‘Fatal Attraction’ Episode 2 Recap: The Beginning & End of the Affair

Forget knives or guns or bathtubs or pots full of boiling water: Dialogue is Fatal Attraction’s weapon of choice, and writers Alexandra Cunningham and James Dearden wield it like experienced gunslingers. In this pivotal episode (“The Movie in Your Mind”), during which the affair between Dan Gallagher and Alex Forrest begins and ends, their aim is true.

Conversation is what brings Dan and Alex together. At various times during their week-spanning liaison, they bond over…pretty much everything adults getting to know each other can bond over. Their shared workplace. The nature of their jobs, and of justice, and of empathy, and how in their jobs you have to guard against losing it while also not becoming a sucker. 

They complain about their asshole dads. Dan tells Alex that his father never once came to watch him try a case, something he’s never told anyone. Alex responds with a virtual non sequitur: Dan has won so many cases because the jurors were “too busy watching your mouth.” 

“Pardon my arm,” she purrs as she extends a hand carrying some clothes past a dividing wall to where he’s waiting in his underwear for his clothes to dry off at her place. (In a clever twist on the rainstorm that brings them together in the original, Alex and Dan get caught under the malfunctioning sprinkler system of a Mexican restaurant.) She teaches him several hyperspecific German words, pointedly including one for imagining future scenarios in your head (hence the episode’s title). 

Later, after they’ve already consummated the relationship, they go to the beach and rattle off all the things they pretend to like, from wind and live music to travel and hats to — this is Alex speaking — “myself.” When he thanks her for the day and says it was great, she ruefully replies “Yeah, it kinda really was, which is just my luck.” When things go south, her biting comment — “Three minutes after you cum, you’re already dressed” — rings out like a chime of doom. 

The hits just keep on coming. I love Alex’s description of mixing coffee with Red Bull: “I mean, I can hear colors?” I love Dan’s banter with Alex’s supervisor Conchita (Toks Olagundoye, who makes an impression), the way he stiff-arms a colleague who interrupts him and Alex at the bar, the way his imperious father-in-law actually tells him he deserved that judgeship, but only now that doing so can’t inflate his ego, since he already lost it.

I especially love almost every word out of Mike’s mouth, from telling an adulterous coworker who mocks his failed marriages “Excuse me for preferring loneliness to shame!” to warning Dan when he sees him talk to Alex, “If you were a different guy, I’d be telling you to be careful right now, but you’re not a different guy…are you?” (Goddamn, but Toby Huss is an absolute marvel; I’m so glad he’s still around in the present-day storyline, working through an obvious hard-luck streak to help Dan clear his name, if not with his friends’ Beth and Ellen’s blessing then at least without them standing in his way.)

As for the sex itself: Well, it involves Lizzy Caplan and Joshua Jackson. How bad could it be, really?

The answer is not very, but it’s also not great, which is a disappointment. Skinemax-style flourishes like slow motion and sexy music strip the moment of its immediacy and intimacy. The original film very smartly eschewed all that to focus on the moment, the sounds, the sights, the textures, mouths on skin, clothes discarded, that marvelous bit where they accidentally switch the kitchen sink on and begin smearing water on each other’s faces as they fuck.

But you don’t need to go back to the sacred texts for evidence of the wisdom of this approach. Be honest with yourselves — we’re all adults here after all — and ask, “When was the last time I watched and enjoyed pornography with background music?” If the answer is “Sometime prior to 9/11,” well, there’s a reason for that: Sex turns out to be more fun to watch and listen to when you don’t have a saxophone or a shitty drum machine competing for your attention.

Anyway, there are at least some winning details during the sex, stuff that makes it feel realistic and therefore more interesting. Dan’s underwear is decidedly unsexy. He leaves his black socks on, a real mood-killer in other circumstances, but it’s just that urgent that he be inside her as soon as possible. I like how Alex extends her legs straight up in the air so Dan can pull off her underwear. I like how he enters her again from behind as they cuddle post-coitally on her chaise longue, barely moving, just enjoying the intimacy. Of course the rooftop blowjob is magnificent. All that stuff is good.

But it does raise the question: Where do we go from here? If we’re going off the movie as a template, the sexual affair between Dan and Alex is now over, nearly as soon as it began — within the same episode, at least. Her suicidal gesture — she pretends to ingest every pill she has after he tries to leave, not admitting to the ruse until he drives her all the way to the hospital and warns her that she will lose her job if authorities determine she’s suicidal — marks the end of this being a casual, easy thing for either of them, and the beginning of the spiraling obsession that will destroy their lives.

The thing is, the show has eight hours of screentime to fill instead of just two. Rushing through the affair made sense in the film: Dan and Alex’s sexual relationship was limited to a 48-hour whirlwind they both knowingly entered into because his wife was out of town, and which he planned to end upon his wife’s return; his literally fatal error was in assuming Alex planned the same thing. The show has already extended the timeframe of the affair, adding two other nights of passion to that initial lost weekend. Moreover, Dan is a much more active agent in the affair’s progression — following Alex to the roof, having her assigned to one of his cases, going back to her place after she interrupts his dinner with Mike. 

If I had the kind of time on my hands that the filmmakers do, I might have expanded the affair’s screentime to match. In addition to further cementing the complicity of both participants in creating the idea in Alex’s head that this isn’t just some limited-time-only fling, this would give the show the chance to develop and intensify the characters’ sexual relationship before bringing the hammer down on it after another episode, perhaps. In other words, the show could stay hotter for longer, and I, for one, like my erotic thrillers erotic.

Who knows? Maybe it will be. It’s already bucked the patterns of the original in ways large and small, so another change isn’t out of the question. And I’ll say this: The appearance of an unexplained bunny in the hallway of Alex’s apartment building at the end indicates that the show doesn’t mind getting a big weirder than the source material. Can it pull off this act of adaptation? Like Dan at this point, we’ll have to wait and see.

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.