Aaron Hernandez Episode 4 Recap

Every February, scouts, managers and coaches at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis spend an entire week putting college football players through rigorous testing and assessing their physical and mental strength in preparation for the NFL Draft in a few months . This is the NFL Scouting Combine – a bizarre but crucial tradition in many ways. In a way, it's the ideal setting for an episode of a series with the title American sports history. I would watch a whole documentary about it.

“Birthday Money” is my favorite episode of Aaron Hernandez Partly, though, it's because the title character serves as a sort of surrogate for the audience, witnessing the confusing, stressful pre-draft process. After a disturbing flashback at the beginning – more on that later – the episode opens straight away with a montage of various agents eating and eating Aaron and his brother, all insisting that he can go wherever he wants. Aaron is very susceptible to people intimidating him, but it's obvious that he needs someone who can tell him clearly. Enter the humble Brian Murphy (Thomas Sadoski), who warns Aaron that his first-round talent won't offset certain “off-field concerns.”

Forget the first round – if Aaron wants to be selected at all, he'll need to make a good impression at the scouting combine. But before the episode gets to that big event, it takes time to build some mystery. Before facing the intense reality of the showcase, Aaron trains for four weeks at the agency in Laguna Hills, California, with DJ as moral support. Training includes rewatching clips of interceptions and incomplete passes from his final three years of college football, taking responsibility for his mistakes and becoming more “coachable.” It also means sitting through long interviews and answering ridiculous questions designed to agitate him, like “Are you in a gang?” and “Do you fuck cows?”

The actual event, when it occurs, is no less silly, although almost everyone involved treats it with great seriousness. “I know why they call this shit a slave auction,” one player remarks and there Is There's something inhumane about the way players dress inconspicuously and are poked and prodded while medics and sports professionals mingle and gawk. Of course, these evaluations are not necessarily perfect predictors; For example, many studies have questioned the reliability of using 40-yard dashes to determine career success, and mental assessments like the Wonderlic test, which Aaron fails, are not always useful. Still, Aaron's score indicates his social immaturity, and data suggests that players who score below average are twice as likely to be arrested.

Given his mixed results, a lot is riding on Aaron's big interview. First, he gets to the point, answers questions with warmth and humor, but also takes his conversation partners seriously. He even cites Tim Tebow's influence as helping him find a new path with Christianity and getting him clean. Aaron only stumbles when his father comes up in conversation. Just saying that he wants to honor his father causes Dennis Hernandez to hallucinate, calling him the usual insults and saying, “You disgust me.” This makes Aaron look somewhat emotionally unstable and his future fate is unclear .

Beyond the football stuff, there are two main focuses here on a character level. The first is obviously Aaron's sexuality, which remains a central part of his struggle. “Birthday Money” introduces a new love interest for him, a composite character named Chris (played by Jake Cannavale, son of Bobby), who is a physical therapist at Murphy's agency. When he first meets Aaron, Chris says he moved here from Hartford but stayed in California because “people are just more laid back,” suggesting that he and Aaron are on the same page.

From the moment Chris first shows up, you can see where this is going: several erotic stretching scenes where Aaron feels uncomfortable and embarrassed by his obvious arousal. During the show, Chris calms him down by visiting him in his room and initiating a kiss (even more) after Aaron opens up about the pressure he's under.

Inserting a composite character into this role is a bit strange. But I'm even more mixed about the first scene of the episode, a flashback of DJ almost walking in and watching his brother being molested by their Uncle Bobby on his sixth birthday. We know from Boston globereports that the real DJ says Hernandez was abused as a young boy, but the person responsible was never identified. Here, Ryan Farley and Chelsey Lora's script seemingly borrows the name of their real-life deceased uncle Robert Valentine and turns him into a pedophile, including inventing an arrest for exposing himself on a school bus. I'd love to be proven wrong here – maybe Ryan Murphy has access to some court records that I don't – but it sure feels gross.

Aside from the verisimilitude of the scene, its placement in the episode just feels weird, almost bordering on viewing the attack as an origin story for Aaron's queerness. Hernandez actually made the same association himself globe coverage, but the show doesn't seem interested (yet) in interrogating this or at least showing Aaron expressing this flawed way of thinking about sexuality. When his trauma later comes to light in an argument with DJ – Aaron flashes back, screaming that DJ should be looking out for him but didn't – it's hard to know what the episode is trying to tell us from that moment on. We have never seen Aaron attack his brother out of resentment over the harassment. The episode also doesn't delve deeply into DJ's perspective, making it a bit unclear what he's thinking and whether he even realizes what Aaron means. Does he feel guilty about what happened and prefers to live in denial? Is he covering up something he knows to be true when he tells Murphy that they were never close to Uncle Bobby?

While training in Laguna, Aaron and DJ are doing pretty well, headlining concerts together and really getting back together as brothers. (“Dad would be proud,” DJ tells him, exactly what Aaron always wanted to hear.) But their dynamic becomes dicey again when DJ’s professional jealousy comes to the fore. He hopes Murphy can help him land a job as quarterback on the practice squad, but the best Murphy can come up with is a spot on the coaching staff of a team in Berlin. It's hard not to feel sympathy for the guy as he points out the gap in career opportunities between him and his brother – and the irony that DJ's spotless record makes no difference.

He gets even more petty about it once the draft begins, during the same fight in which the harassment is implicitly brought up. DJ is clearly jealous – “It should have been me” sums it up – but it's true that Aaron doesn't appreciate the leniency he's been shown. Yes, he was passed over in the first three rounds and might even be passed over entirely, which sucks. But he was wrong by blaming DJ and Murphy even though he knows he only has himself to blame. Even now, very few people are convinced that Aaron is actually ready for this.

As always, Aaron escapes the career-ending consequences he feared, this time thanks to Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and owner Robert Kraft's mistaken belief that there are all benefits and little risk in recruiting him. The “Gladiator” podcast highlights the tragedy of this decision: Keeping Aaron at home near negative influences may be the worst choice for him when he could benefit most from a reset. But “Birthday Money” ends on a high note when DJ hears Aaron's name on TV and freaks out, yelling the news at Terri and rushing outside to meet Aaron sprinting over from his cousin's apartment. The joy of watching them put aside their luggage and hug each other on the street, as one brother is genuinely happy for the other, is nothing short of contagious.

In a series that progresses through Aaron's life so sequentially, leaving characters aside as they become less relevant, it's helpful to have a core relationship to invest in and return to throughout all ten episodes. There are elements of this brotherly relationship that aren't fully fleshed out yet, but the resentment coupled with love and camaraderie make it the most believable character dynamic in this series – and make this installment the strongest of all, despite all the questions it raises.

• The series never shows Aaron's college girlfriend breaking up, but it never really treats her as a meaningful character either. In this episode, he meets Shayanna at the supermarket and prepares them to get back together.

• NFL Europe was dissolved in 2007. So which German team suggested Murphy as DJ?

• Nice to get a little sequel about where Tim and Maurkice ended up, considering they're understandably gone from the series now, and I liked seeing Aaron's enthusiasm for his friends. At the moment I'm pretty convinced by Josh Andrés Rivera's performance, especially in the moments where you see his sweet, youthful side.