Send lawyers, guns, and money: The shit has hit the fan.

With the flashbacks/book excerpts depicting Jonathan Brickstocke’s brief and doomed affair with a young Catherine Ravenscroft at an end, Disclaimer, like its co-protagonist Stephen Brigstocke, can now devote itself full-time to the destruction of Catherine’s life twenty years later. Stephen is determined to get his pound of flesh — to lob live grenades into her life over and over, as he repeatedly mimes doing throughout the series. This time around, he scores another pair of direct hits.

By now, Catherine has moved back in with her mother, an old woman in the early stages of dementia in one of those small overstuffed houses that stand for dead-end lower-middle-class lifestyles on TV and in the movies. (Not to sound like the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, but I dream of living in a house. Ah well!) She lies about why she’s there until her mum is asleep, at which point she tells the unconscious woman everything. Notably, we don’t hear what “everything” entails.

While she recuperates, Stephen is hard at work. He arrives at her office with copies of the book for all her employees, informing her ambitious assistant Jinsoo (Squid Game alum Hoyeon) that Catherine has been stalking him over it. Stephen has some interior fun at this woman’s expense, deriding her obvious grasping nature, and noting the way she puts her hands on his knees to disarm him, Catherine-style. (Robert pulls the same trick when he meets Robert for dinner at Robert’s request, laying his hand atop Robert’s to express fake sympathy. Hey, if it ain’t broke!)

When Catherine arrives at her office, everyone there is completely aghast. A confrontation ensues, a colleague gets slapped, everyone films it with their phone cameras, Jinsoo literally says “You are so cancelled,” and by the time Catherine takes the public bus back home it’s all over the Internet. Her carefully guarded reputation as an arbiter of truth has been destroyed. 

But wait! There’s more! Using a fake Instagram account (only old people use Facebook, Stephen is informed by his young assistant; for that matter, only old people read books), he lures Catherine’s son Nicholas into an instant friendship with “Jonathan.” Nicholas, who we learn is not just a slacker and a stoner but a budding junkie as well, responds well to the open admiration offered him by this young kid looking for advice. 

What he’s really looking for, of course, is to drop the truth on Nicholas like a bomb. The book you read, about the hateful whore who put her child at risk by fucking a teenager and then let the teenager die in the process of saving the kid? That kid was you, and that whore was your mom, and that teenager is “me.”  And oh, by the way, here are your mom’s nudes. Nicholas flees to his flophouse, pissing on the book along the way, sobbing as he crashes on a mattress. “Your mummy never loved you,” Stephen/Jonathan tells him; it’s clear he believes it.

Indeed, the real theme of this episode is that no one in either of these families really knows anyone else in them. Robert is reeling from the revelation of the affair because he never saw that side of Catherine himself; he feels she’s a stranger to him. Nick’s narration is a litany of condescension to his oblivious parents; not even his father, for all his fawning affection over the last couple of days, has any clue who his son truly is. Catherine’s mother is slowly retreating into her own mind, and for her part Catherine lies to her anyway. And of course the whole Stephen plot is about him and Nancy learning too late what their son was up to, and then Nancy pulling away from Stephen entirely, learning the truth (well, “the truth”) and writing a whole book about it in secret.

Honestly, it piles up in a pretty brutal fashion. Is that all there is to a family? A group of strangers, doomed by a few early years of love to spend a lifetime of Sartre-esque cordial misery together? Indira Varma’s narration appears designed to make that point, and make it repeatedly. 

(Full disclosure: I thought it was Cate Blanchett’s voice for a long time. In my defense, the contrast between the use of the second person for Catherine’s scenes and the third for Robert’s and Nicholas’s made it seem like that posh female voice belonged to Catherine herself, narrating the vents of her life like the documentarian she is.)

Now please forgive me as I say something corny: The real star of the show is the camera. Disclaimer is stupidly lovely to look at, a rejoinder to anyone who says all TV is color-graded digital shit. Watch how the light shifts from grey to gold when Nicholas receives the DM that proves his new friend Jonathan died years ago, echoed several scenes later as Stephen stands in his house pondering what he’s done to the young man. Look at the bright grey rainy afternoon light seeping into Stephen’s house when Catherine comes calling, demanding for him to listen to her side of the story. (For our sake I hope he acquiesces!)

For crying out loud, look at how well-lit this dinner scene is. It’s not a big orange glow, there are actual light sources, there’s contrast, there’s shadow…this is basic stuff, but it’s worth calling out. 

Having had some conversations with other viewers about the show, I get the sense that its morality meter, to borrow a term from video games, may not quite align with every member of the audience. Is a 20-year-old affair really something worth tearing your life apart about? Would receiving pictures of his mom having sex really send Nicholas into such a tailspin, simply because he really believes the only book he’s probably read in years?

Most fundamentally, how is Catherine culpable for Jonathan’s death when she was just one of dozens of people on that beach capable of seeing and helping him? I know the flashback/excerpt showed her keeping shtum as Jonathan drowns, but the book’s author, Nancy, couldn’t have known that, any more than she could have known what Jonathan and Catherine said during sex.

Yet there it all is, right in the book, in black and white: Lengthy descriptions of her teenage son fucking and sucking. Stephen kind of gets into this territory too with Nicholas; their conversation is frequently sexual, in the sort of clumsy, objectifying fashion often observed in young men. For crying out loud, Nancy left her marital bed to sleep in her dead son’s. In short, everyone is thinking about either their son or their mom or their wife having sex, and thinking about it a lot. That’s weird, right?

Much like the grey and orange cats that weave their way through seemingly every scene set in the Ravenscroft and Bridgestock households respectively, I find I can’t quite settle into this story yet. Unless and until we hear Catherine’s side of things — note that her narration has barely touched her actual memories of that lost weekend, and unless I’m misremembering maybe not at all — it’s impossible to know what judgments to make, what punishments to assign, what forgiveness to bestow. The cockroach Stephen trapped in a glass at the beginning of this whole nightmare is dying now. Does the real story stand a better chance of surviving his machinations?

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.