‘I Am The Night’ Series Finale Recap: “Queen’s Gambit, Accepted”

Before I Am The Night‘s endgame, we travel further back in time than ever before: to black-and-white 1917, where a pre-teen George Hodel plays piano for an unsmiling man. After the recital, George’s mother harangues “Maestro Rachmaninoff,” who has refused to take George as a student because he could not learn to play with emotion: “He is not an artist.”

The beast — which we now see is a bull — is haunting George already.

In jail, Jay tries to end Billis’ henchman beating him by incriminating Hodel. Billis claims Hodel is no suspect, but when Jay insists that Hodel was following Fauna with the intention of raping, murdering, and dismembering her, Billis is reluctantly convinced to assess Hodel’s character in person.

Apprised of Jimmy Lee’s attack and desperate to leave Los Angeles, Fauna begs Shye for a ride to Corinna’s, but since it’s not safe for him to drive a white girl to Pasadena, she hides in the trunk. Inside Corinna’s house, Fauna asks for bus fare to Reno, and reports on her meeting with Tamar. When Corinna very deliberately sets down her ice water, Fauna realizes that there’s something wrong with her own, and falls onto the floor. Before Fauna loses consciousness, Corinna warns, “Don’t eat anything in his house.”

Jay is still in holding when several prisoners from the rebellion are led in to the neighboring cell, which is when Jay first hears what’s going on. The prisoner states that the cops only care about protecting landlords’ property, and that Jay lives in a different world: “Think somebody’ll stand up and right a wrong, or stop an evil thing. It ain’t like that for us. If we don’t put ourselves on the line, then who will?” Jay, who hasn’t had all the crusading fervor beaten out of him, is shook.

Fauna wakes up in a slip, in an unfamiliar room. She is startled to see Hodel lurking in the corner and all her clothes neatly folded by the door. As requested, Fauna joins Hodel in the sitting room, where he claims that Corinna called after Fauna fainted in her kitchen, since the hospitals currently aren’t safe. After he waves off her questions about where he’s been since she came to the city on his invitation, she tells him about spending time with Tamar and Jay.”You must think I’m Lucifer himself,” Hodel purrs. He dismisses Jay as “a yellow journalist”: “You understand that I sued him for libel, and won?” He then sniffs at Tamar’s “hovel on the beach” and “squalling brats”; he can’t even call her stories lies since, tragically, she believes them. Fauna says she’s going to lie back down, but tries to creep outside; when she finds her way to a metal gate, it’s locked.

Hodel retrieves Fauna and brings her to look at his latest acquisition: a Rothko he thinks may be “faddish”: “Like a window we all peer through from the outside.”

He segues to Fauna’s experience looking through windows to worlds she couldn’t enter, “not belonging.” She’d like to leave, but he says it’s not safe.

Then Billis enters, and when Hodel says Fauna’s name while sending her to her room, Billis recognizes it. He tells Hodel about Jay’s arrest, but Hodel is unimpressed, saying the Lieutenant Governor is sending a National Guard squad to the house. He tells Billis to see himself out, but Fauna stops Billis, begging him to take her with him. Before he can answer, Hodel reappears, and Billis tells her, “No. Better not.”

In an interrogation room, Billis tells Jay where Fauna is, but will only say that maybe the police will investigate Hodel, since he’s protected not just by the police but by the mobsters whose girlfriends’ abortions he performs. Jay suddenly notes the switchblade Billis’s henchman is fiddling with and says it’s the knife that killed Janis Brewster: he’ll put his fingerprints on it, sign a confession, and when they’re transporting him for processing, maybe he’ll get temporarily “lost,” and go kill Hodel. Billis is convinced by Jay’s framing this as an “elegant” way to dispose of both Hodel and Jay. The henchman wipes off the knife, and after a long beat, Jay grips it. “I was supposed to be a journalist,” he mutters. Billis: “Yeah, well, I don’t think that’s going to work out.”

Locked back in her room, Fauna notices Hodel’s chess board, and replaces the missing king from Sepp’s pocket. Hodel’s wife Yuna (Mariko Wordell) — whom I had mistaken for an assistant in the series premiere based on the way Hodel treated her — calls Fauna for dinner (and since Hodel immediately sends Yuna off here as well, you might see why I mistook the relationship). Fauna remembers Corinna’s warning and declines to eat, saying she’s not feeling well. Hodel tries to make a toast, but while Fauna brings the glass toward her lips, Hodel can see that she doesn’t sip.

Giving up on drugging Fauna, Hodel orders her to sit so he can paint her, removing his jacket so she can see he’s wearing a handgun in a holster. Unseen behind him, Fauna takes a marble sphere off its stand on her way downstairs to the clinic, noting instruments laid out, rusty floor drains, and a hook hanging from the ceiling; Hodel’s studio is curtained off next to it. When she says she doesn’t want to put the slip back on, he slaps her to the floor, so she complies, and is horrified to find the changing area festooned with gruesome crime scene photos. Fauna asks whether Jay has been telling her the truth about him; Hodel spits, “You can’t compare me to normal, ordinary men, or expect me to follow their laws. The Surrealists, in the end, were cowards. They lacked the moral strength to see their philosophy through. They made pictures of what they dreamed and desired. How quaint….The Marquis de Sade wrote, ‘I have no need to thwart my inclinations in order to flatter some god. These instincts were given to me by nature, and it would irritate her were I to resist them. If she gave me bad ones, that is because they were necessary to her designs. I am in her hands, but a machine which runs as she likes.'”

The cops transporting Jay are so distracted making racist jokes about the Watts rebellion that Jay easily causes the car to crash, climbs out, and frees himself from his handcuffs using Billis’s key. A cop’s gun in hand, he staggers off.

As Hodel starts painting, Fauna cries that she needs to wipe her bleeding nose. He throws a cloth at her, which she uses to wrap the marble ball, covering her fidgeting with sobs. He tries again to lecture her, but she says Corinna would call his fumbling “kitsch.” “No one speaks to me like that,” says Hodel, offended yet impressed. She baits him by denigrating his literalism: “The artists…were talking in symbols, DUMMY….Even what you were just saying — nature made you a machine — what a bunch of shit.” “I’d rather not start so soon,” Hodel says quizzically, but when he comes at her with a scalpel, she clobbers him with the ball, as Jay did with the pool ball in Hawaii. A struggle ensues, during which she gets the gun and draws on him. “You can’t get away,” he intones. “Whatever you are, you’re mine, most of all. Mine more than anything.” “Am I your daughter?” she demands, cocking the gun. The bull roars as Hodel stares into her pupil, and she answers herself: “I will never be yours. We all know what you are, George. You’re a cliché. Just like a pimp, raping his own daughter.” Telling him how “boring” it is for him to pretend “simple urges are high art,” she leaves him in the dark.

By now, Jay has made it to the manse; Fauna calls his name before he can shoot her. Once he’s determined she’s okay, he goes downstairs. There’s no sign of Hodel, and when Fauna returns, Jay is destroying the studio, screaming in rage.

Hodel has left, Fauna’s portrait unfinished.

As the city burns, Jay tells Fauna, “I don’t want to tell your story anymore; I just want you to get away.” She tells him he can, but he firmly says he won’t. Fauna tells Jay to send her a postcard; she’ll write to him. Soon he’s gone in the dark.

After a brief moment of reconciliation between Fauna and Jimmy Lee at the hospital, we’re with Jay: he’s in Hawaii, reading a letter from Fauna.

“Prominent Physician Flees Country,” reads a headline on the back of Peter’s paper, and then we see Hodel and Yuna, somewhere tropical. Hodel is drunk and bedraggled as Yuna covers the Rothko with a tarp.

Jay sits on a surfboard in the ocean, waiting for a wave; Sepp and a Korean soldier do likewise as we hear Fauna narrating her letter: “What you did and didn’t do — that saved me. You may not believe it, but it saved me. People around me are a sunny day, living their lives wide open, without secrets. When I look in the mirror, Jay, I see something else. Something I don’t quite recognize. But something I chose.”

And the series closes with the real Fauna, at peace.

Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano is the co-founder of TelevisionWithoutPity.com and Fametracker.com (R.I.P.), as well as Previously.tv. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown ofBeverly Hills, 90210), and has contributed toNew York, the New YorkTimesmagazine, Vulture, The Awl, and Slate, among many others. She lives in Austin.

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