The way I see it, there are three theories as to who, or what, is killing people in Them: The Scare, and all three get a turn in the spotlight in the season’s third episode.

First, you’ve got Edmund Gaines. The best phrase to describe the wannabe actor and children’s entertainer at the heart of one half of the season’s story is “increasingly unstable.” It’s one you could pull more or less directly from one of the self-help tapes he obsessively listens to: It warns that a person without a safe, loving childhood lives a life built on an unstable foundation. 

Edmund’s day job already implies some kind of lingering fixation with childhood, at least from an armchair-psychiatry true-crime angle. Couple this with Detective Dawn Reeve’s theory that the killer may have been one of the slain abusive foster mother Bernice Mott’s prior victims, and you’re looking at a prime suspect. That’s even aside from how he menaces poor Rhonda, first at their disastrous dinner date, then at his even more disastrous “audition” for that serial killer role, where he flips out when they demand he leave. Yeah, it sure looks like Edmund alright.

Except for one obvious issue: The show leaves little doubt at this point that Edmund is only beginning to discover his ability to terrorize people. The guy had to rent A Nightmare on Elm Street to figure out what this whole serial-killer thing is about, remember? Meanwhile, Reeve has commented several times that there’s no way a killer as proficient as the Mott murderer hasn’t struck before. Could the show be pulling a Westworld Season 1, intercutting two separate stories so that it seems like they’re taking place in the same time frame when they aren’t?

At any rate, Reeve’s suspicions about the killer are proven horribly correct when a second-generation Korean-American kid named Victor (Eddie Park) calls in the earlier, identical murders of his two teenage sisters, in response to the LA Weekly story about the new killings that Reeve engineered. The story, by the way, blows up in her face: It makes her own efforts to stop the earlier South Side Slayer also look neglectful, which even her furious lieutenant agrees they weren’t. As punishment, she’s given sole control of the case, with McKinney removed so he doesn’t catch hell when the new so-called serial killer inevitably doesn’t get caught.

You’d think McKinney would be thrilled about this. Why would a lazy asshole like him want a complicated, unclearable case on his desk when he can hang the whole thing like an albatross around the neck of a coworker he despises? A coworker even the dumbest detective in the LAPD could figure out is the source of the leak, to boot?

At first, you think his heightened harassment of Reeve and her poor OCD son Kel is over the story. Perhaps he’s simply been made point man by the other cops, given the job of scaring her into shutting up and toeing the line. At one point he even kind of apologizes to her for his pettiness, though he’s immediately so misogynist afterwards that she literally reaches for her gun.

But then Reeve and her new partner, the enthusiastic Detective Diaz (Carlito Olivero), realize the killer would have been able to cross racial lines without triggering suspicion, the way a cop can do. Then McKinney picks Kel up just to menace him. Then Victor’s two sisters start videotaping themselves staring into mirrors and out windows — as with the other victims, they covered up these surfaces prior to their deaths — while worrying about being followed by an invisible “man with the red hair.”

Then Kel mentions that the cop who threatened him was a, paraphrasing here, Ronald McDonald motherfucker. And it’s the damnedest thing: While McKinney doesn’t really look anything like Ronald McDonald at all, if you put me in that police station and said “point out the Ronald McDonald motherfucker,” he’s the first guy I’d finger. Yeah, it sure looks like Detective McKinney alright.

Except for one obvious issue: How does a killer cop — or a killer Chuck E. Cheese, for that matter — account for the paranormal events? The girls on the video tape point right at a man with red hair, but no one can see him but them. The murder victims cover up not only windows, which makes sense if you’re worried about being watched, but mirrors, as if they’re afraid of the Candyman. 

You can maybe write some strange events off as the product of troubled minds. Maybe Kel’s mind was playing tricks on him when he saw his mother grinning like a demon on the couch. (Hopefully his incredibly cool musician dad, played by Iman Shumpert, will take his mind off it.) Maybe his grandmother has some kind of mental condition that explains why she nearly chopped her own hand off with a paper cutter while staring dissociatively at a Raggedy Andy doll. (Note that Raggedy Andy, a toy historically linked to racist caricature, has red hair; note that Edmund has a Raggedy Andy of his own.) Maybe Reeve looks possessed while staking out McKinney’s house at the end because she’s really angry, and/or because actor Deborah Ayorinde has an S-tier crazyface. 

But it can’t explain everything. Remember during Reeve’s birthday party, how the camera moved away from the action seemingly on its own to show lights flickering and popping both inside and outside of the house? You can’t explain that as coming from the point of view of a mentally ill character; it didn’t come from the point of view of any character.

And even after Kel switched on the lights and his mother’s doppelgänger disappeared, the TV kept playing the Rodney King footage over and over on its own until he unplugged it. A TV doing the same thing switches back on at Reeve’s desk the minute McKinney walks away from her the night he threatens her at the police HQ. 

Which leads to an upsetting conclusion. What if it’s not one of the three doing the killing? What if a psychotic racist cop, a sad self-pitying nerd with a fucked-up childhood, and some kind of demonic entity are all at prey in the fields of L.A.?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.