‘Lady in the Lake’ Episode 3 Recap: Parallel Lines

Lady in the Lake is two shows in one. Each half has a charismatic female protagonist, a murder-mystery/crime-thriller plot, and an awareness of the race, class, and gender power differentials at work. But they don’t feel the same, do they, despite all that? And it goes beyond the skin color and religion of the leading players, too. Creator-director Alma Har’el and writer Briana Belser make this not just a tale of two cities, but almost of two genres.

Cleo Johnson is starring in an exceptionally well-made prestige-TV crime show. I mean, it’s hard not to think of one of the granddaddies of them all, The Wire, when you’ve got actor Wood Harris stalking around, and when Cleo herself has very much hit the “Why don’t you go lie low with your family in New York for a couple months until the heat dies down?” portion of any given Wire storyline. 

But as I’ve noted before, Har’el’s approach to filming Shell Gordon’s club, the Pharaoh, with Scorsesean you-are-there intimacy and warmth, but with the club’s musicians occasionally breaking the show out into a full dance number, as they do when Dora Carter burns it down in her last gig at the club before departing for Paris. A lot of dark woods, softly glowing lights, tense conversations in hushed voices between bursts of raucous laughter.

Not that Cleo is capable of enjoying any of it anymore. But I guess we should take the fact that she’s capable of showing up for Dora’s last gig at all as a victory, even if she is blind drunk — it means she escaped the disastrous botched assassination of Myrtle Summer alive. Not unscathed, though, as terrible dreams and waking trauma flashbacks bombard her. This is compounded by the fact that her son’s sickle cell anemia is getting worse and worse, and the only cure left on offer is an offering to God…in the form of a donation to the Prophet (Sean Ringgold), the man of the cloth trying to sell Cleo on this snake oil. 

Worse, she’s now officially a loose end. Cleo wasn’t supposed to be at the drop-off to pay the hitmen at all; now she — an a) beautiful b) woman c) in an expensive coat d) with a distinctive blue color — is easily the most memorable thing about it to any eyewitness the cops might happen to talk to. This winds up including one of the hitmen themselves.

Cleo’s has two unlikely saving graces here. The first is that her friend Officer Ferdie Platt is the guy who catches the would-be hitman (he’s been hobbled by a tell-tale load of Mr. Summer’s buckshot in his buttcheeks) and figures out the identity of the mystery woman. “You’re a loose end,” he tells her at her department store, “and I can’t do nothing about that. But I can buy you some time.” Cleo gives him the assassins’ car’s make, model, and license — and throws in a tip that his partner is crooked in the balance.

Her other guardian angel, for the time anyway, is a far more unlikely one. Reggie, the man who gave her the gig, is covering his own ass: He hasn’t told his dictatorial boss Shell Gordon that he handed off this important job to a woman with zero experience. After all, he did so to avoid heat because he’s now a suspect in the murder (and attempted rape) of Tessie Durst. How do you think Shell would react if he found out his chosen apprentice was mixed up in something like that?

So, just as she did as a kid when she used imagery from a dream to pick her desperate out-of-work musician father the winning combo in the numbers game — only for him to pocket the money and abandon the family — she bets it all on one gamble. In front of Dora, she spells out the whole situation, as well as the mortal peril it puts her in. Now, if Reggie decides to clean up by killing her, her story won’t die with her; he’ll have to kill his beloved Dora too.

Instead, he says he’ll do what Cleo wants: pass her the winning number of one of Shell’s rigged numbers games so she can win big and get out of town with her kids in tow, with none the wiser as to Reggie’s involvement. Considering that Cleo is also the show’s title character, I think we know how this is going to go.

If Cleo’s world Breaking Bad, Maddie Morgenstern Schwartz’s world is Mad Men, with a sprinkling of your favorite true-crime podcast mixed in. You can’t say that she’s not involved in matters of life and death, because she is: Besides whatever dark memory she’s holding back, she’s now actively reporting for a major newspaper on a crime she herself helped crack. 

She’s also seeing Officer Platt, who’s busy cracking the Summer case. Let me be more specific: She’s seeing him leave foot patrol to creep through her window like a prowler, walk up behind her into the bathroom where he finds her in a slip with her wrists crossed behind her back in handcuff position, and rail the hell out of her. She does all of this while also seeing her own reflection in the mirror, gazing back at all this good, deliciously illicit sex she’s suddenly having. (Filmmakers love putting Natalie Portman in front of mirrors, and like, I get it.)

But Maddie’s son isn’t running numbers against her wishes, or dying of an incurable disease that targets only their own minority group. He’s just hurt that she left, defensive of his dad, resentful of her desire for freedom…and aware now, if he wasn’t already from reading her diaries the day before his bar mitzvah, that he’s actually the product of an extramarital relationship, not boring old Milton Schwartz at all. That’s a lot for mother and child alike to go through, but it’s a different kind of “a lot.”

Maddie’s estranged husband isn’t a down-on-his luck political comedian, pursuing his dream while she scrambles to make ends meet, however talented he may be. He’s just a successful balding guy with glasses who doesn’t offer much by way of excitement and has no interest in his wife seeking any out on her own. That’s tough, but it’s not “My children will go homeless unless jokes about lynchings and Harriet Tubman’s vagina catch on in a big way” tough. (In Slappy’s defense, though, it’s impossible to imagine Milton holding Maddie with the tenderness Slappy displays toward Cleo when she cries in his arms.)

Maddie’s gruff co-worker is just a cranky period-accurate sexist who still winds up getting her a first-time reporting job completely unimaginable to anyone working in the field today. (A contributor byline and an advance??) He’s not a guy we know, for a fact, is mixed up some way or other in both of the show’s central murders, not to mention a try for a third in the form of the botched hit that landed them all in hot water. I get that reporter Bob Bauer is not who you or I would choose as a mentor, but when Maddie pisses him off, she doesn’t have to do so in front of witnesses to prevent him from killing her to shut her up.

I don’t think Har’el or Belser want you to think that Maddie has it easy, or is making much ado about nothing. If it weren’t for the simultaneous existence of Cleo, you’d be tempted to say she’s had the weirdest few weeks in Baltimore. But that’s just it: We know Cleo exists. Cleo herself keeps reminding us she exists, even after her death! In the meantime, we see their plights paralleled, compared, and contrasted. And at the murky bottom of it all, we know there’s one more difference: Maddie is the detective in her murder mystery. Cleo is the victim in her own.

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.