‘Good American Family’ Episode 5 Recap – Talk About A Change In Perspective

I must confess to being sceptical that Good American Family could pull off a meaningful change in perspective after how unambiguous the first four episodes were. The Hulu series has always promised to be an even-handed portrayal of the Natalia Grace case, but its first half was rooted firmly in the point of view of the Barnett family, so much so that it was hard to imagine Natalia as anything other than what they claimed she was – a 22-year-old psychopathic imposter posing as an 8-year-old girl. But Episode 5, “Too Hurty Without It”, changes all that and then some.

I figured that the approach the show would take to Natalia’s viewpoint would be revisiting prior events from her perspective, but I was wrong about that. Instead, it languishes in the tiny apartment that Michael and Kristine had abandoned her in at the end of the previous episode. In an excellent, almost completely wordless stretch, Natalia tries to survive in an apartment she’s ill-equipped to navigate, gradually coming to realize that she has been completely and utterly abandoned.

Imogen Faith Reid is remarkable here. It’s through her performance that we come to realize the true horror of what we’re seeing, since divorced from the quasi-thriller context, Natalia is just a disabled child who has been cruelly left to fend for herself. She fails at every hurdle, unable to pluck things from tall shelves, wash herself, open cans, or patch up the wound she inflicts on herself when she attempts to. Her physical discomfort is compounded by her emotional pain, that creep of abandonment and despair when she realizes, step by step, that she really is alone.

A sympathetic ally emerges in the form of a neighbour who helps Natalia out by allowing her to use her phone – Kristine’s voicemail lists the entire Barnett clan besides her – and helping to clean her up. After seeing a TV advert for Kristine’s new book about raising Jacob, Natalia somehow drags herself to the library to check it out and is forlorn to discover she has been cropped out of the family photos. Kristine’s claims about all children being deserving of love are completely bogus.

Mark Duplass in Good American Family | Image via Hulu

Natalia doesn’t exactly help herself, assaulting one of the library workers and stealing the book, but can you blame her, really? The only meaningful downside of Good American Family Episode 5 is that, despite all the obvious hardships Natalia suffers through, she’s still a little too capable for someone who is ostensibly eight years old. Finding her way to the library is perhaps the most egregious example of this, but it’s not enough to sway us back to the Barnett point of view – especially not when Michael and Kristine make their own, brief appearances in a newly monstrous form.

Michael is first lured by reports of the library incident. He finds the apartment in complete disarray, Natalia living in squalor, but shows no concern for her well-being. After roaming around filming a video of the dry food in the cupboards and the shampoo in the bathroom, he makes Natalia say out loud that she’s fine, despite how obvious it is that she isn’t. His constant assertions that she’s an adult don’t hold much water, since you wouldn’t treat a 22-year-old like this either.

Natalia’s takeaway from this visit is wrenchingly sad. She cleans up the apartment and tries to bathe herself, repeating Kristine’s military-style parenting doctrine in the mirror, reminding herself that she’s only worthy of privileges if she earns them. She later regurgitates more of Kristine’s scripting to the lady next door, to whom she claims to be a 22-year-old who looks young for her age. The lady and her grandson, Keaton, both buy it. Keaton even offers to take her to her parents’ address by bus, which goes terribly wrong when they get lost, and Natalia is once again vilified by everyone. The few allies she thought she had are horrified by her negligence. In the midst of it all, she still has no idea who she is, dutifully swallowing Michael and Kristine’s claims that she’s an adult who tried to kill them.

When Kristine finally arrives in person, it’s the final nail in the coffin. Natalia has been evicted from the apartment, so she moves her to another, smaller one that is even less accommodating to her needs. The hatred is visceral and constant. Natalia volunteers to tell the world the “truth”, which is just Kristine’s claims that she has been convinced of. We know from snippets of Natalia’s conversation with Brandon that she kept this promise, unconvincingly reiterating that she attempted to poison Kristine and planned to bury the boys in the backyard. But Good American Family Episode 5 makes it painfully obvious that she’s just repeating what she has been told. In the span of a single episode, Kristine has been reinvented as an abusive monster, and Natalia her unwitting victim.