Summary
Lady in the Lake makes some writing missteps in Episode 4, but it remains exceedingly well-acted and visually striking.
It’s typical of Lady in the Lake to build to the most significant moment of the series thus far – the apparent death of Cleo – and then have it occur off-screen. In a deliberately inscrutable mystery like this, it raises all kinds of questions and suspicions. Episode 4, “Innocence leaves when you discover cruelty. First in others, then in yourself”, is very good for the most part, but something about that ending felt too telegraphed in its ambiguity (and it isn’t the only moment that lands with a groan, but more on this later.)
Don’t get me wrong – this remains another sterling effort from Apple TV+, drenched in gorgeous visuals, boasting genuinely great performances across the board, and being, at the least for the most part, thoughtfully written. But shenanigans are too obviously afoot, I think.
Maddie and Stephan Meet
Anyway, Episode 4 opens where Episode 3 left off, with Maddie meeting Stephan for an interview. Remember, Maddie fancies herself a journalist now and has even turned up with a tape recorder to legitimize things, but she might be in over her head with Stephan.
What helps this scene is the fact that we still don’t know anything about Stephan. We can intuit he’s not guilty and has been scapegoated because of his eccentricity, but something’s still clearly up all the same. I mean, he does set someone on fire later, so he’s dangerous. But he seems to like Maddie – perhaps too much.
In return, Maddie offers probably too much of herself. She pretends the interview thing is just a ruse so she could be allowed to meet and connect with him, which someone like Stephan is going to take a bit too seriously. But Maddie’s only thinking short term, and to be fair, she gets some short-term results. Stephan tells her about being part of a secret military program that tested biological weapons on conscientious objectors. This forms the basis for the story she takes to Bauer, and it makes the front page, earning a tremendous amount of local attention for its implications that if Stephan isn’t guilty of killing Tessie, someone else must be.
More On Maddie’s Romantic History
In my recap of the previous episode I raised a point about what the show might be trying to say about Maddie’s history with men, and I’m still a little confused in this regard. In Episode 4, she confesses to Stephan that she knew where to look for Tessie because that secret spot is where she once went with a boy who turns out to be Allan.
Maddie later confesses to Ferdie that Milton wasn’t the first man she slept with. You’d think the implication here is that she lost her virginity to Allan, but in the flashback, we see that Allan tried to force himself on Maddie and she rejected him. So, Allan wasn’t the first guy she slept with. The flashbacks we saw in Episode 1 and Episode 2 suggest it might have been Allan’s creepy father, possibly by force, but then Seth had read in Maddie’s journal that he had been fathered by another man. Timeline-wise this can’t be Allan or his father.
Unless my maths are wrong, it seems like there’s an additional romantic partner we don’t know about yet, that Maddie is deliberately being vague about.
Gordon Tells Reggie To Get Rid of Cleo
While all this is going on, we mustn’t forget about Cleo, who is on the cusp of pulling off the get-rich-quick scheme she devised in the previous episode. She plans to rig the numbers game and enlists a hairdresser to place her bet for her, with the promise of splitting the winnings. Everything seems to be working out.
But fate conspires against Cleo. Ferdie manages to track down the shooters who carried out the hit on Myrtle Summer, and despite losing his unsavory partner in a shootout during a fun-looking balloon burlesque routine, he’s close to the two men identifying the third conspirator. He’s even promoted to detective – Baltimore’s first Black detective, no less – as a reward, but he doesn’t realize what his ambition has inadvertently wrought for Cleo.
Fearing that the two captive shooters will identify Cleo as their accomplice, which will lead back to him, Shell Gordon instructs Reggie to kill Cleo. It’s the first moment that highlights Gordon’s ruthlessness, especially since we see him playing nice with Cleo and her family later.
Lady in the Lake | Image via Apple TV+
Seth Is Awful
Just a quick side note here so I can complain about Seth.
I hate this kid. I get that his discoveries about his parentage and his mother’s infidelity have shaken him a little, and he’s going through a tough time with his parents separating, but I scarcely recall a more awful kid in recent TV history. Even House of the Dragon children don’t talk to their parents with this much obvious contempt, certainly not in public.
Luckily, Seth gets a slap for his trouble when he sides with Allan Durst at a Hanukkah gathering where he goes nuts at Maddie for leveraging Tessie’s death to get a byline in a paper. You’d be able to see Allan’s point here if we didn’t have the context of him trying to force himself on Maddie when they were young, but with that in mind, it just seems like he’s still bitter about not getting his way all those years ago.
Stephan Confronts Maddie and Reggie Kills Cleo (Or Does He?)
When Maddie returns home after this unfortunate incident, she finds Stephan waiting in her apartment. This is, unfortunately, telegraphed from a mile away, since Ferdie constantly refers to her leaving the window unlocked, and we saw Stephan escape custody by setting an orderly on fire (he was dressed as Santa – this is all happening on Christmas Eve.)
Stephan is creepy and dangerous to festive figures, but he doesn’t seem to mean Maddie any harm. He just thinks they have a bond. Despite a bit of confusion, he agrees to keep her seeing Ferdie a secret (he’s very perceptive, it turns out) if she doesn’t mention he was there. Fair enough.
But when Stephan leaves he heads straight to the lake where Tessie was found. Reggie is also there, transporting what seems to be Cleo’s corpse under her tell-tale baby-blue coat. Earlier, we’d seen him staking her out, so the implication is that he killed her off-screen and has gone to hide her body in the lake – a curious choice of location for the man also suspected of killing Tessie.
While Reggie is dumping the body he falls and breaks his leg, but is forced to remain completely silent as the cops nearby are trying to arrest Stephan while he performs a kind of ritual self-baptism. This is the closest the two core story strands have come to being properly intertwined, and it seems that by the next episode, Maddie will have two murders to investigate instead of just one.
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