The investigation into what’s going on with the strange murders on The Outsider took a turn when episode 3 introduced private investigator Holly Gibney. How will she influence the rest of the miniseries?
At the start of episode 3 of The Outsider, Ralph (Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman). Once the prime suspect for the murder of Frankie Peterson and the young boy’s entire family were dead, Ralph was removed from active duty to seek psychological help. That didn’t mean he was going to stop working on the case, however.
It’s Ralph’s obsession with getting the case right, especially in light of Terry’s death, that leads him to work in secret without the police knowing what he’s doing. That’s where a brilliant private investigator makes her entrance on The Outsider.
Who Is The Outsider’s Holly Gibney?
Ralph reaches out to the Maitland family lawyer, Howard Saloman, to try and combine resources so he can continue to work on the case despite being taken off of it. Saloman has been using his own investigator in the previous episodes in a race with the police to exonerate Terry, even if it’s posthumously. Howard and Ralph form an uneasy alliance. Howard tells Ralph that his investigator has someone he wants to bring in, and that someone is Holly Gibney: a private investigator of seemingly limitless talents who can backtrack over any event and find clues.
Holly is immediately introduced as a genius who is going to be difficult to get along with. She refuses to fly to meet Ralph due to a phobia, instead requiring him and Howard’s investigator to meet her at her favorite bar, where she has a preferred seat that no one else can sit in. She has total recall of all events, which she demonstrates this by giving the exact date of a baseball game after being told who the pitchers were, then threw in some trivia about it. While her mind seemingly works like a supercomputer, the audience is quickly shown there is some sort of emotional backstory to Holly. The Outsider, so far, has been all about character studies, focusing on each person’s background to show how they personally relate to the big case.
Ralph, who is broken from the loss of his son, tells Holly he doesn’t deal in uncertainties when she tells him that they could be dealing with a doppelganger in this case. Holly tells him if he can’t deal in uncertainties then they can’t work together, because some things can’t be logically explained. Interestingly, by the end of the episode, it seems Ralph and Holly develop some kind of camaraderie. She goes to Ohio to retrace the Maitland family’s vacation where Terry’s troubles began. She stumbles upon evidence that this kind of murder case happened before in the town where the Maitlands were staying. She calls Ralph to suggest a doppelgänger killing happened around the same time Terry visited. After apologizing for not having more information, she its to Ralph sometimes she just needs to hear a friendly voice, so she called him. The episode ends there, leaving viewers wondering just how Holly is going to mesh with the group going forward as the mystery of Stephen King's The Outsider unfolds.
