“You’re managing the idea of me having been violated by someone far more easily than the idea of that someone bringing me pleasure. It’s almost like you — you’re relieved that I was raped. And I just…Sorry, I…I don’t know how to forgive that.”

Catherine Ravenstock is talking to her soon-to-be ex-husband Robert in the hospital waiting room, while their son Nicholas recuperates from his stroke nearby. She’s explaining to him that despite his contrition over having falsely accused her of infidelity is, in its way, worse than the accusation itself. So long as she could be blamed for the crime of enjoying herself illicitly, he could stay angry. One he finds out that she was merely brutalized for three and a half hours by a knife-wielding stranger, he can love her again. And that’s not a love Catherine Ravenstock wants. 

But Catherine isn’t just talking to Robert. She’s talking to the audience.

Working from the novel by Renée Knight, writer-director-creator Alfonso Cuarón has by this point spent the first six full episodes of Disclaimer priming us to anticipate and accept a single idea: Catherine didn’t really cheat on her husband. Or if she did, then it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Nancy Brigstocke’s book The Perfect Stranger makes it sound. Surely there’s some other explanation, something exculpatory, something that doesn’t make her the ice-cold bitch of Nancy’s vengeful and fevered imagination. We want this to be true. I mean, I wanted it to be true. I didn’t want to believe Catherine would let a guy who saved her son’s life die to cover up an inconvenient affair. It would be, yes, a relief if that were right.

That sound you heard is a finger on the monkey’s paw curling. Because it wasn’t an affair alright. Far from it.

Cuarón films Jonathan Brigstocke’s protracted hotel-room invasion and assault on Catherine in semi-silence. He mutes the sounds and dialogue within the flashback to a watery mumble, letting Cate Blanchett’s narration and Finneas O’Connell’s horror-movie score and the harrowing physical performances of Leila George and Louis Partridge do the talking. At one point Jonathan marches Catherine into her son’s room to quiet him down after he wakes up, the threat to them both having been made as explicit as a silent sequence can manage. (It’s the opposite of the show’s usual technique of unnecessarily narrating wordless moments to get the point across.)

And so, for an entire night, she performed for him and endured the assault, even posing for his violating camera. Her bone-deep grunts of “animal” pain are the most noticeable noise in the muted murk.

The next day Catherine was so soul-deep exhausted that she fell asleep on the beach, leading to Nicholas’s misadventure at sea. She froze, too afraid to swim after him herself. She screamed for help when it became apparent the man racing to save her son’s life was her rapist; “Anybody but him,” she remembers thinking. After the other rescuers actually got Nicholas back to shore upon taking over from Jonathan, everyone there was so focused on Nicholas and the rescuers, Catherine says, that no one was thinking of Jonathan but her. So yes, she saw him drowning and said nothing. She let him die, because for hours she’d wanted nothing more. (It’s funny how much more easily everyone accepts her doing this than simply having a fling.)

None of this dissuades Stephen Brigstocke from his course of action at all, at least at first. Leaving her passed out on his kitchen floor from the sleeping pills he’d slipped into her tea, he returns to the hospital and wriggles his way through various rings of nurses and doctors to once again stand at syringepoint with Nicholas. But when the young man mutters “Mum” and begs to go while grasping Stephen’s hand, the old man’s resolve finally breaks. No one wants to believe the worst of their child, he says, but he chose to ignore the clues to adopt a more comforting, though life-ruining, fiction. He confesses everything to Robert, then apologizes to Catherine, who’d raced against time and traffic to try and beat the murderous old man to her son’s bedside. “I was wrong,” he says, as plainly as possible.

This earns him no grace, no redemption, no more than Robert’s plea forgiveness is granted. We last see Stephen burning not only the book and its manuscript but really any trace of Nancy and Jonathan that he has left in his backyard, which transformed by the blaze into a surreal Gregory Crewdson hellscape. “Nothing but the void awaits,” says the female narrator, now in control of his voice and his fate.

That the last shot of the show is a fade to white on Catherine and Nicholas embracing is fitting. Nicholas is revealed in the photographs to have witnessed his mother’s rape, but he remembers nothing of the incident, consciously anyway. Catherine was stymied from telling Robert the truth during the breakup not only by his obstinance but also by her simple inexperience with articulating these horrific events to anyone, ever, at any time since they occurred. How could anyone expect something so huge to come out of her easily. Now, she and Nick tell each other “I love you,” both of them dealing with the terrible truth — together. 

This is the part where the review devolves into superlatives for Kevin Kline and Cate Blanchett, but I’ll try to keep the fawning to a minimum. I’ll simply say that Kline takes what could come across as corny supervillainy and instead makes it seem like the understandable outgrowth of a squandered life. The show is quite unsparing in that regard, declaring his life wasted in no uncertain terms. That’s a tremendous weight for an actor to carry — depicting a person who knows his life has no purpose but who lives on nonetheless. It’s scary to see it in action. That’s to Kline’s credit.

And Blanchett…The best way to put it is this. When Catherine breaks into Stephen’s house to confront him with the truth, she barks at him and bullies him and cows him into submission, like…well, like a schoolteacher such as Stephen might have done with a truculent child. To get back to audience expectations once again, we’re primed to root for Catherine, and so we’d want her full frontal assault to succeed, whether or not that’s realistic. We want to listen to her story. It takes an actor like Blanchett to make us believe that Stephen Brigstocke, her arch-nemesis,would go against his every instinct and listen to her story too, simply because she insists that he do so. It’s like making us believe Batman would give the Joker a chance to plead his case. She comes across that sincere and that formidable. 

Not everything in Disclaimer worked quite as well as those central performances. I got used to the narration but I never saw much point in any of it, much of which was redundant as long as you were watching your television. I also kept waiting for an explanation of why each character’s form of narration was slightly different — Catherine’s with a female voice in second person, Robert with that same female voice in third person, Stephen’s in his own voice in first person; this final episode introduces several new variations too — but that explanation never arrived. I dunno, maybe I shouldn’t have put so much stock into that, or into the contrast between Leila George playing Catherine in the excerpts while an actual young Cate Blanchett appeared in Catherine’s baby photos. But you can’t blame a viewer for closely reading what you’re doing, can you?

Speaking of which, there’s one more observation to be made that everyone involved has the decency not to. Catherine is not squeamish about describing what happened to her in all its horror and grotesquerie. At one point she tells Stephen about pushing his son’s “disgusting glob” out of her into a jar to save as evidence that she wound up not needing thanks to the sea. But can he even be taken aback by this kind of frankness when his wife wrote at great length, and with great passion and creativity and insight, about her son eating this woman out?

I’m all for acknowledging that your child at some point becomes an adult. But again, given Nancy’s all-consuming obsession with her late child, up to and including sleeping in his room instead of in her sexless marriage bed with Stephen; and given what we now know about the likelihood that she was aware of allegations of sexual assault against her beloved son…well, it all gets rather Jocasta-complex, doesn’t it? And it seems likely now that the fictional version of Catherine is a stand-in for any number of girls and young women Nancy may have known her son to have assaulted, just as his night and day of besotted romance is Nancy conjuring him up an actual love life she wishes he could have had. These are as good explanations as any for her playing with the truth, as Stephen understated it.

Catherine is right: Jonathan’s violent nature is a truth Nancy and her husband chose to ignore. The truth hurts, which is why some prefer fiction. Yet on the flip side, Catherine is right again: Robert is more comfortable with Catherine as a terrified victim than a satisfied seeker of pleasure. For him, it’s the fiction that hurts, which is why he ultimately, perversely, prefers the awful truth. What a terrible maelstrom to be caught in, and what a performance of a woman who somehow emerges, injured but alive, on the other side.

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.