“The truth is I was unsettled the day that Robert left us to go back to London.” So begins, for the first time ever, voiceover narration from Disclaimer’s main character, Catherine Ravenstock herself. Over a rattling noise that sounds like an old-fashioned home-movie projector — it’s actually something else entirely, something important — she begins telling her side of the story. 

Actually, that’s probably not the best way to put it. “Her side of the story” implies that someone else’s side has already been told. But Jonathan Brigstocke, the handsome teenager who drowned trying to save the life of Catherine’s young son Nicholas, never told his version of the events of that fateful Italian holiday to anyone. He couldn’t. He was dead. 

Instead, everything we’ve seen of that vacation, everything we know of Jonathan’s death and what preceded it, comes from the imagination of Nancy Brigstocke. Accurate? Inaccurate? Wildly defamatory? We have no more way of knowing at the moment than Nancy did when she wrote the book. That first-person narration from Catherine (specifically, it’s the voice of Cate Blanchett over images of Leila George playing her as a younger woman) is the first real account of the events of those two days that we’ve heard.

Maddeningly, Stephen Brigstocke is aware of this. To a point, anyway. “Nancy played around with some facts, of course,” his customary first-person narration informs us. “That is what writers do.” But it’s curious, isn’t it, the divergence from reality that he cites as an example: Jonathan’s girlfriend Sasha didn’t come back to London because of a death in the family, she came back because she and Jonathan had “a row.” A row so bad her mother actually calls Nancy and Stephen up to yell at them about it. A row so bad that after Nancy dutifully informs Sasha’s mother of Jonathan’s death — she says Sasha isn’t home, and you can believe that or not — Nancy gets a perfunctory “sorry for your loss” and never hears from either Sasha or her mother ever again. That was some row, I’d say.

So you have to wonder about this voyeuristic young suitor, whom Catherine first notices staring at her as she brushes sand from beneath her bikini. (His creepshots of this play a key role in Nancy’s imaginary narrative.) He shows up at her hotel bar, buys her a drink. She responds as she’s done to all his attention: with an awkward smile, half-embarrassment, half-excitement. According to Catherine, the most you can say she was was flattered. “Maybe I’d fantasize about this later,” says her narration as her younger self slinks into the elevator, “or maybe I wouldn’t.”  

Hardly the sinister siren of The Perfect Stranger, is she?

And poor, wronged, grieving Stephen Brigstocke? He spends the bulk of the episode unsuccessfully attempting to inject Drano into the veins of a comatose Nicholas Ravenstock, who’s been hospitalized with a stroke brought on by his drug use. His unlikely ally in this effort? Robert Ravenstock, who chooses Stephen over Catherine and won’t listen to her warnings. Neither will the hospital staff, who drag her away from her gravely imperiled son even as they attend to the wounds Stephen incurred during their brief run-in. 

Her son is on death’s door. Her husband won’t spend more than two seconds in her company and refuses to listen to a word he says. The man who’s ruined her life has more access to her child than she does. But Catherine Ravenstock is a storyteller by trade, and her story is going to get told, one way or the other.

So she flips the script on Stephen. She breaks into his house, violating his personal space, to let him know what really happened. (The rattling we keep hearing in the background of her flashbacks is actually his malfunctioning freezer, which has been on the fritz since before Jonathan’s death.) Writer-director-creator Alfonso Cuarón shoots her in blazing white light, like an alien visitation. I think that’s a key visual indicator, personally. I think she’s an avatar of the truth.

Which would, of course, raise a lot of questions about why she didn’t come out with her story sooner during all this mishegas. Could she have taken aside Robert or Nicholas or even Stephen and said “Look, this is what really happened, which you’d know if you’d just sit still and listen to me for 45 seconds”? Maybe, but the question strikes me as churlish to ask at this point. By all indications, we’re about to get Catherine’s story. There’s just one problem: You and I may be ready to listen, but Stephen Brigstocke, who doses her tea with sleeping pills, is not.

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.