DTF St LouisCredit: HBOTwo big questions linger as we head toward the Season 1 finale of DTF St. Louis, HBO’s quirky murder mystery / dark comedy-drama – or whatever you want to call it. The series defies easy categorization. It’s really unlike anything else I’ve seen. Spoilers through Episode 6 follow.The first question is, of course, “What happened to Floyd?” I am purposefully not asking “Who killed Floyd?” because I’m not sure that’s the right question, though it’s part of it. This is so much more than a murder mystery, after all. I’m not convinced there even was a murder. More on that in a second.“What happened to Floyd?” is also my second question, though more specifically, “What happened to Floyd’s you-know-what?” or “What caused Floyd’s Peyronie’s disease?” This is a story that Floyd has begun telling Clark several times, but each time we get closer to the big reveal, something cuts the story short.Check out other great shows currently streaming in my latest guide:ForbesWhat To Watch This Weekend: New Shows And Movies To Stream On Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Apple TV And MoreBy Erik KainMORE FOR YOUBoth these questions will, I suspect, be answered this coming Sunday during the DTF St. Louis finale. A third question might be how these two mysteries ultimately tie into one another. I suspect they must in some way, even if it’s just because Floyd’s sexual troubles are part of why we’ve gotten to where we are in the story to begin with.Before we address the first question, I’d like to just briefly discuss why this show is so unexpectedly wonderful. Like Floyd (David Harbour).The Surprisingly Surprising Story Of DTF St. LouisDTF St LouisCredit: HBOThere are many things I love about this show, but chief among them is how delightfully surprising it is, both in terms of plot and in all these odd, unexpected moments we encounter almost every episode. Floyd’s hip-hop dance at the kids dance studio, or his energetic signing at the concert. Clark (Jason Bateman) and Floyd’s “We’re the Thunder Boys” rap as they bike together down the street. Floyd showing off his shockingly impressive gymnastics skills to Richard (Arlan Ruf) on the park bench, moments after giving the boy a lecture about “hostile architecture.” There’s almost a degree of magical realism to some of these scenes. A sense that we’re experiencing not how things really are on the surface, but how they feel underneath.The story itself is told in such an interesting, fragmented manner. There’s a pretty straightforward-seeming mystery: Floyd is found dead in the locker room of a community pool where he was apparently drinking alone. He had a magazine spread of a naked man in an Indiana Jones hat. At first blush, it looked like natural death. But as our detectives, Homer and Plumb, soon find out, there’s more to the story. So much more.A normal mystery might involve the detectives learning new facts as the case unfolded. DTF St. Louis certainly does this, but in a way I’ve never seen before. It shows us glimpses of what happened, but because they are only glimpses, we see them out of context, and each new episode peels back the veil a bit more, showing us a more complete – and more nuanced – landscape. We aren’t exactly lied to, but we are misled, and these pieces of the puzzle, without context, make us leap to conclusions.DTF St LouisCredit: HBOFor instance, during the first episode we get a brief moment where Clark – a local weatherman – and Floyd – a sign language interpreter – are signing to one another but for some reason, the show doesn’t include subtitles. At the end of the episode, after we learn of Floyd’s death, we see the scene play out again. This time, the subtitles reveal that Floyd knows Clark is sleeping with his wife.This makes us immediately begin to suspect that Floyd was killed because of this affair. Makes sense, right? The police certainly think so. It’s only several episodes later that we get a much-expanded version of this scene in which we discover that Floyd’s wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini), told him about the affair before it had even begun. Not only that, but Floyd is fine with it; he wants Carol and Clark to be happy. Floyd is, in many ways, too good for this world. Too kind, too caring, too compassionate.We have so many little moments like this, where our expectations are turned upside down and our assumptions are taken out to the woodshed. We think Clark must have been the one who showed up at the swimming pool on the security footage that Detective Plumb finds because he’s the one who rides the recumbant bike. It makes sense! Then, a few episodes later, we see that Floyd also rides one of these bikes. And so does Carol.At the end of one episode, we see Floyd hiding in the hotel room closet at the Quality Garden Suites, watching with wide eyes as his wife and Clark enact a pool-boy roleplay scenario and then make their way to the bed. We feel terrible for him, because we think he’s only just now discovering their affair, seeing firsthand what’s going on between his wife and best friend. But then, the next episode, we learn that this was all arranged and agreed upon. Floyd wanted to watch. That’s a relief . . . until later we learn that all of this has made Floyd feel small, that no matter how much he’s trying to justify what’s going on, he feels left out. Like the third wheel on one of Clark’s weird bikes.DTF St LouisCredit: HBOEarlier in the season, it appeared that Floyd was meeting up with men, and we began to suspect that he was secretly gay. Then, later, it’s revealed that he met up with a man by mistake and “frenched” him in the parking lot not because he was attracted to him, but because he felt bad. He agonizes over worries that he made the other man – “Modern Love” – feel like he wasn’t enough.Then, later, we learn that Floyd is so down about his weight and his sex life and his life in general, that he wants to meet up with the only other “like” he’s gotten on the DTF St. Louis app: Tiger Tiger, the false account that Clark set up to give his friend a boost. He wants to meet up with Tiger Tiger not because Floyd is gay, but because he thinks that maybe he’ll feel better if he can turn this other man on. He’s so lonely and so sad and so down on himself that he’s turned to this kind of connection just to feel better.Of course, it’s clear that what Floyd needs more than anything is just a really big hug, at least once a day, and words of affirmation and support. He gets that from Clark but not from Carol. Or perhaps Floyd is just one of those people who can be kind to everyone around him, but never to himself. He sees the good in people and wants to help them, but can’t see the good in himself.Whatever the case, Floyd is dead and we don’t know why.What Happened To Floyd?DTF St LouisCredit: HBOSo what happened to Floyd? I’ve avoided theorizing too much because so far all my predictions have been foiled by the show’s excellent writing. For a bit, it really did seem like this was an insurance scam and that Carol murdered Floyd to collect on the insurance money. After all, she arranged the whole thing with Clark and then made him promise to not let Clark know that she knew, which ensured that documents wouldn’t come to their house. It also takes her out of the suspect spotlight. After all, if she didn’t know about the million dollar payout, what motive could she possibly have to kill her husband? Of course we knew that she knew, and that raised our heckles plenty. That and her willingness to have an affair and be manipulative and deceitful, plus her generally horrific way of treating people – wow, and stuff – including the detectives – can you speak up? – made her the most unlikable character in the show, and the most likely suspect. (The detectives bonding over how “weird” their interaction was with Carol was kind of awesome, and their relationship, which includes a lot less friction than it looked like it would in the beginning, is another one of this show’s surprising things).But I’m not so sure now, both because it’s not adding up and because it’s too obvious. Nothing else in this show has been obvious, why should this be? It doesn’t make sense. My theory for a couple episodes now has been suicide. Floyd is very, very depressed and the events of the penultimate episode give me pause. He’s “nixed” by the guy Clark hired to pretend to be Tiger Tiger and this can only make him spiral further. Clark tells the detectives that things “got out of hand” at this point. Could he become so filled with despair that he takes his own life? He strikes me as too selfless and compassionate to do that to Carol and Richard, but serious depression can cause people to do things that seem selfish from the outside. Genuine mental distress is something that can simply defy our expectations of people. DTF St LouisCredit: HBOAnother theory I’ve toyed with is that he killed himself by accident, taking too much of the Amphezyne on top of booze and other meds. Maybe this was reckless. Maybe the Tiger Tiger meetup was setup and he was nervous and took too much. Either way, I can see why Clark and Carol would want to cover this up or even make it look like a murder so that life insurance isn’t voided by the suicide clause. Even if it was an accident, it could easily look like a suicide.But then, what about the loud knocking on the pool changing room door in the middle of the night? Someone else was clearly there, and they were there before Floyd’s death. Is this the someone who kills Floyd? Poisons his drink with the Amphezyne? The only other thought I have on this front is that someone, either Clark or Carol or even Richard, perhaps, shows up because they’re worried about Floyd. They show up and bang loudly on the door because they’re trying to stop him from hurting himself. This is the best theory I have right now and because this show has done such a clever job at obfuscating the truth, I’m almost certain that I’m wrong. But what else could it possibly be? I don’t see Clark or Carol as killers (well, maybe Carol, but I don’t think so) and there’s no other suspect.I guess we’ll find out in the season finale, titled “No One’s Normal. It Just Looks That Way from Across the Street,” this coming Sunday. That’s a line that several people have uttered, first spoken by Modern Love (Peter Sarsgaard) at breakfast with Floyd and most recently by the fake Tiger Tiger guy, as he “nixed” his meetup. Maybe it means that even though someone seems so lovely and happy on the outside, they’re actually wrestling with all kinds of demons and doubt on the inside. Floyd was wonderful, Clark told Homer and Plumb, but he was also deeply troubled, with his bird heart and his debts and his non-existent sex-life and his weight and the weight of it all pressing down on him, crushing him under day after day after day. The heartache I feel watching this man, especially in the sixth episode, is almost too much.My daughter said to me, during one of the show’s wonderful, joyful, heartbreaking moments, that knowing Floyd dies “makes every happy moment sad.” I can’t think of a better way to describe this show.P.S. I didn’t say this above, but on top of the incredible storytelling and overall production, all the main actors here are knocking it out of the park. Jason Bateman’s Clark Forrest is so strange and he just inhabits the role with gusto. Linda Cardellini’s Carol Love-Smernitch is at once kind of intimidating and weirdly childish, with her “For realsies” and constant “and stuff"s tagged onto everything. But David Harbour really steals the show. I’m so glad to see him take on a role like this, moving away from Stranger Things and Marvel and just blow our minds with one of the best performances of the year. He’s so funny and so raw and so vulnerable.Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday as Detectives Homer and Plumb, respectively, are also fantastic. Everyone on this show seems to really get how the script works, how off-kilter and peculiar the dialogue is, and they all lean into it with relish.P.P.S. I feel like there is at least a little shared DNA between DTF St Louis and Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company. That’s a much zanier, much more bizarre TV series, obviously, but both shows have characters who act . . . just a little outlandish. “Why did you say it like that?” Det Plumb asks Clark at one point during their interrogations, after he repeats himself. But Plumb is hardly a normal cat herself, with her almost complete lack of affect or emotion. Both shows are also wildly unpredictable in the best way.I’m so curious to hear your thoughts.Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.