Summary
The second episode of Disclaimer puts a lot of the criticisms of the premiere to bed, putting its cast and clever direction to work in tightening the screws of a more conventional thriller.
Disclaimer has a point to prove in Episode 2, and in so doing it makes me look a little foolish for assuming in the premiere that Alfonso Cuaron’s show might be a bit up itself. The drama morphs here into a more conventional thriller – albeit with a few formal tricks up its sleeve – that puts the excellent casting and dramatic direction to better use. And, while there are still things we don’t know, including the specific nature of Jonathan and Catherine’s relationship and the former’s untimely demise, this sophomore outing does quickly establish the bones of what was going on between them.
But it also shifts the focus so that the “mystery” is less important than the lens we view it through, which in this episode is primarily the marriage between Catherine and Robert, with Robert’s perspective, in particular, taking precedence.
Past Is Prologue
We start where we left off, though, to a certain extent. There is some time spent with that initial meeting between Jonathan and Catherine; the latter’s sultry interrogation of the former about what he intends to do with the photos he just took of her, and the former’s fumbling, ad hoc attempts to impress this siren-like woman he has just suddenly become rather obsessed with.
We also get another flashback, but this one is more recent. In it, Catherine (still played by Blanchett) meets with Jonathan’s mother, Nancy, who at the time was dying of cancer. She had lured Catherine out under false pretenses to try and convince her to speak to the police about Jonathan’s death. In her eagerness to obscure what happened in Italy, Catherine refused. There’s a lot bundled up in this conversation; implications about Catherine being at least obliquely connected to Jonathan’s death, and something about Jonathan and Nicholas, remind us that there are still important gaps we’re yet to fill in here.
Stephen’s Grenades
But the bulk of Disclaimer Episode 2 takes place in the present day. At one point Stephen mimes pulling a pin on a grenade and tossing it, which is very much what things begin to feel like once he takes aim at Catherine’s family.
One of these sequences is also technically a flashback, but a very recent one – we see how Nicholas acquired The Perfect Stranger. All that happens plot-wise is Stephen pretends to be in the market for a vacuum cleaner and leaves the novel on the counter, but it’s an extremely telling – and faintly frightening – scene on a character level.
Stephen plays the bumbling old man up to the hilt, but he’s no such thing. He’s old, sure, but he still very much has his faculties, and his self-awareness is a powerful weapon. He not only manipulates Nicholas easily but visibly relishes in his general layabout demeanor and lack of personal success. His hatred for Catherine extends to her offspring for, as far as we know, no reason at all.
Inside Voice
The narration, which I’m still not sure about as a storytelling device, fills in some of these rationalizations. Every key character gets their own first-person internal monologue, and they’re all written in a literary way as if they’re POV characters in a novel. Since there’s a novel at the story’s center, I don’t know if the implication is that these are sections of the story being read aloud – I doubt this since Nancy didn’t have all of these varied perspectives unless she’s embellishing reality and it is mingling with truth in real-time – or it’s just a gimmick. But either way, it works better in some instances than others.
I don’t think it’s necessary in this scene, for instance; Kevin Kline is playing all of the emotions. But it’s very useful when we switch to Robert’s point of view since he relates things that we haven’t seen – how he was younger than Catherine when they met, for instance, or how Catherine’s personality has largely been molded around the contours of their largely sexless marriage. This makes Robert’s discovery of Catherine’s affair with Jonathan – Stephen drops off a copy of The Perfect Stranger and an envelope full of lewd photos at Robert’s office – sting all the more, since as he describes, the woman he’s seeing in the pictures is not, at least in his mind, the one he’s married to.
I always have reservations about seeing Sacha Baron Cohen in dramatic roles because I find it almost impossible to divorce him from the idea of Ali G and Borat, but he’s very good in this. His reaction when first thumbing through the photographs is an exquisite descent into horror, and a later scene when he sits down with Catherine to confront her about them finds Cohen competing very directly with an actress of Blanchett’s caliber. His casting mystified me at first, but Disclaimer Episode 2 again proved me wrong.
Leila George as Catherine Ravenscroft (2001) | Image via Apple TV+
Marriage Story
That scene is the big emotional outburst of the episode. It’s also where we get a bit more of the story. Catherine and Nicholas were in Italy on a family holiday, initially, but Robert had to leave for work. Catherine frames her affair – which she claims to have kept entirely away from the eyes and ears of Nicholas, though neither Robert nor the audience believes her – as an outgrowth of abandonment, shifting the blame to Robert.
Robert isn’t having this and frankly, neither am I. I don’t think the show expects us to buy it either. It’s clear in the snippets of past Catherine we’ve seen thus far that she wasn’t particularly concerned with Robert at all. Her demeanor is completely different, which is the first thing Robert notices about the photographs in the present day. The question is whether Catherine was putting on a sultry alter-ego for Jonathan, or if she had lived her entire life as a lie with Robert, playing down her wilder side to reassure a younger and more sexually inexperienced husband.
The other interesting question is how Robert might react now since the signs we’ve seen thus far are not good. As his narration has continuously reminded us, this is a pretty meek, emotionally stunted guy. Now his anger with Catherine has given his worst impulses a means to manifest. Before he meets with Catherine, he meets with Nicholas and offers to fund an expensive trip for him and his girlfriend, despite it not being in Nicholas’s best interests, just to spite Catherine. We know – again, through the narration – that Robert is actively ashamed of the young man Nicholas has become, but he’s now so angry with Catherine that he’s willing to wield Nicholas’s lack of responsibility and accountability as a weapon against her.
And we should ask, as a final note, how much Nicholas himself can recall. His relationship with his mother has always been strained, apparently because she’s the disciplinarian. But is that the whole story? They seem pretty close in the flashbacks, and Nicholas almost immediately strikes up a back-and-forth with Jonathan. Can he recall that holiday? Has the knowledge of his mother’s infidelity contributed to his present-day woes and the deterioration of their relationship? It all seems very possible.
After a premiere I wasn’t sure about, I’m thrilled to not only be asking these questions about Disclaimer but also to be genuinely interested in their answers. If the series can continue along these lines and sustain this level of quality without getting bogged down, Apple TV+ could be on to a real winner here.
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