Waco: The Aftermath review: This might be the scariest show on television

Waco is the ultimate American shitstorm. The 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound resulted in the deaths of 86 people (including 28 children and four ATF agents), took place over two bloody raids by two different government agencies separated by a tense and public 51-day standoff, featured the largest military force ever gathered against a civilian suspect in American history—with one dozen tanks and nearly 900 law enforcement agents—and ended in the largest gunfight on United States soil since the Civil War. Of course, really, there remains no end. What was planned to take 20 minutes 30 years later became a muddied ideological talking point for Second Amendment rights, religious freedom, government overreach, and who exactly started the proverbial fire. The ATF maintains they only returned gunfire. The FBI, somehow, still maintains it never shot a single bullet. Survivors hold they were not involved with a cult but a communal church acting in self-defense. Really the only certainty is that violence begets more violence. Two years after Waco, Timothy McVeigh cited the raid as a singular motivation for his truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. This remains the worst case of domestic terrorism in the country’s history.

The Aftermath, which premieres April 14 on Showtime, navigates the direct path between the two. Based on the book A Place Called Waco: A Survivor’s Story by David Thibodeau, an outspoken and frighteningly tortured chronicler of his past who met David Koresh at Guitar Center in L.A., the show joins the present-day discourse, along with the just-released Netflix documentary, Waco: American Apocalypse, and the first installment of this show from 2018. Together it is a package of harsh light on the dark side of Clinton-era nostalgia. Even for those of us who grew up with this news on the front page, who followed along on CNN as Sharyl Attkisson (now a member of the anti-vaccine cult) narrated the action, who remember well the first World Trade Center bombing, the days of the chart-topping “I Will Always Love You,” when Attorney General Janet Reno, a driving force behind all those tanks, was best known for being portrayed by Will Ferrell on SNL’s “Janet Reno’s Dance Party.” Just a cursory refresher of the raid details leaves a trail more twisted, a feel more odious, than seems to exist in the collective consciousness.

Waco is a study meant for multiple browser tabs. In fact, it is astounding that such a big, yes, apocalyptic event, one that played out in front of the world on TV, offers scarcely an agreed-upon baseline of objective fact. And for all this, there is probably not an actor more suited to embody the disparate psychic forces of Americana than Michael Shannon. Playing FBI investigator and negotiator Gary Noesner, with his usual conflicted simmer, near-perpetual grimace, brimming with intense uncertainty always threatening a boil-over of outrage, his voice a tamped-down baritone, he projects a conflicted conscience and righteous menace. He echoes his role in Boardwalk Empire, as a crusader cursed by his own moral compass. There are also shades of his quiet turn in Take Shelter, as a man torn apart by the effort of keeping it together, being the only one to see the whole doomed picture. Here he is tasked with a dive into the feeling of an “undercurrent of rage in America,” thinking, “we helped create the monster we’re trying to stop.”

Around Shannon Aftermath jumps, connects some dots, offers loose connections, and generally takes its time for a show with so much to say. At the very least it avoids heroes or myth-making. As really there are only villains, cautionary tales, bystanders of varying degrees of participation, and confounded cleaner-uppers. Instead, it revels in the sprawling muddiness, acting as more broad interrogation or choppy meditation than retelling. Everything seems to indicate a straight narrative rehash might be impossible: In the first scene we see the FBI, in the aftermath, failing to make sense out of their own story, infighting, men in suits and mustaches with shoulders erect, patting themselves on the back, basically, for the inconceivable claim that “not a single shot was returned by the FBI.” There is no mention of the rounds of CS gas, or tanks crumpling compound walls, or the victim autopsy results. But you can tell from the swagger of Shea Whigham, as agent Mitch Decker, always righteously curdled, so bothered and rumpled, a kind of working face of bureaucracy, that this is certainly not the side of good.

To get to the bottom, or, well, at least to go down, the show hops between three major plot lines. The procedural courtroom drama section might prove to be the least interesting, as five living members stand trial for the deaths of the ATF agents. There are some gotcha Law & Order-isms about how the ATF lost the tape of the raid and 100 Happy Meals were brought along for the photo op of freed children. Yes, the Davidians were stockpiling weapons, but obtaining them legally. Probably. There are mitigating factors, permutations, dark gray areas to every claim on every side. Giovanni Ribisi, suited and squirrely as defense attorney Dan Cogdell, channeling his inner Clarence Darrow with a Perry Mason twist, holds court with a weird accent and a whiskey and wisdom dispensing at his local bar and grill. He speaks on government overreach, looks for angles, gets tips from a would-be Deep Throat driving a DeLorean played irascibly, but comically, almost as if from a different show, by Gary Cole. He asks about the front door to the compound for about one-and-a-half episodes. He delivers an impassioned speech to the media on the court steps about the importance of religious freedom in America. It’s hard not to imagine Ribisi, the man, a member in good standing with the Church of Scientology (although maybe not at a very high “OT” level), offering a vindication for his own cult participation.

More important is the chance for time with the Davidians themselves—human, confused, damaged, grieving, reflective, far from innocent, mostly, but naively baffled by public outrage and claims of “brainwashing.” Some still believe. Some are still outside of their minds. There is an incorrigibility to faith, they seem to show, a snowballing effect, maybe a need to double down on outlandish beliefs when you see how far they have taken you. Or there is something non-believers simply might not be capable of understanding.

We are then bounced back to the formation of the cult. But, yes, not a cult, also, so to speak. Maybe. Founded in 1930 as an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Davidians have long been overly obsessed with the imminence of the apocalypse, the “Beast,” the Four Horsemen, the Seven Seals, the Second Coming, Ezekiel 9, Revelation 5, etc. Since the mid-’30s, the sect has existed, strangely, yes, but peacefully, and not totally independent of the lay population, as a Bible-based community just outside Waco. In their compound, known as Mount Carmel, this story thread picks up in the early ’80s. Through sepia-toned filters is glimpsed a world of brown dust, big glasses, small clapboard churches, and the kind of attire you always see pictures of your parents wearing on vacations before you were born. Into this “New Palestine” rides Vernon Howell (Keean Johnson) literally, atop a motorcycle like a mulleted Messiah, ready soon to be renamed David Koresh. The gangly, gently charismatic con man certainly knows his Bible stuff and speaks soft and open about his struggles with the flesh, before finding his charm, wooing the then de-facto leader, Lois Roden (J. Smith-Cameron), setting upon a struggle for his own authority stake. He begins to become a vessel for the Lord’s words, fortunately, breathing relatable life into the ideas of the Old Testament, launching fruitful member recruiting trips to the U.K. Unfortunately, said Lord also advises the wedding and bedding of girls as young as 10 years old.

Meanwhile, in 1995, Noesner has a bad feeling. Disenchanted with the FBI’s role in the raid, he convinces his superiors to let him amble, without much clear objective, after marginalized anti-government sects of the post-Waco world. He stumbles through frightening complexities—the Christian Identity movement, an anti-government sect of white supremacists in Elohim City, Oklahoma—ending up in the homes and clubhouses of the burly, bald types to order bulk quantities of the Turner Diaries. “Waco has done something to them; it’s started to unite them.” And here the show begins to stop feeling like a time capsule. A domestic terrorism expert informs him, after the government’s botched raid in Ruby Ridge in 1992, that the Aryan Union held a picnic, “decided to start calling themselves ‘Patriots.’” To which Noesner replies, “You know what patriots do? Overthrow tyranny.” Throughout, the screen is filled with Shannon’s face of flat mouth and endless inner turmoil, a despair that seems to manifest itself across his brow almost like intestinal distress, his steely gaze conveying ulcers and intestinal knots of the conscience, everything within seeming near combustion. Each polite smile to a known waitress is an act of toil.

For good reason. Noesner plants a confidential informant (a fiery Abbey Lee) at Elohim City, the place a beating dark heart of sweaty white disillusionment and hate. At the same time, we meet that compound’s recent graduate, Timothy McVeigh (Alex Breaux). He’s frighteningly reminiscent, with wide blank cop gaze, flat voice, rigid back, the embodiment of a bullied kid who found refuge in gun magazines and computer hacking, who dropped out of Bryant & Stratton, excelled in the Army, but also got in trouble there for buying a White Power shirt at a KKK rally. Here is the show’s, the epoch’s, the world’s true boogeyman. Set on doing something, set on a vision of himself as a lone wolf soldier of vengeance. Against taxes, against the raid, against, well, “them.”

We live in a country beset by magical thinking, the show seems to say. Or, in the words of President Clinton, “I do not think the United States government is responsible for the fact that a bunch of religious fanatics decided to kill themselves.” Of course, that suicide was, at least, assisted by the U.S. government. Within these worlds, it is easy to feel the rage, paranoia, for and from both sides. To feel disgust for a nation where leaders are offered up out of a rotating stable of conmen and cosplayers. For a government composed of those who repeatedly refuse to act on our gun violence epidemic, while at the other end, a militia plans the kidnapping of a governor. Or how to overturn an election. Something is coming, always coming. As gruff and determined as can be, Shannon is but a helpless conscience, equally outraged and baffled, as frightened as driven. In many ways, this is the scariest show on television, as it is so clearly anything but a period piece.