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DTF St. Louis enthusiasts, were you prepared for that unexpected finale? Creator Steven Conrad ensured the suspense lingered until the very end.
**Warning: Spoilers for DTF St. Louis Episode 7, “No One’s Normal. It Just Looks That Way From Across the Street,” are ahead. Now available on HBO Max.**
The concluding episode of the HBO miniseries, featuring David Harbour, Jason Bateman, and Linda Cardellini, unveils a shocking twist. After weeks of speculation about who was responsible for Floyd’s (played by Harbour) death at the Kevin Kline Community Pool in St. Louis, it is revealed that it was not murder, but a tragic suicide. The twist comes when Floyd’s stepson, Richard (portrayed by Arlan Ruf), discovers Floyd and Clark (played by Bateman) dancing together in nearly nothing. Mistakenly, he believes Floyd is being unfaithful to his mother, Carol (played by Cardellini).
Discussing the series finale with DECIDER, Conrad shared insights about the story’s conclusion and character development. He mentioned that the storyline involving Richard was the clearest path he envisioned from the beginning.
“I recall hearing someone say early in my writing career, ‘Don’t write past your ending,’ which stuck with me,” Conrad said. “The ending is essentially your starting point, although you’re unaware of it initially. Once you discover it, you might need to revisit the story because it signifies your true direction. The entire concept was encapsulated in the promise of the DTF app and its slogan, ‘All the excitement, none of the consequences.’ Anyone with a bit of sense realizes that intimacy without consequences is a false promise. It’s a risky gamble.”
From there, however, it wasn’t as straight forward as having Harbour’s character cheat, Conrad said he wanted to make the audience feel the complexities of the narrative and challenge himself to go past your typical story about someone winding up dead in a threesome. Exploring the idea of intimacy without consequence led to him thinking about what more could be sacrificed in this type of story, which made crafting the finale and the reveal that Richard being let down by Floyd is what led to taking his own life.
“What is the most valuable thing you could lose by playing recklessly with intimacy? The first thing you think of is your marriage or your partner. But then I thought, ‘I bet there’s a there’s a more valuable thing you could lose.’ And so then Richard appeared as an idea [to address] the hardly ever acknowledged plight of so many connected families, or the plight of the step parent to try to connect,” the writer-director said.
He added, “I knew I wanted to write about that ordeal because I hadn’t really seen that in a character I admired before. There’s a lot of evil step-parents in cartoons and the ones that I know in my life are trying every day to be very good at something very hard. So I knew who Floyd was going to be in relation to that walk of his life and then I knew that was going to be the thing that he dropped and broke.”
As for finally putting together the pieces on how Floyd’s penis became bent — something the show began teasing in the first scene of the first episode and then drew out all the way to the end — Conrad also felt like all roads had to lead back to Richard. One thing he did note, though, is that the way Floyd tells Clark about how it went down might be the most intentional part of the entire show.
After weeks of building up the story in bits and pieces, always abruptly leaving the conversation on a cliffhanger as he told the prologue to his Peyronie’s Disease diagnosis, Floyd came clean about his curve by saying simply and plainly that Richard had hit him in the penis with a bat in the middle of the night. It’s so matter of fact that it underpins the love Floyd has for Richard and how broken he is after the confrontation at the Kevin Kline Community Pool before his death.
“He [Floyd] has this instant, easy understanding of this attack and how it made sense for Richard and his role in it. He feels responsible for it, and it was so much more simple to him than a motorcycle accident or getting hit by a car,” Conrad explained. “It was just this thing that Richard did that he might have deserved. It should have felt as easy as that. As easy as if he were to say, ‘Oh, Richard came in and broke the windshield of my car because he was mad at me. I made his mom cry.’”
Hey, sometimes answers to our most pressing questions don’t give us the closure we’ve been hoping for.
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DTF St. Louis is now streaming on HBO Max.