From the beginning, there’s been a circularity to Disclaimer’s timelines. The series premiere opens on a teenage boy and his girlfriend on a sleeper train to Venice. The boy, we learn soon enough, never makes it home from that trip. He sends postcards, but his parents will never get the full account of what he saw and the places that stirred him, the miserable details of the hostels he stayed in and the characters he met along his way. There are the photos their son took, but his mother will keep those a secret from her husband. She’ll piece together her son’s final days for herself, typing it up the way she imagines it happened and locking her version away in a desk where no one can see it.
A decade after she dies, though, her husband does find it. At this point, he has no son, no wife, no job, no purpose. He reads the book — the story his wife invented to fit the pictures her son took. Pictures of Italian vistas. Pictures of his girlfriend. Pictures of an older woman in scant clothing. This book opens on a boy and his girlfriend on a sleeper train to Venice. The boy, his father will read soon enough, never makes it home from that trip. The father mistakes this account for reality.
That Jonathan’s sepia-tinged timeline is actually the plot of The Perfect Stranger isn’t exactly a twist. Disclaimer has been inching toward the revelation, presenting more and more implausible versions of its characters. Jonathan is cocksure in one scene and guileless in the next. Catherine is a tease, a seductress — a teenager’s wet dream and a mother’s worst nightmare. The twist, instead, is how directly acknowledging the fictional story line — which finally happens explicitly as Robert slams the book closed in the cafe — unsettles our confidence in the remaining story lines.
The distinction between the “fictional†world of Nancy’s novel and a “real†present-day world in which that novel is having ramifications has crumbled. At the end of the episode, when Robert confronts Catherine about falling asleep while their son nearly drowned, for example, Catherine doesn’t contest that that’s what happened. Is it because Nancy has accidentally landed on the truth? Or is there some leering, time-stamped photo we haven’t seen yet of Catherine’s eyes closed on the sand? Or perhaps it’s because Catherine, too, can’t be trusted. After 20 years of secrecy and silence, can she even be sure what happened and when? The first half of Disclaimer compelled us to ask how much of what we were watching was real. Now, we’re left to ask if any of it can be. Maybe there is no “real†— it’s all just a collage of voices and viewpoints, memories as thin as make-believe and made-up stories committed to paper. We were warned early on: Beware of narrative and form.
So let’s wind down the Jonathan story line as told by Nancy and read by everyone else. When the episode opens, Jonathan and Catherine are still mid-tryst, a tryst that is cringy and explicit and way more unsettling when you consider that this May December erotica was penned by mummy. Catherine reveals she’s going back to London in two days; Jonathan agrees to put off his train to Rome in favor of another 24 hours in her bed. This is a much more confident Jonathan than we encountered in episode three — a sexual metamorphosis, perhaps. He takes Catherine’s photo in the hotel suite and, later, on the beach.
Yes, that’s how Nancy imagines it. Jonathan confidently training his lens on his lover as she sunbathes a few beach towels over. Propriety demands that they pretend to be strangers. Nancy’s Catherine speaks fluent Italian; she’s glamorous and terrible. Nancy’s Catherine leaves her young son Nicky, who Nancy’s decided can’t swim, in the charge of a stranger so she can seduce Jonathan in the changing rooms. Meanwhile, Nicky is playing in the dinghy he asked his mother for that morning, pretending to sail the open seas with his stuffed animal for a skipper. Chekhov’s dinghy.
Nancy’s Jonathan, though, is young and vulnerable. He believes he is in love with Catherine and pledges himself to her. Nancy’s Catherine is heartless and cruel. The lovers are quarreling when they return to the beach. Jonathan goes for a walk or a swim. Catherine lays down for a nap next to Nicholas, who is mercifully okay despite her neglect. But it won’t be long now. The lifeguards are distracted by tending to a boy’s bloody foot, as we already knew they would be.
When Catherine opens her eyes, Nicky and the dinghy are far offshore. She runs out into the vast and stormy sea calling for help, a call which Jonathan — so attuned to her — is the first to heed. Jonathan is a strong swimmer, but in Nancy’s version, Nicholas doesn’t want his help. Soon, other men join the rescue mission. Nicholas is pulled in safely. The others make it back to shore safely. It takes a minute before anyone notices that Jonathan is still struggling in the turbulent surf. By the time the lifeguards reach him, it’s too late. They can’t rescue Jonathan, only retrieve his body.
Episode four also follows Nancy to her end. Without Stephen detecting it and perhaps without Nancy even realizing it, she’s been researching The Perfect Stranger since the grieving couple left Italy. Stephen finds his wife simulating drowning to learn for herself if her son’s end was as painless as she’s been assured it was. She quits her job and stays home poring over Jonathan’s bedroom. The Kylie Minogue posters on his bedroom walls become the text for The Perfect Stranger’s overwrought foreplay. Nancy finds photos that Jonathan took with his camera before he left for Europe. They’re basic but artsy, and she sees in them a kernel of genius. On the page, she’ll imagine her son more confident behind the lens than across the bistro table.
Specifically, Nancy finds candid photos Jonathan took of his mother without her ever noticing. Resting in the garden. Cleaning up supper. How interested Jonathan was in her. How much of his mother he saw. Soon, she’ll devote the rest of her life to seeing him. Nancy moves into Jonathan’s bedroom. She stays there for years. Stephen brings her meals but he doesn’t clean the kitchen or make the bed. Nancy gets cancer and dies in her son’s room, drowning in memories as vast as the sea.
The book is done. Its author is dead. Its protagonist is dead. The inspiration for the protagonist is dead. Now what? In “present-day,†Robert sits in the café, where Nancy’s prose has given him an erection. Is this the power of her blue fiction, or is this someone else’s imagining? It feels like fiction, of course. An omniscient female narrator tells us what’s in Robert’s head, and it’s mostly over-the-top jealous-male rage. Robert worries about what Nicholas saw or didn’t see of the affair, what he understood or inferred as a small boy. (These same preoccupations litter the sepia-toned timeline, too.)
Eventually, Robert and Catherine both head to work. They say and do things that you can’t actually imagine real people saying and doing. Funny things. “When worst comes to worst, incompetent is always better than dodgy,†Robert tells his team, who are working out a way to protect the reputation of a (dodgy) charity they manage. No one breaks a smile. Robert walks into a meeting with his shirt untucked while his secretary fetches him Alka-Seltzer. It fizzes away in his water glass. (Does anyone really take Alka-Seltzer?)
Separately, in a meeting in another office building in another part of London, Catherine is thinking about her marriage, which she would like to save. The narrator talks us through her thinking, which appears to progress without really changing. She realizes that calling Stephen was a mistake. If all Stephen wanted was her acknowledgment, then he wouldn’t have sent Robert those dirty photos. She blames herself not for the affair or for Jonathan’s death but for how she could have stopped what’s happening right now. She should have been less secretive. She should have been less silent. She’s lost control of the narrative.
It’s Robert, feeling so diminished after appearing as an unnamed character in The Perfect Stranger, who is finally writing a bigger role for himself. He kicks Catherine out of their home in front of their son, but he does it shrewdly. He’s packed her bag and her passport for her. He mentions to Nick that there’s a big scoop that needs Catherine’s attention. The threat is clear: Do what I say, or our son will learn the truth. Conspicuously, the narrator returns to the second person here. This is not how a person thinks about her own situation. “I wanted him to die,†Catherine whispers to “the Husband†before she gets into the taxi he’s already called for her.
It’s the same sentiment that was etched on young Catherine’s face on the beach that awful day. She looked out at the sea, Nicky shivering in her arms, and hoped that no one would spot Jonathan flailing and fighting in the distance. Getting pushed around by a wave more powerful than himself, again and again, knocking him this way and that, almost teasing him before pulling him down forever.
Poor Jonathan never stood a chance (at least if you ask Nancy).