Summary
Lady in the Lake continues to have a lot going on, but it coheres a little better in the second episode, even if the answers it gives to a few mysteries are obviously misleading.
Episode 2 of Lady in the Lake is as busy as the first, and while it creates the illusion of answering more questions than it raises, I still can’t say I’m any wiser about the particulars than I was at the end of Episode 1.
But the show is coming together, at least. Characters are developing, stakes are rising, and the two parallel story strands are becoming more entwined (Cleo and Maddie almost cross paths a few times, as they did in the first episode, but they’re starting to develop mutual acquaintances now too.)
There’s still plenty we don’t know, but it’s a mystery so we’re not supposed to. Still, let’s go over everything that happened in the second episode and see if we can piece a few bits together.
An Early Flashback Suggests More About Maddie’s Past
Brief flashbacks in the premiere suggested something untoward in Maddie’s past, implying it had to do with Tessie’s father, Allan Durst. The opening flashback in Episode 2, set in 1947, suggests that the secretive incident might have instead involved Allan’s father, Hal.
In 1947, Maddie and Allan were in a relationship, but he was a meek lad, very subservient to his parents. His mother, Louise, is a surrealist artist, and Maddie interviews her. I don’t think this is especially important beyond prompting a line from Maddie about her view on surrealism – “I think it has to do with the search for the marvelous” – which comes up again later, and introducing Maddie to Hal.
Nothing more is shown, but we can tell Hal’s a creep, and we see his office is full of sketches of naked women (including one in a lake!) and features that yellow sofa we saw him scrubbing blood from in Episode 1’s flashback. Since Maddie is a teenager at the time, this is a little worrying, to put things mildly.
Tessie’s Supposed Killer Is Arrested
After Maddie and Judith discover Tessie’s body, the case proceeds very swiftly. Despite the two women briefly becoming suspects in the eyes of Bosko, the awful cop who first responds to the scene and says to Maddie “I can usually tell” when she reveals her Jewish surname, attention quickly shifts elsewhere.
Tessie’s funeral is the very next day – it’s customary to rush things so that the soul can move on – and there, Maddie briefly meets the eyes of Allan and has to hold Tessie’s mother in her arms while she breaks down.
The suspect, we learn, is Stephan, the guy from the aquarium. This is determined by the fact that Tessie had aquarium gravel under her fingernails, but the shoe certainly fits, since Stephan is prone to stripping naked, donning a gas mask, and getting into a bath with his fish. His mother violently punishes him for his deviant behavior, but she does later try and protect him when he’s arrested from the store in a hail of gunfire (wearing the mask and dancing with a mop, his mother a hostage.)
Seems like a nice guy.
Cleo Has To Make A Tough Decision
Things aren’t going well for Cleo. After learning from a strung-out Dora that Shell Gordon paid for Myrtle’s political campaign, she uses the information to try and talk Myrtle into a full-time paid position. But Myrtle, while quite happy to leverage Cleo as a volunteer, is reluctant to hire her, both because she works for Gordon and because, after her speech at the function, it’ll look like she has bought her loyalty.
Cleo is still expected to hand in her dignity at the door so that Myrtle can continue to use her story as a backdrop to pose in front of, but during the taping of a campaign video, Cleo flips out and makes some rather pointed comments about that dignity she’s being asked to surrender free of charge. Instead, she goes to Gordon and asks for a larger role in his operation – anything that’ll make her more money.
Gordon is skeptical of whether to trust Cleo, but he later relents when he learns what she said to Myrtle. She also does him a solid by getting Slappy to perform a set at the Pharoah, even though he didn’t keep it anywhere near as clean as she wanted him to.
Maddie Succumbs To Officer Platt
Officer Platt and Maddie get close in Lady in the Lake Episode 2 | Image via Apple TV+
Since Maddie can’t even buy a car for herself without Milton’s signature, she takes matters into her own hands by staging a robbery and banking on the insurance money for her expensive wedding ring. The officer who responds to the call-out is Platt, the guy who drinks in the Pharoah and has the hots for Cleo.
It’s Platt who tells Maddie about the fish store guy being the prime suspect in Tessie’s murder, a tip that Maddie later passes on to Mr. Bauer, a journalist who visits her about the case. This leads directly to Stephan’s arrest.
There is pretty obvious sexual chemistry between Maddie and Platt, which is confirmed later when he contrives a reason to check up on her (he’s ostensibly there to inform her that Stephan has been arrested, but we know better.) Maddie, high as a kite after smoking up a storm with Judith, invites Platt in for “a beer”, and you can fill in the blanks from there.
An Attempted Assassination Goes Bad
Like any good criminal, Gordon pays off the police with fat envelopes full of money. When Reggie delivers the latest one to Platt’s partner, though, he’s informed that Stephan’s mother has suggested to the police that a Black man with a black eye who had been in the fish store earlier was guilty of Tessie’s murder. Since we already saw Reggie fretting about the fish in Episode 1, we know he’s on the hook for the crime, so he needs to lay low until his tell-tale eye heals.
That means tasking Cleo with dropping off another envelope full of dough, this one to a bird-loving but ill-tempered man named Duke, who forces her at gunpoint to drive him somewhere. The “somewhere” turns out to be Myrtle’s house. Duke has been paid to assassinate her. He sends a reluctant triggerman to the door, and he unloads several rounds when someone – we don’t see who – opens it.
But someone else in the building comes out with a shotgun, firing wildly at the car. Cleo gets out and flees, which is where the episode ends. Is this how she meets her demise?
And Another Thing…
One more detail to consider:
- When Maddie and Judith get high, the latter starts reciting quotes from a French diarist that she has committed to memory, one of which is the same line Maddie dropped to Louise in the flashback trying to explain surrealism. I’m not entirely sure what is being implied here but it’s a very explicit connection amid hallucinations and/or recollections that are probably steeped with clues if you’re the kind of person to go through them frame by frame. Unfortunately, I’m not.
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