Lady in the Lake
As you’ve no doubt noticed, every episode of Lady in the Lake takes its title from a key line of dialogue. This week, it’s a piece of Cleo’s voiceover that plays over scenes that give Maddie and the audience a chance to think of Stephan anew. “Innocence never leaves slowly,†she says, “It leaves suddenly. Abruptly. Violently.†She could very well be talking about any one of these three characters, who are slowly finding themselves at the mercy of others’ cruelty, but also finding their own capacity for it.
The episode opens with the closest this show will get to offering a Silence of the Lambs send-up. Maddie arrives to meet with Stephan, and you immediately sense that each is testing out the other. Maddie wants information to help her further ingratiate herself with Bob Bauer at the Baltimore Sun (she even brings a recorder to the meeting). While Stephan wants her, instead, to connect with him. To tell him the truth about the things she’s learned to always lie about. Of course, Maddie leverages the conversation to her advantage even as she’s the one who ends up ceding ground: she doesn’t record, tells him the whole interview thing was a ruse to meet up with him, and confesses she’s had a hard time connecting with others since seeing Tessie’s body. She finds that Stephan is willing to buy all that in order to tell her a bit about his faith and his conscientious objections to the war. He’s clearly fascinated with a woman who’s a born performer and liar.
In uncomfortable close-ups that take over the screen, director Alma Har’el shows us two characters who unwittingly feel seen by the other. And just as in The Silence of the Lambs, Maddie offers something of herself (that she knew where to find Tessie’s body since that’s where she’d gone with a boy in her past; Stephan loved going there to watch couples) in exchange for some information that Stephan offers: he used to be part of a military experiment that used conscientious objectors to test out biological weapons. Oh, and he insists on one thing: “I didn’t kill Tessie Durst.†It’s unclear how much Maddie believes that statement, but with more research on those experiments, she has enough to earn Bauer’s trust for another “reporting by†byline (in a story that dominates the paper and lands on the front page!) and, eventually, a job at the Star (though only as a lowly assistant to the Helpline column.) Still, it’s enough to find her giddy with excitement when she meets with Ferdie later, during an intimate moment where she confesses she’d slept with someone prior to her husband (Allan, presumably, yes?): “My husband doesn’t know he wasn’t the first man I ever slept with,†she says, forlornly. And now that she has someone she’s somewhat happy with, she finds she can’t even bring Ferdie to the game Bauer gifted her tickets for, lest they be jailed for their illicit relationship.
As a story about the strictures women (and mothers, in particular) had to navigate in the ‘60s when they refused to adhere to the lives laid out of them, Lady in the Lake threads both Maddie and Cleo’s stories to a longer history of feminist struggle. And struggling is something Cleo is tired of. It’s why she’s concocted a plan to play in Gordon Shell’s rigged numbers game (with Reggie’s help) and get a payout big enough to leave town. To do so, she recruits a local hairdresser to place her bet, promising to split the winnings with her: all she has to do is bet on 366 (a number associated with dreams of a dark lady). Reggie only has one request when he shares this number: he wants Cleo gone by Christmas morning.
But Reggie is losing control of the situation. He does not want Dora to leave for good (in hopes of getting sober, she says), and his decision to let Cleo do the drop the night of the Myrtle Summer assassination attempt is slowly closing in on him. Ferdie has been busy working the streets and he eventually captured two of the three men involved (though at the cost of his partner, who gets a bullet to the head during a shootout at a local burlesque theater): Ferdie, whose ambition eventually lands him the enviable post of being the first Black homicide detective in Baltimore, is itching to make a mark for himself. Which only fuels Gordon’s decision to settle any loose ends about that night.
That means finding the third man involved (now that the other two are in custody, perhaps eager to point to Cleo and thus needlessly involve the Pharaoh and Gordon himself) and, as we see, making his murder look like an accidental overdose: “Clean that up,†he tells Reggie. It’s the kind of dirty job Reggie has likely done many times, but he’s panicked about what Gordon then asks him to do next: get rid of Cleo. ASAP.
And so this brings us to Christmas Eve.
It’s a festive time all around in Baltimore. Gordon, in perhaps a display of cowardly cruelty, takes photos with Cleo and her boys in his santa best, knowing full well she’s to be offed later that night. Elsewhere, Maddie gets her hair ironed before meeting her mother and Seth (though curiously not Milton) at a Hanukkah gathering. It’s there that Allan Durst explodes at the mere presence of Maddie. He’s convinced she’s merely using Tessie’s murder. “You’re using the body of my dead child to fulfill your dreams,†he yells at her. The show later shows us what took place in that remote place by the lake where Maddie found Tessie: Maddie and Allan had gone there and made out, but she’d rebuked his advances for more, which apparently angered him enough to dump her on the spot.
It’s all quite necessary context for the ire he feels, which still leaves Maddie stunned as she’s embarrassed in front of her entire community — not even her mother came to her defense. Neither did Seth (“I sympathize with the guy,†he quips before being slapped by Maddie). It’s hard to start a life anew and still salvage parts of the lives left behind.
Worn out by the entire encounter, Maddie returns home to find … Stephan! It’s quite the reveal. Like any good TV villain kept in a psychiatric hospital, Stephan had handily escaped with little more than a lighter (he lit an orderly on fire and used the distraction to disappear into the city, presumably?) and made it to Maddie’s place, which he’d surmised from the photo she’d sent him. It’s a terrifying moment, especially because he’s come to confront her about her real intentions.
At the same time, Reggie is readying himself to kill Cleo, who’s wearing that blue coat again and has been called to meet up with him to give him a cut of her winning jackpot (an excuse to kill her, we guess). But Reggie’s disturbed. He had wanted Dora to stay, and Cleo had had to help calm down her friend, but now she’s headed to meet him. At the same time, we’re stuck in Maddie’s place as she tries to reason with Stephan, who’s going on about how it’s easier to forgive others than it is to forgive oneself.
Frightened, but with her wits about her, Maddie manages to convince him to leave her alone. She’ll keep his secret that he was there and he will keep hers (that she’s seeing Ferdie). He leaves and makes his way to the lake where, surprise surprise, Reggie is busy rowing a boat toward the fountain with a body donning Cleo’s blue coat in his rowboat.
As police finally catch up with Stephan, Reggie dumps the body and falls down to his boat, breaking his leg but staying silent enough that none of the cops ashore can hear him. How badly did his meeting with Cleo go? Or did it all go according to plan? And does this mean Reggie may have had something to do with Tessie after all? Or is the lake where everyone goes to dump their bodies?
Clues & Things
• Let’s commend the casting team, which’s assembled a truly murderous (pun intended) row of performers. Ingram and Portman are doing thrilling, textured work here. Their physicality and voicework (as if both Cleo and Maddie were constantly unsure of whether they would or should be seen, let alone heard) are masterful. But the likes of Josiah Cross (as Reggie) and Dylan Arnold (as Stephan) are doing just as strong work.
• How fab was that balloon burlesque number at the theater where Ferdie pursued the Myrtle Summer shooters?
• Nothing good will come from someone catching Ferdie leaving Maddie’s apartment via her fire escape, right?
• If I had one quibble with this episode, it would be that Stephan’s arrival at Maddie’s apartment felt overly telegraphed. I mean, how many times had we heard Ferdie tell her not to leave that window open lest someone break in? Talk about a Chekhov gun!
• In a series that constantly gives us heartbreaking family revelations, how bruising was Cleo telling her mother, “I needed you to tell me it wasn’t my fault†that her father had left? All while wrapping a beautiful scarf a tad too tightly on her mother’s neck?