‘Lady in the Lake’ Episode 5 Recap: 13 Conversations with Maddie Morgenstern

When Maddie Morgenstern talks to boyfriend Allan’s father Hal Durst back in 1946, she’s a high school newspaper reporter there for a story on his business. That’s the cover story, anyway. They’re actually there to fuck, something they’ve done before many times, but may not do again. Hal promises Maddie the life of “a bohemian princess,” with a room of her own. Maddie tells Hal that she’s pregnant. By the end of the Lady In The Lake Episode 5 we learn his response: paying for a painful illegal abortion. After all, he tells her, she has her career as a writer to think about. 

When Maddie talks to her estranged husband Milton in 1967, things are tense but surprisingly reasonable in the end. He tells her their son Seth finally opened up to him…about his fear of staying at his mom’s place, given the neighborhood. (Maddie’s just relieved he didn’t reveal he’s not Milton’s biological son.) When he produces divorce papers, she immediately susses out that he’s started seeing someone, and figures out she’s a much younger woman just as fast. (Younger even than Officer Platt, so she does have a leg to stand on here.) But they agree to help each other out: He’ll cover the legal costs of the divorce if she’ll stop pressuring their son about visiting her. Less than ideal, but less than dire.

When Maddie talks to Edna (Lisa Hodsoll), her colleague at the Star, she’s looking for advice. Instead she gets barked at like a bouncer on Dalton’s first night at the Double Deuce in Road House. Like Dalton, she has three simple rules for how Maddie should conduct her business: Never ask for permission, never apologize, and always read the room. Edna, for example, is hiding in a bathroom stall to avoid dealing with her obnoxious coworkers, in whose number she now includes Maddie. She closes the toilet stall door in Maddie’s face in the episode’s funniest moment.

When Maddie talks to Stephan Zawadzkie, it’s because she suspects he’s involved in yet another murder: that of Cleo Johnson, just recently found floating in the fountain after months in the water. Cleo disappeared the same night Stephan escaped, and both were found in the same park, so the cops like him for this murder as well as for Tessie Durst’s. But Stephan insists he’d never heard of this woman before the cops came asking if he’d killed her. The only real connection between it all, he insists, is Maddie. As Brian Cox’s Hannibal Lecktor [sic] put it in Manhunter: “You wanna get the scent, Will? Smell yourself.”

When Maddie talks with Dr. Kornblatt (Daniel London), the medical examiner, she finds she won’t get much information from Cleo’s body itself. All that time submerged has left the body in a state of advanced decomposition, making it impossible to tell how or even if she was murdered. Maddie points out that people don’t generally accidentally drown in fountains in the middle of the lake in the middle of winter.

When Maddie talks to Patrice Murphy (Nikiva Dionne), a star reporter at the Afro-American, she’s hoping to…well, honestly it’s not clear that she’s hoping for anything more of a two-way street than just pumping the more experienced, more plugged-in journalist for information. I certainly didn’t hear a “let’s pool our resources here,” and neither did Murphy. She tells Maddie off in no uncertain terms, though she does do her one favor: She gives her a pile of issues of her paper and tells her to do her own research, not just on the case but on the “world” she now likes to claim as her own just because she lives in the Bottom. (I could do without the resulting “swirl of photos and newspaper clippings with the investigator at the center” montage that results.)

When Maddie talks to Slappy Johnson, the comedian is vibrating with pain and anger. He’s just caused a major scene at Cleo’s funeral, aiming his verbal darts at every target within throwing distance. He’s furious with his in-laws for daring to suspect him of the crime, and keeping his sons from him. He’s furious with Myrtle Summer for refusing to give Cleo the job that could have kept her from trouble, all because of she had to work for Shell Gordon to make ends meet. He’s furious with Shell, whom he either bravely or recklessly refers to as “Kingpin” in full view of the whole congregation, for tarnishing Cleo’s good name in the first place — and, as he makes clear to Maddie afterwards, for his almost certain involvement in Cleo’s death. He’s furious with Reggie for jumping every time Shell says “frog.” About the only person Slappy doesn’t say he’s furious with his Slappy himself, but it’s not hard to read between the lines. If his career had gone better, if he had not driven her away the way he had, if he had been more persuasive or more attractive that night, so much might have changed, and Cleo would still be alive.  

When Maddie talks to Lucille (Lynda Suarez), the hairdresser she sees from time to time, it’s for business, not pleasure. Slappy tipped Maddie off that Lucille also hit it big in the numbers game the same night Cleo disappeared. (“Score on a a number you shouldn’t know, you end up face up in a lake.”) It doesn’t take long before Lucille’s hurrying her client back out of her (big, fancy, new) shop, and it doesn’t take Maddie long to figure out why. 

When Maddie talks to Bob Bauer, she knows she’s onto something. She also knows that he knows she’s onto something. But he’s a “coward,” she says, unwilling to touch a story about Black Baltimore, dismissing her solid circumstantial evidence as laughable deflection by Slappy when it obviously isn’t. Any further investigation will be done on her own.

When Maddie talks to Shell Gordon and Reggie Robinson…okay, I’m gonna break format here and just say when this happened I practically cheered. Here we have Academy Award winner Natalie Portman sitting across from Wood Harris, The Wire’s Avon Barksdale, commanding the screen just as effortlessly. That show’s deep bench of talent is just extraordinary.

Anyway, when Maddie talks to Shell, he chooses and delivers his words with the kind of skill and care an unpracticed speaker and interviewer like Maddie can’t match. When she tries to be coy about his racket, he makes her come out and say it. He’s the person who finally makes the racial subtext of their conversation text, praising Jewish people like her for surviving a genocide and overcoming racism, but ultimately letting her know that for all intents and purposes, she’s as white as anyone else to a Black person like himself. It’s like watching a serious version of Zorro making a few quick swordstrokes and his opponent (or lady friend)’s clothes all falling off at once, effortlessly torn to shreds. 

Shell isn’t the only other person in the room, though. There’s also Reggie, who for all his gravelly soft-spokenness may as well be an open book. He lets slip that he’s a boxer — you know, the kind of hobby that leaves you with a black eye — and reveals that he and Shell collect tropical fish — you know, the kind that a Black guy with a black eye might have been seen buying at certain store the day a certain girl goes missing. The cherry on top is that, seemingly just for the fun of it, Shell reveals that Reggie was an item with Dora Carter, Cleo’s best friend. (Even now, when it’s in his best interest to do so, Reggie can’t hide his feelings: When Maddie asks if they were in love, he replies with a surprisingly humble and tender “I’d like to think so.”)

When Maddie talks to Cleo’s old shift manager at Hecht’s Department Store (Laureen E. Smith), it’s largely out of a sense of obligation to Shell, of all people. Obviously the man full of shit — he ordered the murder! — but he’s correct when he says that Cleo worked all over town, for Jewish employers as well as Black ones. Might as well follow another lead, if nothing else. But it’s where she gets a nasty shock: The yellow dress she remembers buying in a hurry the Thanksgiving Tessie Durst disappeared and her life fell apart was bought right off the back of Cleo herself. 

When Maddie talks to Ferdie, she seems like she might be on the edge of another breakdown. She’s inundated with traumatic memories of the abortion, of Cleo’s body. She becomes fixated on how everything seems connected. Maddie bought a dress from Cleo on the same day Tessie was killed, and both their bodies were found in the same water in the same park months apart, and the second body was found the night the suspect in the first killing fled to that very park after first breaking into Maddie’s apartment, and Ferdie knew Cleo before he knew Maddie, and Cleo’s body was only discovered in the first place because of a call she’d placed to public works as part of her job as the paper’s Miss Helpline, and on and on and on. (It does, admittedly, feel like something that would happen to a character in a literary genre novel— which, well, you know.)  

She funnels all this anxiety into attacks on Ferdie. Does he work for Shell too? Is he only interested in Maddie for sex? Did deliberately fail to report his own acquaintance with a Black boxer-slash-fish-enjoyer with a Black eye around the time of Tessie’s murder? That last bit is the last straw for Ferdie, who points out people’s lives are at stake here, not just the theme of the homecoming dance or whatever. 

And when Maddie talks to Mrs. Zawadzkie, she is brutally stabbed in the gut while the Polish woman, from beautiful scenic Treblinka, hurls an anti-Semitic slur at her.

If it seems like it comes from out of nowhere, that’s because it does. Not that the scene isn’t an uneasy one: For a Jewish woman like Maddie, stepping into the home of a Catholic Polish woman straight from the old country at this particular time, seeing all the crosses and lambs and portraits of the Pope, hearing about how Treblinka is actually a very nice place and how when you think about it the locals who’ve had their reputations ruined lost a lot to the Germans too…Shell Gordon wasn’t half as friendly as Kasha Zawadzkie, but somehow he wasn’t half as frightening either.

But the violence itself? That explodes onto the screen like a bomb. The brutal, messy, sloppy, bloody battle that ensues ends only when Maddie slithers from the bedroom where she’s been blockading herself from further attacks by the enraged woman — who it’s now pretty clear just wants her insane son to stay behind bars — into the kitchen, where she finds Kasha has slit her own throat. The uncomfortably domestic setting, the sudden lurch from calm into chaos, the use of household objects like a folding tray or a butterknife as weapons, the final unsuccessful phone call for help as the survivor passes out unconscious beneath the receiver: This couldn’t be more The Sopranos if Natalie Portman somehow morphed into James Gandolfini in the middle of the scene.

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.