Death by Lightning Series-Finale Recap: A Minor Footnote

When Candice Millard wrote Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, she came at the story of James Garfield from a fittingly odd angle given his relative obscurity among American presidents. Millard recalls reading a biography of Alexander Graham Bell, who had invented the telephone but dedicated a tremendous amount of time and energy to developing a metal detector of sorts, called an “induction balance,” for the purpose of locating the bullet lodged in Garfield’s body. Millard writes that while it took her three years to complete the book, “it took only a few days of research to realize what Bell must have known — that President Garfield was not only a tragic figure, but one of the most extraordinary men ever elected President of the United States.” That, in the end, became the book’s driving purpose.

Millard devotes a large amount of space to Bell in her book, ending with his agonizing failure, depicted in the end, to get the induction balance to work on Garfield as intended. She also spends time — a lot more time — on the stultifying arrogance and backward thinking that led Garfield to die at the hands of Dr. Willard Bliss, whose rejection of basic anti-septic principles was much more to blame for Garfield’s fate than Charles Guiteau’s bullets. Part of the tragedy in Destiny of the Republic is that the assassination happened just before advances in medicine and technology — to say nothing of tighter security — would surely have saved the president. Millard had the space to include all that information in the book because, well, it’s a book.

Like any adaptation, even one that unfolds over four hours, Death by Lightning has to make some hard choices, and creator Mike Makowsky, whose credits include the terrifically entertaining HBO true-crime comedy Bad Education, relegates Bell and Bliss to the sidelines. Still, given that Garfield spent 80 of his 200 days in office suffering from his wounds, it’s extremely surprising that he doesn’t even get shot until 25 minutes into the 66-minute final episode (including credits). But it’s also a signal of Makowsky & Co.’s priorities for the show, which focuses more closely on Garfield and Guiteau’s historical collision than on the fascinating subplots that spin out from it. By and large, their instincts are sound.

One important takeaway from the series, and this finale especially, is that assassinations cannot be detached from the political climates that make them possible. So while our hissable villain, Roscoe Conkling, isn’t in league with Guiteau, he stokes the internecine battle within the Republican Party that consumes Garfield’s time in office. Although the show wisely avoids making Guiteau’s motives and actions 100 percent clear — there is room here for insanity, and Macfadyen makes a five-course meal out of Guiteau’s delusions of grandeur — he is aware enough of Garfield’s floundering first few months in office to tell which way the wind is blowing. If Conkling prevails in stifling Garfield’s agenda by wiping out his appointees, then his man in the White House, Chester Arthur, will have helped orchestrate it. In Guiteau’s mind, he and Arthur are buddies and killing Garfield would benefit them both.

In the lead-up to the assassination, the episode digs into the showdown between Garfield and Conkling and the broader fate of the Republican Party and democracy writ large. After all, you certainly wouldn’t want a system so detached from the will of the people that only the country’s wealthiest can have access to it. [Loudest ahem-ahem-ahem imaginable.] Conkling’s approach is to twist every arm within reach, threatening political ruin to those who won’t play ball. Garfield’s approach is to appeal to congressmen’s better angels. Against all odds, Garfield not only wins out in the end but draws Arthur away from the bully who made his career. In that, Garfield’s surprising faith in Arthur’s dormant patriotism and decency pays off. And it pays off later, too, when he steps into a role everyone, including himself, believes he’s woefully ill equipped to handle.

The hilarious scene in which Arthur attempts to submit his resignation to Garfield is a prime example of what Death by Lightning has done so well, which is give history a little seriocomic zing. By speaking openly to the press about Garfield’s ineptitude and refusing to hide his identity, Arthur is like George Costanza in the Seinfeld episode where he drags a World Series trophy around the parking lot in an effort to get canned from the Yankees. “I feel it my duty to explain to you that you really ought to fire me,” says Arthur. “I’m a truly bad vice-president.” Yet the worst opprobrium he gets from Garfield is a gentle request to come to him first before airing his concerns to the public.

The sequence at the train station where Guiteau plugs Garfield with two bullets from his pearl-handled pistol is nicely staged and so chaotic that no one remembers to take the murder weapon until Guiteau casually offers it up himself. And the show handles the aftermath of Guiteau’s capture beautifully. If this man truly believed he was committing a war-averting act on behalf of the American people, it follows he would expect to be treated like a hero with just a brief stop in a cell with a view before earning a proper post in the new Arthur administration. Bit by bit, Guiteau’s illusions are diminished by events like an angry mob gathering outside the prison, a disappointing reaction from his sister, and a confrontation with Lucretia after Garfield’s death. But they don’t fully disappear until he’s on the gallows and realizes the stone-faced gentlemen below him are unmoved by anything he has to say. Macfadyen plays him as a tragic fool to the end.

It’s been a little odd to see a wild card like Michael Shannon play the noble Garfield, though he summons a thunderous energy when Garfield rallies his party to stand up to Conkling in Washington. For the last part of the finale, he’s reduced mostly to moaning in response to Dr. Bliss’s invasive care — “Loss of consciousness is to be expected,” says Bliss as he needles around his patient’s spine with a probe — and muttering kindnesses to the loved one who will carry on without him. It’s a shame the episode doesn’t have enough time to detail Bliss’s shocking affronts to modern medicine, but a shot of him holding a bloody scalpel in his teeth while digging into an open wound with his bare fingers is maybe all that needs to be shown. At every turn, Garfield gave a lot better than he got.

Which leads to the confrontation at the prison between Guiteau and Lucretia, a scene that underlines the point of the show a bit too heavily but gives the underused Betty Gilpin a chance to sell it. Lucretia confesses to Guiteau that her deathbed assurances to her husband that history would “remember him grandly” were a lie. “In reality,” she tells Guiteau, “history won’t remember him at all. Be no reason to. Be a minor footnote at best. An idle piece of trivia. Do you recall poor old what’s-his-name, who was shot three months into his presidency?” Lucretia’s lone, cold comfort is to deny Guiteau his exalted place in history, too, most tangibly by ensuring his book is never published. Those guys in 1969 asking, “Who the fuck is Charles Guiteau?” in the opening scene of the series will at least know Garfield was president, even if they don’t know another fact about him.

One could counter that Millard’s book and now this series have given Guiteau’s views an audience, but that would suggest those views are coherent. Death by Lightning continues the book’s work in exalting Garfield’s character and wondering what might have been, something he has in common with other major figures shot down before their time. But the series is also about a corrosive tradition in American politics in which progress is undone by incitement and destructive violence. Charles Guiteau may not be remembered, but it’s wise to remember there are Charles Guiteaus everywhere.

Conklings:

• “America’s faced with a peril like never before. It’s time for the true patriots to reveal themselves. Take action. Today, we bring a reckoning. I can no longer stay quiet about the dire state of affairs in Washington”: The “take action” part of this quote at the beginning of the episode hangs a lot of Garfield’s fate on Conkling.

• Fun fact: Chauncey Depew, the politician who bests Conkling in New York, was a passionate advocate of mail delivery by pneumatic tube. Hard same, Chauncey.

• Dr. Bliss referring snidely to germs as “invisible monsters” is just the tip of the iceberg for anti-septic skeptics at the time. An entire miniseries devoted to this one issue would be welcome.

• The show does what it can to depict how hot it was in Washington at the time, with those ice blocks being brought in to cool the White House and Arthur storming off from Conkling’s carriage. But the summer heat was indeed oppressive and a big contributor to Garfield’s misery (and the decision to cart him off to the shore for his final days).

• Does it feel era-appropriate for Guiteau to say his diary is “soon to be available wherever books are sold”? Seems too modern to me. But at least he didn’t hype ye olde audiobook.

• “I stubbed my toe on the gallows”: A fantastic comic beat from Macfadyen in the show’s final moments. You can take the boy out of Tom Wambsgans, but you can’t take Tom Wambsgans out of the boy.