When a body is found inside a storage facility, the authorities look into other spaces rented under the same name and find other victims.
Tropes:
- Affectionate Nickname: A victim used to call his grandmother "Mom-Two".
- Bittersweet Ending: Malik is stopped and his last victim is saved. But it's clear that the previous victims' ghosts and their families blame the cops for not having taken the disappearances of the first four victims seriously, letting Malik get away with three more murders before the bodies were found.
- Bookends: The episode opening is of Shemar and his grandmother chatting on his porch, with her chastising him for always listening to hip-hop music on his iPod. It concludes with his ghost appearing to her on that same porch, with her listening that same iPod.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Malik, in his insanity, does not goes after the now-grown men who beat him up and mangled him when they were kids, or the now-elder Knight Templar supervisor of the Orphanage of Fear who made them stand in place for days on end until the wicked came out of them (and ordered the other kids to beat up Malik to make the torture stop, leading to said cutting off of fingers). He instead targets kids who… beat his high score at an arcade machine.
- Fingore: Malik had one of his fingers chopped off by the other kids at the orphanage and they were ordered to do so by their sadistic prefect. One of the kids Malik got close to but let go because he failed the test for being chosen as a victim (beat Malik at Defector 3) remembers seeing the mangled hand.
- Not Worth Killing: If a potential target doesn't beat Malik at Defector 3, the target isn't included in his hit list.
- Orphanage of Fear: The serial killer grew up in one of those and tortured his victims the same way he was tortured and that includes cutting off a finger.
- Pac Man Fever: The game Defector 3 is described at one point as a role-playing game but what little we see of it on screen makes it look like a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game.
- Raised by Grandparents: One of the victims was raised by his grandmother.
- Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Malik uses "Theseus" as his high score nickname, seeing supposed parallels between Theseus' Roaring Rampage of Revenge and his own killing spree. Which he explains to Rush and her partners as he is caught and slices his own throat.
- Revenge by Proxy: Malik tortures and kills other kids as replacements for the kids who tortured him at the orphanage.
- Rule of Three:
- The first victim to be found was killed three months before being found.
- The serial killer picks targets who beat him at a game called "Defector 3".
- Visible Victimology: Malik kills young black boys (aged between children to tweens) who beat him at the same video game as they represent him around the time of the sadistic physical torture he suffered.
