This week FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson gives us what we want: the glove! Finally. As with the Bronco chase, Ryan Murphy and the writers manipulate the audience’s expectations in the best possible ways. The most infamous events of the trial (even the ensuing parodies, from Saturday Night Live to Seinfeld are part of a shared memory that connects Americans old enough to have been a part of the trial, even just as viewers. And those personal memories further fill out every scene in the show—watching every episode makes us creators of the story as well as consumers.

David Schwimmer is back in a more prominent role this episode, playing conscience of America Robert Kardashian, asking Johnnie Cochran why nobody’s found the real killer yet, and why there’s no other “realistic” theory for who did it. Schwimmer plays the scene as if he were a kid discovering that Santa Claus isn’t real. “I have trouble with the blood in the Bronco,” which he actually said to Barbara Walters during a “20/20 interview, intimating that loyal friend A.C. Cowlings had similar doubts about their friend’s innocence.

A few episodes ago, we saw Johnnie Cochran emphasizing the importance of narrative—the side with the best story wins. Alan Dershowitz expands on his teammate’s axiom in a lesson for a class he’s leading at Harvard. As he and his students watch Cochran expound in the courtroom (on TV), Dershowitz appraises the spectacle: “Look at what the culture is becoming. The media, people—they want narrative too. But they want it to be entertainment. And what’s out in the world osmoses back into the courtroom, sequester be damned. If there’s gonna be a media circus, you better well be the ringmaster.”

There’s no question who the ringmaster is: it’s Cochran, who Christopher Darden describes as made of “Teflon.” Here, we see him take charge from the very first scene, sculpting the narrative that’s going to win, while both Marcia Clark and Darden naively dismiss the importance of a good story for the bland constraints of truth and evidence. Darden, who had earlier intuited the need for drama—“We have hard evidence and they razzle-dazzle a bunch of conspiracy nonsense in the big moments. We need to make our own big moment”—tells his friends that the jury will be able to tell the difference between entertainment and real life. A strategic misstep at the time, but now a sharp reflection on the merger between the two that dominates pop culture.

We see Cochran start to lose control of his story ever so briefly, that of upstanding member of the African-American community, when his first wife and former mistress appear on television together to air his dirty laundry, which really happened. He regains his balance quickly, and shifts focus from himself back on to the case, just like that. Barbara Berry, his ex-wife, also gave an interview to People magazine during the trial in which she said of Patricia, the woman with whom Cochran kept up a multi-decade affair during his marriage to Berry, “I feel she's been caught up in a web of deceit spun by Johnnie. . . . I'm just glad I'm not part of that circus anymore.”

On to a fact check of the episode’s highlights.

The “Colombian necktie” fax from Dershowitz to Cochran in the courtroom.

True. But even better was what was left out of the scene, either for time constraints or to preserve Cochran’s “ringmaster” image: Dershowitz, who may or may not have been teaching at the time of the fax (it’s not mentioned in his book about the trial), sent word that drug cartels sometimes killed in a manner similar to Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder—a “Colombian necktie.” But Cochran got it hilariously wrong in court. He asked Detective Tom Lange, “Have you ever heard of something called a Colombian necklace?”