In the Flesh: Dead Ringers Episode 3

“This isn’t normal,” says Genevieve (Britne Oldford) as she stands between a stone-faced Beverly (Rachel Weisz) and her visibly decompensating twin Elliot (Rachel Weisz). “This isn’t healthy.” There’s Dead Ringers’ third episode in a nutshell for you. With the birthing center taking off and Beverly struggling to adjust to both its bougie exclusivity and her association with the Parker name, which sees her splattered in pig’s blood by an angry protester, Genevieve steps in to take her girlfriend for some R&R, knocking the Mantle twins out of their accustomed orbit. “We’ve never been in different cities,” Beverly explains apologetically. Moments later Elliot latches onto her like a lamprey, sucking at her neck with infantile desperation. “I need you not to go,” she whimpers, the rancid sexual tension between the twins thick enough to cut. Several times I actually forgot that Beverly and Elliot are played by the same actress, Weisz’s performances are so entangled and engrossing. It’s a credit to the show that virtually every actor we see is putting in career-best work, from Jeremy Shamos’s clueless PR agent Joseph to Susan Bloemmart as a dead-eyed interloper at a house party.

Scenes of childbirth and prenatal care within the Mantle-Parker clinic read like something out of a slickly capitalist version of Star Trek, a place for the listless rich to go to have their babies’ genes edited and then get a personalized juice. There’s an unreality to it, a sense of floating in space as we see embryos fertilized on gigantic dual projector screens and red-robed surgeons and doctors gliding through softly-lit halls. Denise Cronenberg’s iconic costume design plays as off-puttingly here as it did in the original film, or when Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal paid homage to it in its second season, and the red suggests an element of thoughtful cynicism on the part of its in-universe designers. If you’re going to get splattered with blood, you’d better be sure your rich clients can’t see it. Equally cynical is Rebecca Parker’s (Jennifer Ehle) blistering monologue about affluent college students who take a class on capitalism and decide to protest, a speech which for all its spiteful, sardonic viciousness equates more or less to the infamous Mat Bors “We should improve society somewhat” comic.

The episode’s centerpiece is Elliot’s protracted meltdown, which opens with her fertilizing one of Beverly’s eggs with Tom’s (Michael Chernus) sperm after chewing him savagely out in front of a coworker. “Produce!” she yells at him as he masturbates in a corner of the freezer, like he’s a dairy cow resisting the milking machine. Things escalate quickly from there, with Elliot getting coked out and throwing a wildly impulsive house party at which she gives away Beverly’s clothes and provokes a fight with a nebulously real neighbor, Agnes (Susan Bloemmart), before pushing the woman off her balcony. There’s no corpse to be found afterward, at least not by Elliot, and her rapidly spiraling panic and animalistic shrieks at passers-by are an incredible showcase for Weisz’s talents as a physical performer. That the episode is an embarrassment of riches visually feels almost like a footnote at this point, from the hazy Mrs. Danvers curtain moment of the opening scene to what I can only describe as the bright murk in which artificially incubated fetal lambs float in the twins’ lab. This is something very special, the kind of show that makes you fall in love with the medium all over again. Savor it while you can.