‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ Episode 5 Recap: Navy Blue

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” may not hit the tear-down-the-sky heights of the previous two episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, but simply not feeling like a letdown after those two magnificent hours is itself a victory. The grim tale of how the dehumanizing Clinton-era policy on gays in the military destroyed Jeff Trail’s dreams and helped place him in Cunanan’s crosshairs isn’t as stomach-churningly chilling and sad as the show’s depiction of the last hours of Lee Miglin and David Madson, to be sure. But the stakes wind up being just as high, as is the cost in wasted human potential and life.

“DADT” is one of the most temporally complex episodes of the series so far, bouncing back and forth in time and between protagonists. In out-of-order fashion, it traces the life of Jeff Trail from the waning days of his career in the military through the night he first meets Andrew to the hours after his murder, with special attention paid to his and David’s interactions with Cunanan in the days leading up to their killings. (Andrew has a blowout fight with Jeff and has his marriage proposal rejected by David. There’s also a polka bar.) Meanwhile, a side plot chronicles Gianni Versace’s decision to come out as gay in the press, with the support of his partner and to the chagrin of his sister.

But with Andrew himself pushed mostly to the margins and no threat of new murders hanging over our heads, it falls to Finn Wittrock to carry the weight of the episode as Jeff, investing the story of how institutionalized homophobia helped lead to his death with the same sense of tragedy and intensity as a serial-killer narrative. It’s a testament to his note-perfect casting — he simply has the exact physical and psychological mien of a military man, from the cadence of his voice to the way he walks around in his nondescript civvies — that he pulls it off.

With Wittrock’s Jeff as the bedrock, a thematic layering emerges that’s even more impressive than the time-shifting storyline. Throughout the episode, Jeff is painted as a parallel figure to both his eventual killer and his killer’s most famous victim. The comparison with Versace is as direct as possible: Writer Tom Rob Smith structures the episode by juxtaposing Gianni’s triumphant coming-out interview with the Advocate with Jeff’s anonymous, silhouetted testimonial in a CBS News special about closeted soldiers and sailors. Both interviews take place in hotels, though Versace’s is in the Ritz Carlton while Trail’s is in a seedy motel. Both men are also shown talking with their clearly beloved sisters, each of whom is deeply concerned about her respective brother. Donatella advises Gianni not to go through with the Advocate profile (I do wish they’d speak Italian with subtitles in their scenes together — trust your audience, Ryan Murphy! — but whatever), while Jeff’s very pregnant sister, herself career military, jokingly issues “a direct order as your commanding officer” for him to finally come out to their parents years after the recording session.

Jeff and Gianni’s fates following their respective interviews were as divergent as their accommodations and their sisters, yet Andrew finds something equally infuriating about both. His beef with Versace is obvious enough. The stalker-wall of newspaper and magazine clippings that Andrew maintains, many of them about Gianni’s life as an out and proud gay man with his longtime partner Antonio, indicates resentment. Why should this man have it all, while Andrew has to lie about fame and fortune and can’t find anyone who loves him back?

Jeff, by contrast, is a crash-and-burn case. The military’s discovery that he was gay has left him “a washed-up queer in a shitty job and a shitty condo, bitching about how you could have been somebody,” as Andrew cuttingly puts it. “You’re not wrong about that,” Jeff replies fatalistically — he won’t even bother to deny it. Of course, you’re not wrong to see shades of Andrew himself in that description, except insofar as he has no job and no condo at all anymore, not even shitty ones.

But it’s not self-recognition that drives Andrew to kill Jeff, or at least not self-recognition alone. Earlier, we see Andrew advise Jeff not to do the interview at all, unwittingly playing Donatella to his Gianni. Like Donatella, he’s concerned about career fallout for his friend. More importantly to Andrew, though, Jeff’s interview is pointless because he’s just some sailor and nobody special or famous. “Who cares what you have to say?” he asks incredulously, not even noticing the insult he’s delivering. He genuinely doesn’t understand why anyone would be interested in a non-mover-and-shaker’s thoughts on the topic, or why a non-mover-and-shaker would be interested in sharing them. “It’s something I need to do,” Jeff replies. “I can’t explain it any better than that.” For Jeff, it’s a question of honor: being true to himself, to the Navy, to his country, to the lifelong dream that binds them all together for him. He might as well be speaking an alien dialect for all Andrew is able to understand that kind of idealism.

So Andrew appears to first formulate murderous intent toward his former friend and protégé when he watches a VHS recording. The belief in a cause bothers him. Jeff’s stated belief that saving a fellow gay sailor from a vicious beating at the hands of their crewmates gave his own homosexuality away — leading to an attempt to carve away a tattoo that could incriminate him and a failed suicide attempt as well as his eventual discharge — bothers Andrew even more intensely.

It’s during this portion of the interview, where a stricken Jeff says “I did a good thing, the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed about taking that moment back and letting him die, just so people wouldn’t know about me,” that Andrew, wearing the white hat from Jeff’s uniform, points Jeff’s gun at the screen, starting to psych himself into the idea of murder.

Watching Jeff’s final confrontation with Andrew prior to the murder is painful, then, both because of what he gets right and what he gets wrong. “I don’t know what you stand for,” he shouts at Cunanan. “I don’t know who you are. You’re a liar. You have no honor.” Correct on all counts — possibly lethally, so if you figure this contrast in their outlook is a big part of what drove Andrew to kill. But when Andrew rightfully points out that he believed in and supported Jeff while his beloved Navy treated him like shit — “I saved you!” — Jeff bitterly retorts “You destroyed me. I wish I’d never walked into that bar. I wish I’d never met you.” He says he wants his life back, as if Andrew took it from him, instead of Bill Clinton and Uncle Sam. Andrew does take his life away, eventually, mere hours from that moment in fact. But in a sense, he was just an accessory after the fact. Jeff signed his own death warrant the moment he decided, in the face of society’s hatred, that some principles are worth fighting for anyway.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" episode of ACS: Versace on FX