All of the characters on American Auto have their own areas of expertise. Well, except for Wesley Payne, who only has a job because his family founded the company and his grandfather was the last CEO. Cyrus Knight, on the other hand, had proven to be incredibly important to Payne Motors as their Chief Product Designer. But as the rest of the team found out, Cyrus also had another area of expertise in the form of oddly specific knowledge of serial killers.
When it comes to being an auto manufacturer, a company is only as good as its most recent success. That’s especially true for Payne Motors considering that they seem to get endlessly bad publicity for every terrible decision they inexplicably make. The crew running the show also seem like a rather hard luck group who can rarely catch a break. That was certainly true in Season 1, Episode 2.
Coming off the failure of launching a slap-dash car made of stolen and spare parts in Episode 1, the Payne Motors team was confronted by a new problem. A serial killer was using one of their minivans, the Payne Magellan, to abduct and transport his victims. It didn’t exactly look great for the company. At the same time, it also really didn’t have anything to do with them. The company had no control over what anyone did with their products.
In fact, the impact of this unwanted publicity was positive. Interest in the Magellan jumped dramatically in the wake of the realization that it was the van of choice for America’s new favorite serial killer. That didn’t stop CEO Katherine Hastings from trying to get in front of the problem with a series of unnecessary and bad ideas. As always, Cyrus Knight’s contributions did help, though not in the way most people were expecting.
As the Chief Product Designer of Payne Motors, Cyrus was involved in many aspects of the company. He was instrumental in the development of the self-driving Payne Ponderosa. He was also the one who missed that the AI running it was essentially racist and would run over Black people. Cyrus showed a completely different side during the Magellan situation when he started educating the rest of the Payne team on the intricacies of being a serial killer.
This wasn’t just casual knowledge, either. Cyrus knew many details of why the killer chose the Magellan as well as how he was operating. He even explained the difference between a mass murderer and a serial killer. All of his teammates were immediately concerned by his level of knowledge. They were all 95 percent sure that he wasn’t a serial killer. At the same time, that remaining five percent was obviously nagging at them.
In the end, Cyrus and his strange obsession with serial killers were actually somewhat helpful to Payne Motors. Though the question of why he knew so much about this specific subject was never explained to the satisfaction of any of his friends or coworkers. Hopefully, it’s just an issue of curiosity and nothing more sinister. But given the major reveal at the end of Superstore, anything is possible when it comes to worlds created by Justin Spitzer.
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