“I wanted him to die!”
Smoking gun, admission of guilt, moral culpability: Whatever you want to find in Catherine Ravenscroft desperate declaration to her enraged husband Robert as he kicks her out of their house in Disclaimer Episode 4, you can probably find it in that one statement. No sooner does he spit “You prefer your lover to die” in her face as an accusation about her lack of integrity than she confirms it, in so many words. The prosecution rests, guilty, case closed.
Certainly that’s the version of the events presented in the flashbacks — revealed this episode to be not flashbacks at all, but excerpts from Nancy Brigstocke’s The Perfect Stranger via a cut from Catherine and Jonathan in bed together to Robert reading about it. Catherine and Jonathan fuck all night and plan to do it again the next evening, while playing coy at the beach during the day. Neither is able to help themselves, though, and they sneak off to a changing room for some afternoon delight.
But by the time Jonathan resurfaces from between Catherine’s legs, he reveals he’s caught feelings in a major way, as perhaps a thirtyish woman might have expected from her transparently besotted 19-year-old lover. Not only does he insist on coming back to London with her instead of continuing his vacation and “find[ing] other lovers” in Rome, he reveals he’s already bought the plane ticket. “You don’t have to leave him right away,” he says of her husband, the “right away” revealing the depths of his delusion. No, not right away, that would be unreasonable! Give it a few months before you break up your family for a college kid.
Anyway, the two return to their spots on the sand and Catherine takes a post-coital stress nap. When she wakes up, her discovers her son Nicholas has taken his little inflatable raft out into the ocean, and he’s been blown hundreds of feet from shore. When she screams for health, Jonathan races out into the water to tow him back to shore. A pair of able-bodied beachgoers and a separate pair of lifeguards finish transporting Nicholas to safety…but somehow, Jonathan is forgotten about.
By everyone except Catherine. As she cradles Nicholas in her arms surrounded by a gaggle of concerned onlookers, she notices Jonathan frantically waving for help. Eyes narrow and cold, she lets him keep waving. Eventually others see what’s happening, but by the time lifeguards bring him back to shore to perform CPR, it’s too late. There are tears in Catherine’s eyes, but the implication is that they’re tears of relief: The ticking time bomb she’d set to blow her life to pieces has been safely detonated. For her family, anyway.
Not for Jonathan’s. Lesley Manville gives another punishing performance of grief as Nancy, Jonathan’s devastated mother. She quits work. She tries to simulate drowning in the bathtub before screaming at the top of her lungs that there’s no way to know if he didn’t suffer. She becomes a zombie-like presence who moves into her dead son’s room without so much as a “let’s talk this over” with her husband Stephen, who by now is grieving as much for the woman he loves as the son he lost. Finally she locks herself in an ill-smelling room with her cancer and her book before dying, taking the burial plot next to Jonathan’s and leaving Stephen to be buried alone.
Somewhere in there, Nancy briefly perks up when she discovers prints Jonathan had made from the camera she’d given him and learns that she was her son’s muse. There’s a beautiful moment when the wall of grief comes down just long enough for Stephen to touch her hair. But his narration informs us that if anything, she got worse after this; perhaps it’s as he theorizes, and finding these pics and expecting more of herself was what prompted her to develop the telltale holiday photos.
In the present, Stephen moves on to the next stage of his plot, asking his friend and publisher Justin (Art Malik) to help him create a fake Facebook profile for an imaginary teenager from his next book. (Research, he says.) Catherine careens around looking for ways to keep busy: She stops by a bookstore to pick up some orders only to flee from a display of the novel; she shows up at work, bullies her assistant, makes her colleague the world’s worst cup of tea, and locks herself in the bathroom.
Finally Robert, his emotions a rancid cocktail of jealousness, anger, protectiveness towards Nicholas (against Catherine as much as anything else), and sexual arousal leave him sleepwalking through a meeting at his own job. He abruptly gets up and makes plans to meet Nicholas to chat that evening. And as Catherine discovers upon her return to their house (and its omnipresent grey cat), he’s packed her suitcase, grabbed her passport, and booked her a flight to an unspecified destination, with the cab already on the way.
Robert presents this all cheerily. Catherine swallows it down through a smile of pure misery, all so as not to clue Nick into what’s going on — but he’s thrown her out of their house, which he makes clear to her during that final sotto voce argument at the door. His swiftness and ruthelessness in ejecting Catherine from the family home is, though he’d no doubt hate to admit it, an echo of how effectively Catherine (or “Catherine,” if you prefer) excised the problem of Jonathan from their lives.
All of this is set against some of the most astonishing gorgeous ocean cinematography I’ve seen in my life. From Children of Men to Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón has long been a “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” director, pushing the envelope of everything from long takes to IMAX. What I don’t know about how he does what he does could fill a book. But man, all that time with the cameras in the water, lit so brightly by the sun that you want to squint just from looking at it on your television, capturing actual nuanced human expression at the same time as conveying the backbreaking, breath-shortening labor of bringing even a child back to shore through rough seas…it’s a technological marvel is what it is, grim though what it’s showing us may be.
But there remains so much of the story of Jonathan’s drowning that just doesn’t add up. Setting aside the impossibility of providing the viewpoint of a person who died before they could tell you what happened — that’s good old-fashioned creative license — how could Nancy Brigstocke have known Catherine deliberately didn’t call for help? How could she have known how long it took before someone else noticed, and that it just happened to be roughly the amount of time between when Jonathan last went under and when the rescuers arrived?
Meanwhile, why would Catherine have been the only person capable of noticing Jonathan’s struggles for all that time? An entire crowd was gathered around her and Nicholas, some of whom surely would have been facing the ocean. Moreover, an even bigger crowd watched the entire rescue attempt while knee- or waist-deep in the water themselves. Did no one notice the fifth rescuer, who’d gotten out to Nicholas first? What about the two strong swimmers who first reached them? What about the lifeguards who reached them?
Maybe none of the other beachgoers can be blamed, what with the chaos swirling all around making it easy to miss things. But of course that line of thinking can be applied just as much, if not more so, to the woman who nearly lost her child in that chaos as it can to just a bunch of vacationers. The fact that she’d been fucking the rescuer might have kept her fresher in his mind, I’ll grant you, but you get the point.
Speaking of fucking, Jonathan goes down on Catherine twice in this episode; neither time is the oral sex reciprocated, and the second time she cuts things off before intercourse. Not to be the Oral Police, but this seems to me like a bitter mother trying to paint her nemesis as sexually narcissistic. All of Catherine’s ante-upping sex moves and pornographic poses paint a picture over time, one I don’t think is intended by its author to be flattering.
Finally, why does Catherine have this affair to begin with? The flashbacks/excerpts don’t provide us with any clues beyond “it’s fun to fuck a handsome 19 year old when your fuddy-duddy husband is away.” Which, yeah, it probably is. But we know next to nothing about what’s going on inside her…except her overwhelming sense of protectiveness toward Nicholas when he’s at risk of drowning, something Nancy, given her situation, probably couldn’t help but imbue Catherine with. Despite her hatred, a mother is a mother.
(Also, when we see a baby picture of Nicholas with his mother, the woman in the photo is an actual young Cate Blanchett, not Leila George, who plays young Catherine in the flashbacks/excerpts. Make of this what you will.)
In short, I still don’t believe we’ve gotten a full accounting of events. I suspect that Catherine’s “I wanted him to die!” wasn’t her old-school Perry Mason confession on the witness stand, it was her processing her guilt that the thing she wanted to happen as a sort of dark fantasy actually happened as an even darker reality. (Also, there are three episodes left, and seven episodes of “Old man destroys life of woman who deserves it” is kind of an underbaked premise for a seven-episode miniseries.) For a million reasons — she wasn’t there, she couldn’t know, Catherine never told her, she was full of hatred, every single reader of the book declares the Catherine character to be an unreconstructed monster who deserved to be burned at the stake — it’s hard to believe Nancy’s novel writes up Catherine accurately. Not to mix literary metaphors, but let’s not judge a book by its cover just yet.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.