told Kevin that he was gay (this was confirmed in the argument that they had in this episode) so it seems extremely unlikely that the team worked together to help Eric rape Taylor.

I think from here on out only Taylor's future is in anyway predictable. He killed someone; he's going to prison. The only question now is how much time he is going to do or, ah um, they still have the death penalty in Indiana don't they? He might get a more lenient sentence if Anne and Sebastiene manage to change the narrative enough, but with the kind of cynicism a show like American Crime has, I wouldn't be surprised if a child psychiatrist hired by the prosecution determines that Taylor is a remorseless sociopath (and then writes a book about it afterwards). What will happen to everybody else is less certain because they all still have something to lose. Eric, Kevin, and Becca could all go to jail. Coach Chris might get fired. Leslie might kill herself, like someone above mentioned. Anne might have another breakdown and be hospitalized again. Eric's dad might kill himself too.

So from the episode descriptions for 9 and 10, we know personal information was leaked that implicates Kevin (in the attack against Taylor) and Becca (in the drug dealing). This sounds like Sebastien's work since I think the only other major character who knows about Kevin's involvement is Eric and Eric didn't know about Becca (Taylor knows about Becca, but he doesn't know about Kevin because Kevin wasn't present during the attack). I'm kind of curious know what kind of information is floating out there online that points the finger at Kevin -- maybe Wes messaged the other guys that "Kevin said Taylor needed a beatdown"? Also, strangely enough, Eric wasn't mentioned at all, meaning that he might have slipped through the cracks, even with his phone call to Taylor that night.

Yeah, I don't think we'll ever know for sure. My current guess is that Kevin gave Taylor a drugged drink, Eric had sex with Taylor not knowing he was not fully in control of himself, and Taylor after the party thinking that Eric was working with Kevin in drugging him. This explains why Taylor blames both Eric and Kevin (but Eric more) and why Eric thinks Taylor wanted it but changed his mind after the fact.I don't think Eric will go to the police about the beat down because he knows that he is technically an accessory, but even if he did, I don't think he will be charged. From the police perspective, the obvious charge against the attackers is a hate crime, but including Eric as one of the accused complicates any narrative the prosecution might try because he is gay himself. They're more likely to support his contention that he was coerced through intimidation and put him on the stand as a witness.

Definitely the collective avoiding of responsibility and the search for a scapegoat was a major theme of this episode. Both Kevin and Leslie had a hand in wheat happened, but their accusers probably should have looked at their own involvement as well. I think the scene with Eric and his dad was awkwardly written and edited, which is why there is so much confusion over what it was about. I read an interview with Joey Pollari where he said that he thinks that Eric is just looking for love, and at the time I thought it was about romantic love but now I think I was being too narrow minded. I think what happens to a lot of closeted gay kids is an inability to accept the love people show them because they believe it's based on a lie; that if their family and friends knew who they really were, they would feel differently. And we saw that with Eric's mom and brother, like they literally ran away from him. So when his dad told him, hey, I know who you are and I'm still here -- I think that was what he was looking for this whole time.

Of all the things we didn't know about the party that they could have revealed, this was probably one we could have already guessed. I mean, Eric obviously didn't pay for it. He doesn't have the money. I thought it was interesting how his father brought up the fact that Eric likes to feel sorry for himself, but doesn't want to take any responsibility for what he's done wrong. Like, he blamed Kevin for sending the team after Taylor, saying that they forced him into making that call, but doesn't acknowledge that he could have stood up to those guys and said no. Overall I thought the episode was rather uneven. The interviews were powerful, but the drama parts were kind of hit or miss. Eric and his father's conversation felt kind of heavy-handed to me. And what was going on with Becca's actress in that confession scene?

I'm not sure if it was that serious. It looked more like Eric gashed his attacker from the back of the neck to the collarbone. A really gory cut, but probably not life threatening. In any case, I don't think Eric will see the inside of a jail cell for this. Maybe for something else, but not for this.