‘Lady in the Lake’ Episode 4 Recap: Tonight There’s Gonna Be a Jailbreak

This was the big one. In retrospect, the fourth episode of Lady in the Lake makes the first three look like they were holding their breath (when they weren’t gasping it out while fucking or dancing or running for their lives, of course), waiting for this big inevitable exhalation of raw unadulterated plot movement. A lot happens in this episode — some of it above and beyond what seems strictly necessary, or even advisable, to tell the story of these two women.

On Cleo’s side of the ledger, this episode is a straightforward tragedy, and it plays out much like you’d expect it would. Shell Gordon finally discovers that a woman with a blue coat was, somehow, the bagman for the hitmen, who are being arrested at a rapid clip. 

You can thank newly minted Detective Ferdie Platt — the first Black detective in the Baltimore PD, an achievement for which I’m sure he’ll be roundly congratulated by his supportive white brothers-in-arms lol — for that: He corners the lead assassin at a burlesque show, though the hitman takes out his crooked partner Officer Davis in the process. Ferdie feels his zeal to get the collar got Davis killed. “He wasn’t my friend,” he ruefully tells Maddie later, “but he was my partner.”

For Cleo, moving ahead with the plan is the only plan. She gets her rigged lotto number, passes it to a friend to place the bet, and gets ready to leave with a suitcase full of cash. But by now Reggie has received his marching orders from father figure Mr. Gordon. As grief- and guilt-stricken as he is over what he is about to do — we watch him sob and yowl in frustration as he cases Cleo’s place and sees her kissing her happy, newly employed husband Slappy; earlier he begged Gordon not to make him do this on Christmas Eve, so as to spare her children — Reggie is a good soldier.

Just as they did with Tessie Durst, the filmmakers, in this case writer Nambi E. Kelley and creator-director Alma Har’el, deny us the act of killing. Cleo waits in the park to give Reggie his cut of the winnings before leaving everyone behind, Reggie pulls up, the show cuts away, and the next thing you know Cleo’s corpse is in Reggie’s rowboat on its way to the fountain in the middle of the lake. (Reggie’s disastrous fall back into said rowboat after ditching the body, leaving him with one of the most broken legs you’re ever gonna see, is new news here.)

By far the most compelling thing about Cleo’s story here is simply what’s on her mind as it plays out. In much the same way that Maddie’s trauma backstory dictates her current state of play, so too does Cleo’s: She’s haunted by her abandonment by her father, who took the money he won playing the numbers and ran — the exact plan she has right now, children and mother and husband and best friend notwithstanding. She also painfully confronts her mother about the way she too abandoned Cleo, by succumbing to almost catatonic depression for months after her husband’s departure. 

“I needed you, Mama,” she croaks. So simple, so devastating to hear as a parent, whatever excuses you’ve made for yourself. Doubly painful since Cleo may as well be addressing this complaint to herself from the perspective of either of her sons, who may soon feel the same way.

Maddie’s side of the story is where the “that escalated quickly” sign is really flashing. Perhaps to its detriment? That remains to be seen, of course, with half a season to go, but there’s reason for concern. Simply put, it feels like with Cleo’s departure from this mortal coil, the story suddenly had to introduce a lot more mortal peril into Maddie’s. 

Take her relationship with the imprisoned Stephan Zawadzkie, accused (almost certainly wrongfully) of killing Tessie Durst. When she does the serial-killer drama bit of going into the visitation room alone with him and fakes a rapport, he goes on a tangent stemming from his Polish family’s innocence of Nazi war crimes — as Seventh-Day Adventists, they honor the Hebrew sabbath and refuse military service — into, get this, biological warfare experiments conducted on him by the U.S. military while he was a conscientious objector.

Frankly, I’m not sure this taut, psychologically rich drama about two minority mothers in 1960s Baltimore needed to introduce MK-ULTRA type shit. I’m doubly unsure that Stephan needed to break himself out of prison by lighting a guard’s Christmas-elf costume on fire, break into Maddie’s home through the window she leaves unlocked for Ferdie, read her diary and thus learn of her secret relationship, tackle her to the ground, then leave her safely behind. It feels, I dunno, cheap? 

And it doesn’t help that Dylan Arnold’s performance as Stephan the twitchy weirdo has the likes of Paul Walter Hauser’s turn on Apple TV+’s own Black Bird to be compared to. I don’t know if it’s the writing or the performance, but I don’t find this character frightening or sympathetic either — I find him to be a character.

But that’s not all. Maddie’s ongoing, extremely hot sexual relationship with Ferdie has attracted the notice of the vicious misogynist racist Officer Bosko, who knows as well as they do that their relationship is literally illegal due to miscegenation laws. (Coming back soon, from a Supreme Court near you! Don’t worry, Thomas will willingly take the L in exchange for a few more billionaire-sponsored trips to the Bahamas or whatever.) This can only end in disaster, but on this show disaster is already in abundant supply. Do we really need more?

At any rate, the military-experiment story is front page news and gangbusters business, earning Maddie a new (albeit kind of crappy) job at the paper, the thanks of the unseen publisher, and the envy of every man in the newsroom except Bob Bauer, her condescending, sexist, but at least somewhat appreciative guardian angel cum rabbi in the newsroom. 

Attending a Hanukkah celebration quickly gives her a sense of just how far her new job will get her with her old friends and family. The other housewives are blown away by her new gig and her success at breaking a front page story, but they react dumbfoundedly when Maddie asks them what they, not their husbands, think of the situation. A woman, with an opinion about something other than food, clothes, decor, makeup, or children? It’s simply not done!

But by far the worst moment for her is when Allan Durst walks over to confront her about her role in partially exonerating the man he blames for his daughter’s death. By now we’ve already learned that Maddie was drawn to the place she found Tessie’s body because that’s where she used to go to fool around with boys…including Allan, who bulldozed past her consent to get himself off on top of her in lieu of raping her outright. To be berated by this man for her perceived lack of morality…that’s a lot for her, I’d imagine.

Her son Seth bears the brunt of her rage, and honestly it’s hard, period-appropriately of course, to blame her for smacking him. He’s been nothing but antagonistic to her from the moment she left, belittling every change to her life she has made and refusing her any kind of kindness or considerations. It’s hard to blame him, I suppose, but we’ve seen what Maddie’s going through and he hasn’t. That slap feels both ugly and cathartic, the kind of mixed-up emotional register in which Lady in the Lake excels.

And that’s more the register I wish Maddie’s story would stay in, rather than fiery jailbreaks and Hannibal Lecter. If Lady in the Lake artificially gooses up her peril to offset the absence of Cleo, it will muddy the point it’s been trying to make about the two women’s relative privilege and power, despite them both being members of despised minority groups. The simplest way to put it is that Maddie’s adventure is Cleo’s life. That point should be kept diamond-sharp and diamond-clear.

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.