Well. Now we’re getting somewhere!
Starting from the bottom (which is both a well pun and a Drake reference), there are now two things we know for sure: (1) Rob somehow wound up dead in the well with David’s watch, and (2) When Adele goes into her dream state and through her dream door, where she winds up isn’t in an idyllic dream of her subconscious’ own making but in the real world, apparently spying on David and Louise.
Now let’s back it up and start from the top of this episode.
Louise is indulging in more of her through-the-door dreamland, which now includes Adam catching tadpoles in a lily pond while David (cast in Louise’s mind as a dreamy dad figure) mans the family’s outdoor grill. She and David are also boning in her childhood bed. Her dream life is so satisfying that back in the real world, she now finds she doesn’t feel the urge to smoke away her anxieties anymore.
In a flashback, Adele and Rob talk about their future once they leave Westlands. Rob isn’t looking forward to it. “In here with you, I’m better,†he says. “Out there, I’m just a junkie with a shitty family. Sometimes I think being in here with you is the happiest I’ve ever been.†He adds, somewhat ominously, “I’ve thought about making sure we get caught [smoking pot], just so you have to stay.†All Adele says in return is, “Promise you’ll come and visit.â€
To me, there’s always been something off about the caliber of Rob’s fixation on Adele. It’s an intense friendship for both of them, but he seems to need her in a way I don’t get — and in a way she doesn’t seem to reciprocate. It’s starting to make me think that maybe she’s the one who kills him and puts him down that well. (After all, she was the last one we know of to wear that watch.) In the next Rob and Adele flashback, when Rob makes good on visiting Adele at her estate, she tells him, “You can’t have me all to yourself forever.†Maybe their friendship couldn’t exist outside the walls of Westlands, and she needed to find a way to be free of his obsessions so she could move on, no matter what that took.
We’re interrupted by a buzz at Adele’s front door. It’s Anthony, the junkie patient, who came around to talk to David, but when he sees Adele’s black eye, he suspects David did it, and Adele immediately plays into that suspicion. Then she meets up with Louise, who tells her she has made it through her dream door. Adele tells Louise she knew she could teach herself to control her dreams, because, “You shine, Louise. Just like Rob did.†Hello! Adele basically just repeated the compliment David paid Louise in the previous episode word for word (“You shineâ€). So that was my first inkling that Adele is somehow spying on Louise and David, but Louise only ponders that freaky coincidence for a moment before moving on and telling Adele, “I think you’ve maybe changed my life.†Adele replies, “Maybe one day you’ll do the same for me.â€
Anthony’s parents bring his suspicion about David’s domestic abuse to the office. David’s boss calls Adele at home. She is more than happy to cover for David. Was Adele’s plan all along to lure Anthony into making this accusation as a way of reminding David that she still holds the power to ruin his life?
David decides to go vent at Louise’s, where he walks around like he owns the place, much to Louise’s chagrin. She semi–breaks up with him, telling him to “go home and sort your shit out.†Ominous music plays, and it feels like maybe we’re about to find out what happens when a woman dares to cross David. (Is it still possible he’s the bad guy in all of this? I don’t know anymore!)
Even Louise’s subconscious doesn’t want David around anymore, as she kicks him out of her next dream. Then she sees another door in the reflection of the lily pond, but she wakes up before she can open it. Back in reality, she fetches Rob’s notebook, ostensibly to read up on what she just experienced in her dream, but what she instead finds is more real-world confessions from Rob: “I love Adele properly. Everything about her,†he wrote. We see him tiptoeing through Westlands to Adele’s room, where he reaches out to caress her hair while she sleeps.
(Here’s a question: Louise receives this highly curious notebook from this highly suspicious friend that will purportedly cure her lifelong night-terror torture, and she has yet to read through the whole thing?)
I just have no category in which to place Rob’s feelings for Adele. Is it an obsession? Is he bisexual, and does he have a romantic/sexual crush on her? Is it just one of these intense adolescent platonic friendships (the first reference that comes to my mind, not saying it’s the best one, is Rayanne and Angela in My So-Called Life)? Stroking someone’s hair in the middle of the night while they’re asleep, and you’re not someone they share a bed with … I don’t know where to put that, but YMMV.
The next scene shows present-day Adele counting her fingers. She falls asleep and a door appears. A teenage Adele walks up to the door, walks through it, and vanishes. Cut to David and Louise’s office, and there’s this never-before-seen wavy camera effect as the two of them talk. That’s my second inkling that Adele is spying on David and Louise. Has she been doing so this whole time? It’s the first time we’ve seen that visual effect, but if she’s actually been dream-spying this whole time, that makes me think that Adele and Louise’s meet-clumsy in the first episode was not by chance at all but that Adele already knew at that point what David and Louise had done at the bar.
Adele wakes from her dream with a scream, then goes to the gym and very clearly lays a trap. She asks the front-desk attendant to extend Louise’s guest membership, which Adele is paying for, then asks the gym to call her later that day (after 6 p.m., when she knows David will be home) to confirm. Then she goes to meet Anthony Hawkins in a park. She is wearing a pink and green coat atop her usual all-white ensemble. The coat has me fizzing. Her costume motif is changing; she seems to have found some agency; it feels like we are finally getting somewhere! The wheels are in motion. Things are happening! Anthony sells her drugs. Fine, great, at least it’s a thing that is happening and not a notion that is faintly suggested!
Adele’s trap is sprung when David takes the call from the gym and hears Louise’s name. He rages, natch, first at Adele and then at Louise. (Honestly, I have to give Louise props for managing to keep the cat in the bag on both of her hidden relationships this whole time.) David tells Louise she is fired and warns her, “You stay away from me, and you stay away from Adele.†Why is he now suddenly being so protective of Adele?
The next day, Louise quits, then goes to David and Adele’s house. (No, Louise! What are you thinking, Louise?!) She peers through the front door and sees Adele slumped in a chair as if she is dead. When Adele finally comes to, there’s this weird quick sequence in which she also wakes up on her bed. Had she gone through multiple doors, like multiple layers of dreams? It seems to me like Inception, and Adele’s inability to move her limbs coming out of her dream state seems to me like The Princess Bride.
Louise tends to Adele and discovers that David has been prescribing her strong sedatives and antipsychotics. Adele tells Louise that before they moved to London, David had an affair with a woman who owned “a cozy café.†Now we know why David asked Adele if she “meant to be funny†back in episode three when she said she might go find “some cozy café for a coffee.†The episode ultimately ends with David and Adele getting ready for bed — both of them dressed in all black! Adele promises David she’s going to fix everything. And then we see Rob in the well.
The feeling I’m left with at the end of this episode is that I’m really champing at the bit to watch the next one. Hooray!