“Disclaimer” recap, episode two

It makes sense for Apple TV+ to release the first two episodes of Disclaimer at the same time. The series premiere scratches the surface of Catherine’s glaring, long-buried secret, and the second episode hints at the extent of her downfall. It’s not hard work for Stephen to turn Robert against the woman he’s always adored – the old man has some damning scores – but perhaps that’s the point. How easy is it to ruin a marriage? A family? A life? Stephen may have a flip book full of lewd photos, but his real weapon is his will to destroy. With every domino that falls—with every grenade he gleefully throws toward Catherine’s exquisitely manicured existence—Stephen falls a little more in love with the power he wields.

Episode two picks up right where the series premiere leaves off (perhaps an indication that the episodes are best understood as a set). Young Catherine stands silhouetted in front of the sea and plays with her hair. She notices Jonathan taking a photo of her and playfully confronts him, although he doesn’t realize she’s being playful. Provocative. Five seconds ago he was bold, confident and a little perverted; Now he’s shaking and unable to maintain eye contact. Get a hold of yourself, buddy. He seems really bad, so bad that it’s hard to imagine he’ll even end up in bed with this woman.

Unless… Catherine must be enjoying how effortless it is and how powerful this boy makes her feel. Whatever difficulties life brings, there is one consolation for her: she can make a man shudder. The dialogue between them is clunky. She corrects Jonathan for calling the sea “ocean” and is probably flirting pedantically. They both say “Aura” often until 4-year-old Nick gives Jonathan the opportunity to play the hero. He helps this woman and her son with their things up the beach. If your husband is an uber-wealthy wife, does it matter that he isn’t there when you need him for physical work?

Twenty years later, in the present, Catherine awakens from a bad night’s sleep in her new house with a new purpose: to protect her family. This will be their modus operandi from now on. Step one: Strengthen her relationship with Robert by cooking him a sole dinner—a meal that will make him think of Paris, of her, of simpler times.

Step two: Identify the author of The perfect stranger. To do this, Catherine goes to the office. Off camera, she blames herself for failing to research this matter as thoroughly as she would a work issue. Then she takes out a notebook and makes a list called “Who knows?” Police. Waiter. Father. Mother. She draws a circle around Mother And Father to indicate that they are both dead. I guess even award-winning documentary filmmakers have to start somewhere, but as a kid I took more meaningful notes while watching Ghostwriter.

So let’s start with Jonathan’s mother, Nancy Brigstocke (Lesley Manville). Because director Alfonso Cuarón has no respect for the inexorable march of time, he introduces a flashback to the present-day plot, halfway between Jonathan’s sun-drenched Italian vacation and Stephen’s gray attempt to get back into the swing of things. It turns out that Catherine and Nancy once briefly met in a London café. Nancy was already dying of cancer and posed as a widow. Maybe she wanted to appear as vulnerable and pitiful as possible, or maybe that was just how she saw herself ever since she banned Stephen from her dead son’s bedroom.

At this point, Nancy has seen Jonathan’s photos because she wants to know why this woman who can’t stop playing with her yellow hair lied to the police when she said she didn’t know him. Nancy wants Catherine to come clean, although it’s hard to see how that would help anyone right now. Still, I can’t blame her. If you can’t have what you really want, convince yourself to want other things instead. Instead of getting her son back, Nancy wants this complete stranger’s confession. Instead, a consolation prize: Nancy asks to see Nicholas.

The drumbeat of what happened on the beach is only hinted at, but it appears that Jonathan died saving Nicholas. Does Nicholas remember? How much did Catherine keep secret from Robert? The affair, of course, but the whole ordeal? The beach, the police, her son who was almost lost at sea? The waiter (whoever he is)? How many times did Catherine have to remind little Nicky not to tell Daddy? Not to mention the brave boy who carried her things and rescued him from the surf.

“He saved your son,” Nancy pleads. A son for a son, a mother for a mother. And then Saint Catherine lets it slip out, almost accidentally: “Well, I wish he hadn’t.” When Catherine says this, Nicholas would have been about 14 years old. Was he already a disappointment to his mother? Or was it motherhood in general that she wanted to escape?

To show how close Catherine and Stephen’s schedules are, we see the ever-grieving, definitely alive father go to John Lewis department store to give Nick a published copy The perfect stranger. Stephen poses as a clumsy old widower in need of a lightweight vacuum cleaner. You get the feeling that Stephen thinks he’s put on an extravagant disguise, but isn’t Stephen exactly the “clumsy old widower in need of a light vacuum”? He ultimately decides not to buy the Dyson, but leaves the novel on the counter for Nick to find. As he leaves the department store, Stephen mimes throwing a grenade, an evil genius, if only in his own head.

Later, Stephen makes a duplicate of his son’s dirty photos, which he hand-delivers to Robert’s glass-walled office, with St. Paul’s looming in the distance. Robert’s real job is to amass inherited wealth, but his primary job is to run an umbrella company that manages the noble NGOs his siblings and cousins ​​have founded to launder their reputations and money. The company is called Hope, and he sits in Hope, flipping through photos of his wife on display to another man. He shakes with anger as he looks at her, just as Jonathan shakes with nervousness as he looks at Catherine in the sunlight.

Robert recognizes the hotel in the photos, but not the woman in them – not really. His Catherine has never been like this: free, seductive, burning. His Catherine knows the fishmonger by name and visits her mother every week, who is suffering from the first symptoms of dementia. His Catherine is at home preparing sole. His Catherine always puts off sex and doesn’t stare into the lens.

Suddenly Robert’s timeline jumps past Catherine’s. (Did he borrow Hermione’s Time-Turner?) In this (new?) timeline, Robert has already given up on dating Catherine and lost his fondness for her cooking and keeping secrets. Instead, he picks Nick up from his run-down apartment and goes with him to the bar, where he asks his son for information. Nicholas doesn’t remember the trip to Italy, which Robert left early, he emphasizes. Robert’s iPhone wallpaper is a photo of his family from when Nick was a baby, his family from another time. In a sense, not this family at all.

Robert wants to confront his wife about her infidelity in a calm manner that befits the man he believes he is, but as soon as he gets home the screaming starts. He gives Catherine the package with the photos; she can’t bear to look at them. “They could soon be all over the internet,” he barks at her. I suppose Robert is right, but that doesn’t seem like something Stephen would do. Stephen dissects Catherine’s world in detail, person by person, blowing it up one relationship at a time. He likes to set himself small tasks. Go to Snappy Snaps; Bypass security in Robert’s office building. If we’re honest, Stephen could have done this all more efficiently via email.

For her part, Catherine doesn’t seem to have spent any time imagining this confrontation with her husband or preparing for what she would say, which is frankly confusing. Did she really think she could cry to Robert? The perfect stranger and he would never find out what the book was about? That it was all over for her, and quite painlessly? “I’m so sorry,” she says. Robert bought her the red panties that she put on for Jonathan, and that’s exactly the kind of detail a man would fixate on. When they got home from the trip, Catherine decided to go back to work. Now Robert believes it’s all connected: a basic boredom of being his wife.

The affair fits Robert’s paranoia so well. He has long feared that he was not sexually experienced enough for Catherine when they got together. In this new house, which is not yet their home, they argue about it. They scream. Robert is not above a bitchy little joke: “I should have listened to my family. They damn well warned me about you!” Catherine reminds Robert that she asked him not to leave her in Italy; That doesn’t excuse the affair, but it was still a shitty thing to do. Robert searches for more details to satisfy his anger. Did the affair continue? No. He died. Did our son hear you together? “No wonder he can’t even look at you.” In the end, Robert drives off, leaving Catherine alone and crying on the road. However, if you live in Notting Hill, is it even that bad to stand barefoot in the middle of the street and watch your neighbors run to their windows?

It’s hard to predict where the show will go from here. Two episodes only spanned two or three days. Timelines that seemed different have collided. Narrators who seemed close to each other are shown to be omniscient: Catherine reveals what is going on in Robert’s head and what is in her son’s apartment, where she was certainly never invited. A camera clicks on a sunny day and 20 years later and a thousand miles away a marriage is wiped out. Cats, always scary, appear and reappear. This also applies to the toy plane that Nick saved from Catherine’s eviction from the new house in the first episode. Now it hangs in Nick’s dingy room and it’s hard to imagine Disclaimer will no longer explain its origins to us at some point.

This is the cinematic promise that Cuarón delivers Disclaimerthat eats its own breadcrumbs before they can lead us too far down a particular path. There is no mystery to solve here. We know who wrote the book; We know who published it. Beware of narrative and form, we are told, but Disclaimer does not commit to a particular narrative or form. The series usually runs away from its own story, an ouroboros moving forward, only to find itself back on the beach in Italy.