“Folks have taken your story and twisted it. Used it for their own devices. Added things that weren’t real. Taken out things that were horrible. So I think you ought to think about telling your own story. Sitting down and spending these last couple of months writing it yourself. Setting the record straight.”

“I think enough people have told my story. Don’t you think? They seem to know it better than me.”

In the slipperiest, saddest, most surreal episode of the year’s most upsetting television show, Ed Gein is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Once upon a time he imagined impaling Nurse Roz (Linda Reiter), the woman talking to him, so vividly that he was truly surprised to see her alive again. Now they’re friends, and she wants him to separate himself from the myths and legends, additions and omissions, while he still can. 

But Ed demurs. Other people, he says know his story better than he does. Perhaps he’s referring to his massive memory gaps regarding the murders, but I don’t think so. Ed realizes that he’s not Ed Gein anymore, he’s “Ed Gein.” He’s not a human, he’s a meme. In that sense, the stories that Roz finds so upsetting — distorted, exaggerated, bowdlerized, biased, bigoted — are his story. The people who rewrote it, from artists like Alfred Hitchcock and Tobe Hooper and Jonathan Demme to murderers like Jerry Brudos and Richard Speck and Ted Bundy, all the way up to and including writer-creator Ian Brennan: Ed is right about them. They do know his story better than he does, because his story has become theirs as well.

In a very real way, Ed’s crimes were so shocking that they effectively cut him out of the fabric of society forever. Physically, he’s trapped in a mental hospital from which he now knows, as an old man, he will never leave. He’s not there to be healed, he’s there to be held. The whole thing is meaningless.

But as a person…he just kind of stopped being one, for the world’s intents and purposes. What good to anyone is a calm, soft-spoken old man in a mental hospital? What people want, what people need, is a killer. In a hilarious full-fledged reenactment of David Fincher’s unfairly canceled series Mindhunter, a pair of familiar-looking FBI profilers, fresh from interviewing killer and shoe fetishist Jerry Brudos (Happy Anderson, who played Brudos on Mindhunter for chrissakes), they come to see Ed.

The FBI wants Ed’s help in catching a new killer wreaking havoc across the country, from the Pacific Northwest to Florida. Unlike Ed, this killer is a true sadist, who relishes hurting and frightening his victims before he rapes and kills them. He’s Ted Bundy, and take it from a person who knows a lot about serial killers (I was very depressed for a while there), he’s one of the dirt worst. No regret, no remorse, no honesty, no responsibility, no exculpatory circumstances, no sense that he’s a sad and broken person — just an abominable, irredeemable piece of shit. 

But there’s a little fan club going among killers now, one effectively started by Ed. Gein regularly receives letters form Richard Speck (Tobias Jelinek), a mad-dog killer of several nursing students who shared a house he tried to burglarize while on acid. Now he’s living the life of Riley in prison, having learned all the wrong lessons about Ed. Convinced that Gein is only faking his insanity, Speck too plays it crazy like a fox. 

In a sort of roundabout homage to Gein’s skin-suit — recall that a “Richard” was among the visitors to the auction of his estate in the last episode — he uses hormone injections to increase the size of his breasts, making him the most popular guy in prison. For a fee of cigarettes or drugs, you can actually squeeze tits for the first time in god knows how many years, and more besides, depending on how much you’re willing to pay. This misogynistic murderer doesn’t have breasts because he’s a woman, he has breasts because of what he gets for them in return. The only trans at work here is as in transactional.

Anyway, while Speck’s writing fanmail to Ed, “Teddy” is out there writing fanmail to Speck. The so-called Birdman (he used to keep a pet sparrow in his cell, until he killed it) sends Teddy’s letter to Ed…who, amazingly, helps crack the case. He figures out the make and model of Ted’s car by his description of its horsepower, he deduces that he’s a loner because that’s how negative thoughts like his own developed…he basically has Ted Bundy dead to rights. He’s pleased to see the man get caught, too, to the point of tears. Finally, he’s contributed something good to the world.

Of course that won’t be how he’s remembered. In a sequence that dropped my jaw with its sheer audacity, a dying Ed is wheeled towards the light down a corridor full of people from the hospital, along with a gaggle of mass murderers — Speck, Brudos, Ed Kemper, Charles Manson. While the killers express their admiration and the onlookers cheer Ed on, nurses and orderlies and doctors dance to, of all things, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes. (It was the song playing on MTV when he lost consciousness. Yes, Ed Gein wanted his MTV.)

So here’s the thing. I adore that song. I adore a novel use of it that doesn’t simply signify “Hey, it’s the 1980s!” I adore dream dance sequences, especially ones accompanying a person’s final moments — see also All that Jazz and the seventh season of Mad Men. And while it’s been many years since I was really in that dark place, I know an awful lot about those awful men. Seeing them as part of this joyous sequence is the exact note of discord it needed. There’s something awesome and terrible, in the old-school senses of those words, in watching Ed transcend in this way. It reminds me of how the show aims straight for the most indelible images from the three films it references: the shower scene, Leatherface twirling with his chainsaw, Bill in front of the mirror — just going right for it. I fucking loved it.

There at the end, waiting on the stairs, is Ed’s mother. She welcomes him, congratulates him for all he’s accomplished. “You’ve really made a name for us Geins,” she says, voice thick with pride. 

Does it go without saying that like many, many things in this episode, and in this season, it was all in his head? 

I mean, he says as much when he receives a visit from his old friend Adeline. He’s now a grey old man, and she looks maybe 15 years older than she was before. There’s a lot of that fudging of time going on here: Roz, who was older than him before, is younger than him now. While Ed is upset with Adeline for never writing or visiting, making him feel he’d made their whole relationship up — an unbearable thought — he also says something important before he kisses her hand goodbye: “I think maybe we were one and the same.” 

Maybe it’s just the Twin Peaks fan in me, but when I hear a weird man say two people are “one and the same,” I take it very literally. Adeline’s as much a figment of his imagination, extrapolated from a real person, as Ilse Koch and Christine Jorgensen were — or as Mother was, all that time he believed he’d somehow kept her alive, embedded in another woman’s corpse.

The bottom line is that though medication, therapy, and time cured Ed of his fixations (mostly — he still makes nipple belts, but now the nipples are fake), and though he was so delusional he may not have even thought of it this way himself, it was plain-old misogyny that drove Ed to kill. He was steeped in the stuff, as was the society he was born into. He saw women as literal objects, he valued their bodies over them as people, he murdered at least three women for the crime of getting on his nerves, and again, he spent his whole childhood and young adulthood being told by a woman who insisted only she was capable of loving him that every other woman was sin incarnate. 

Speck was a woman-hater too. And Brudos, and Kemper, and Manson, and Bundy, and Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill. (Leatherface, I think, is an equal-opportunity killer.) I think one of the points this characteristically brutal season of Monster is making is that this is Ed’s ghoulish legacy.

True, we remember him through the movie monsters partially inspired by him. In an epilogue we see a partying teenager who was helping to deface Gein’s grave get visited by Bates and Bill (who didn’t even exist yet — time is slippery on this show) and finally Leatherface, like they’re the three ghosts from A Christmas Carol. In that sense, Ed Gein is a scary story to tell in the dark. Then he himself appears in the cemetery at the end of the scene, young again, swinging his chainsaw like Leatherface, but with something like joy. Then we see him reunited with his mother on the porch; smiling, she tells him “Only a mother could love you,” and he smiles back, content. The real Ed Gein is lost to time, death is his legacy, and only the dead know him.

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.