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This is a relatively spoiler-free review of Under the Banner of Heaven, based on the first five episodes.

You know her. She's softly backlit underneath a billowing white sheet. She doesn't want to be videotaped. She laughs as she tells whoever's behind the camera to stop with a hand on the lens, but we're oh so grateful we have this snapshot to remember her smile and her white teeth and her prairie dress collection. She's usually brunette for some reason. And she's gone. 

She's the Dead Wife—and she's the reason we're watching her husband's story. 

In the first episode of Under the Banner of Heaven, Brenda Wright Lafferty (Daisy Edgar Jones) seems perfectly poised to fill the dead-wife trope, with her brown doe eyes and easy smile as she lets out a soft whoop on the back of her husband Allen's (Billy Howle) motorcycle, throwing her arms into the air for just a second. Though she's not the wife of our main protagonist, Detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), it is her gruesome murder—and that of her 15-month-old daughter—that kicks off his emotional journey and crisis of faith.

FX’s Under the Banner of Heaven, inspired by Jon Krakauer's true-crime book of the same name, is a fictionalized retelling of the real-life 1984 murders of Brenda and her daughter, Erica, which were motivated by Mormon extremism. Unlike Krakauer's work, which weaves between the story of the modern crime and the equally violent founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the miniseries unpacks these stories through the eyes of Brother Pyre, a devout Mormon detective who finds himself at odds with his own LDS church as he investigates the Lafferty brothers' descent into Mormon fundamentalist teachings of blood atonement and polygamy. 

With this framework in mind, Brenda's story could easily get lost among Pyre's internal war and the intense cast of suspects, sprinkled in here and there to remind viewers of the stakes. However, UBH has done what countless Christopher Nolan films fail to do: It explores Brenda's humanity. 

Daisy Edgar Jones as Brenda Wright Lafferty in Under the Banner of Heaven.

Right at the top of the first episode, UBH resists the urge to shock viewers by depicting the violence done to Brenda and baby Erica. We get flashes of a blood-covered body as Pyre explores the initial crime scene, but her death is more apparent through the detective's emotional response. Erica's body isn't shown at all. This leaves viewers to remember Brenda as she was when she was alive. And who was she? Complicated.

It's here that I must remind readers that Brenda Lafferty was a real person and there are things we know about her. Through Krakauer's investigative reporting we know that she was also from a Mormon family, won first runner-up in the Miss Twin Falls Pageant in 1980, and anchored a local news show while attending Brigham Young University. We also know she was hated by certain Lafferty brothers for her perceived effect on their wives. With that in mind, any further reference to Brenda in this piece is based on the fictional version of her that is depicted in this television show.

This Brenda is not perfect, which does not exclude her from the dead-wife trope in and of itself. You see, there are two kinds of dead wives. The ones who are perfect and beautiful and hollow, and the ones who are perfect and beautiful and hollow until we learn they've done a Bad Thing. This bad thing is ultimately what leads to their death and shakes up the protagonist's worldview. It's not so black-and-white in UBH.

In this case, Brenda's “crime” is her willingness to question her priesthood holder, a term used by the LDS Church to describe male authority figures. It typically relates to husbands, but in this case Allen isn't much for authority. Instead Brenda is deemed insubordinate by his brothers for attending college, wishing for a career, and for meddling in Lafferty family affairs, despite her status as a woman and an outsider. If that's where her “flaws” ended, she'd make the perfect martyr. 

But it's not. Though Brenda is unwaveringly kind, intelligent, and supportive; she's also ambitious to the point of manipulation, often for the sake of status. Unlike her husband Allen, who is willing to forsake his brothers to lead a more modern life in line with Brenda's upbringing, she's unabashedly attracted to his family name. “Ask anybody in Salt Lake what it means to be a Lafferty,” she implores her skeptical father after introducing him to Allen, who even she seems to recognize as a dud. “It's like marrying into royalty!” Their reputation appears to be her main motivation for her marriage and subsequent attempts to pull Allen's brothers back from their foray into tax evasion and fundamentalist practices. 

It's her autonomy that makes her a compelling character and breaks her apart from the dead wives that have come before her. The various flashbacks provide a well-rounded picture of her life and marriage instead of serving as clues or driving Pyre's motivation to capture her killers. 

And this autonomy is extended to all the female characters in Under the Banner of Heaven, which heavily focuses on the ways the LDS church covers up the abuse of its female parishioners and protects their abusers. For a show that implicitly highlights the power imbalance between wives and husbands in the Mormon faith—including Pyre's own marriage—none of the wives are depicted as mindlessly subservient, a choice that makes creator Dustin Lance Black's message all the more powerful. Thank God for that. 

The first two episodes of Under the Banner of Heaven are available on Hulu. New episodes drop on Thursdays. Emily Tannenbaum is an entertainment editor, critic, and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. 

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