Aloha: An unimaginable truth is revealed for Fauna

In “Aloha”, the fifth episode of I Am The Night, we join Jay Singletary (Chris Pine) and Fauna Hodel (India Eisley) as they search the island for Tamar Hodel (Jamie Ann Allman), Fauna’s birth mother.

Aloha to Truth

If I’ve said this before about any of the others, forgive me, but as it stands, “Aloha” is my favorite episode of I Am The Night so far. Since there are only two episodes left, a lot of questions had to start getting answered, and OH BOY did they get answered.

The episode starts out in 1949, where a psychiatrist is on a witness stand talking about all the psychological problems a certain girl has, stemming from “hysteria” and “hyper sexuality”. this girl is a young Tamar Hodel, who is sitting in the court room while this doctor talks about her. Her father, George Hodel (Jefferson Mays) is staring at her and she gets so upset she pricks her palm with a safety-pin.

We’re transported to the present day of our story, where Jay is begging Peter to give him two tickets to Hawaii because he knows that he can finally put this case together that he’s been chasing for ages. After some badgering, Peter does it. The next step for Fauna and Jay to get to Hawaii is to get past Jimmie Lee, who chases after Jay with a butcher knife. Fauna sneaks out the window and they’re off.

Once on the island, it takes a while for the duo to find Tamar, but eventually they do, because they see two children playing and the boy calls the girl “Fauna”. They follow the kids to the house and low and behold..out comes Tamar.

Jay Singletary (Chris Pine) and Fauna Hodel (India Eisley) are on the hunt for Tamar Hodel in “Aloha”. Image courtesy of TNT.

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Tamar and Fauna go for a walk on the beach. Fauna wants to know who her father is. Tamar said she “wiped him” from her memory. After more questioning, Fauna finds out that she is not black, after thinking she was her entire life. Tamar tells her that she always thought that black people were nicer than white people, so she put “negro” on her birth certificate.

As if this wasn’t enough to give poor Fauna an identity crisis forever, the news she discovers next would leave anyone who heard it disturbed. Tamar mentions that Corinna Hodel (Connie Neilsen) after what she said at the trial. Fauna didn’t know which trial she was referring to, and at that point, Tamar reveals that the reason Fauna was kept a secret is because George Hodel was the father.

I guess I should have picked up on this earlier but it didn’t really start to come together for me until the beginning of this episode, and let me tell you, I was shocked. Tamar then tells Jay that “everyone knows” George Hodel killed the Black Dahlia, then she shows Jay portraits George sent Tamar of all the women he’s killed.

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From here, all the rest pales in comparison but basically Fauna gets mad at Jay for not telling her what happened, they go back to Los Angeles, and Fauna calls Jimmie Lee. During their phone conversation, Jimmie abruptly hangs up on Fauna and then we see that George Hodel is in her house standing in front of her.

It doesn’t take long before he stabs her with a blunt rusty knife and heads back to Los Angeles. Jimmie Lee’s neighbor runs in, so it’s possible she’s not dead. Additionally, Peter rats out Jay to Detective Billis (Yul Vazquez) who takes him into custody. At the end of the episode, Jay is in a holding cell.

“Aloha” was so rich in plot and structure, the Hawaii sets were beautiful. There’s an awesome part where Chris Pine’s Singletary hits a drunken sailor in the eye with a pool ball in a sock. Not gonna lie that there’s a lot of gross guys I wish I could’ve done that to in my day.

This series really strikes a chord with me because I am adopted. I have never met my biological mother, but I know she’s out there, and to my knowledge my biological father is dead. Fauna’s experience meeting her birth-mother is the kind of worst case scenario that all adoptees fear the most.

Luckily, my parents, especially my mother, were very forthright with me about everything from a very young age. I cannot imagine the psychological toll it would take on a person to discover the things that Fauna did as a teenager when one’s sense of identity is already shaky at best.

Additionally, I Am The Night, and “Aloha” in particular, brings up a lot of existential quandaries. Things such as war and the effects it has on solders when they come home, the concept of family and what it means to each unique individual, toxic masculinity and the effects it has on men and the world at large, and even biggies such as “what is good?” and “what is bad?”

There’s something that Jay Singletary says to Fauna that is a good summation of this episode, and the series as a whole:

"“Most people…normal people, they don’t know–they feel it just once at the end. You found out the truth, Fauna. Death and evil, they’re around us all the time, and the line between the two is thin as tissue paper. You got the bad news and you gotta know it for the rest of your life.”"

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“Aloha” delivers the most out of all the episodes of I Am The Night thus far, and leaves me extremely curious about what happens in the final episode. I’m purposely not reading the real history on it until after I’m done.

I really hope George Hodel doesn’t get away with this, but what do you guys think will happen?

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