Over the phone, Sara tells him that she enjoyed what happened between them but that they didn’t think it through. The Alienist: Angel of Darkness episode 7 finally has Sara and John reckon with their feelings for one another he even stands up Hearst and Violet at a swanky dinner in order to do so, and they’re forced to order for him in his absence, both competing over who knows his tastes better. She slashes his throat, steals his gun, and blends back into the busy Brooklyn street. Libby is eventually cornered by a police captain who dopily turns his back on her. Libby, though, catches a glimpse of Clara, which leads to their being spotted and having to flee. This flushes everyone out of the building, as Libby and Goo Goo watch from afar. But Libby is apparently inbound, though she’s smart enough to send a decoy with a delivery and a message - a single bullet, with the promise that she has one for each of them.
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Sara and Laszlo arrive at Mallory’s home, fuming at what Burns has done, with the intention of taking Clara away to safety. Hearst, as is typical, speaks only in vague terms about how he doesn’t want to see Violet hurt and how John surely knows what he must do in regard to his public relationship with Sara. With Mallory’s help, he gets Libby’s daughter, Clara, to pose for photos that make the papers, and that are soon seen by Libby and Sara, the latter of whom takes the matter to John, who takes it to Hearst. With no success, Burns proposes to Hearst using Libby’s child to lure her out, and he takes this proposition to Mallory under the guise of an offer from Cornelius Vanderbilt himself. Goo Goo, despite having taken the child, nonetheless skips the rendezvous with Burns, watching on as Fat Jack takes a licking as a message for him. Meanwhile, the Isaacsons arrive with the memory boxes Libby created to memorialize her victims, the oldest of which is for her own daughter. When Goo Goo tells Libby about Burns’s offer, and cautions her about the Pinkertons, she flat-out refuses to play ball and he’s forced to take the Vanderbilt child for himself, which he claims he’s doing for her.
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Laszlo, though, sees right through this and lays out pretty bluntly that Mallory herself fabricated the attempted murder story in order to justify the child being taken away (this is where that whole “family of means” thing comes up again, validating a need to prove Libby was incapable of caring for her child since removing her from the care of a well-to-do family would have been the last resort.) Mallory still has the papers from the orphanage, and the new working suspicion is that Libby has come back to retrieve her daughter. She relays the family’s posh background, the husband’s unexpected suicide - Laszlo theorizes that, being from the country, he might have found the lifestyle ill-fitting - and the story of Libby’s biological child being taken away on the grounds that she was unable to care for her. Instead, along with Laszlo and Burns, they visit Libby’s mother, Mallory Hunter, who has been expecting them after reading about the case in the papers. John, as a reminder to the audience that they slept together last week, mentions to Sara that they have some things to discuss, but now isn’t exactly the time. John and Sara are struggling to work with Burns in “Last Exit to Brooklyn” since he’s the kind of guy who callously tosses coins to street urchins. Presumably pleased with his no doubt healthy bones and teeth, Goo Goo meets with Fat Jack, who informs him of Burns’s offer of payment for the child’s release. That profile is quickly proved very accurate, though, as The Alienist: Angel of Darkness episode 7 cuts to Libby feeding the babe in front of a rather fake-looking window, promising Goo Goo that she’ll save him some. Laszlo and Karen work through the profiling together, and one can’t help but wish she had been introduced earlier and they’d had more to do as a pair. This is all part of Libby’s bizarre pathology, which Laszlo attempts to determine by accompanying Karen to an “alternative club”, where the black hermaphrodite proprietor, Alice, discusses with him how her partner has a fixation identical to that of Libby - a detachment and fervent need for connection rooted in abandonment.
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She was also institutionalized for two years for trying to murder her mother, so you know - money isn’t everything. As it turns out, Libby comes from a good family of means - a term repeated again and again throughout “Last Exit to Brooklyn” as an excuse or an explanation for a whole host of different things, as class tends to confer those kinds of privileges.