Summary
“Monster” lends most of its runtime to one of the most deeply unlikeable characters in recent memory, but it remains oddly watchable in a slightly perverse way.
“I’m a lot of things. I’m not a monster,” says Robert in Episode 3 of Imperfect Women, and it’s perhaps the least convincing thing anyone has ever said. It doesn’t help, I think, that Joel Kinnaman is playing the character like a square-jawed emotionless robot, but he certainly comes across like a monster (which, by the way, is the title of the episode). This is precisely why I don’t think he killed Nancy. It’s too obvious.
Not that Eleanor is much better. Since “Monster” picks up from where we left off, we’re still in the post-coital guilty haze of Eleanor sleeping with her dead bestie’s husband, a dynamic complicated even further by her discovery of proof that he already knew about the affair she thought she broke the news of. But Robert has his excuses locked and loaded. He found out about the affair by accident, went ballistic — but didn’t lay a finger on her, he’s careful to clarify — and then left Nancy to break it off with the enigmatic David, whose real identity even he doesn’t know. Nancy took her secrets to the grave.
You’d think this would implicate Robert, and in a sense it does, but the logic does make a warped kind of sense. He didn’t mention it to the police because they’d never believe he knew about the affair and did nothing, which is probably true. Eleanor takes his word for it either way, but can’t quite get the images of them together out of her head as she tries to go about her day. And it’s a very Eleanor-centric day full of journalists and toasts and reassurances about how great she is, which is the last thing she wants to hear, given how she’s feeling. Jordan takes the brunt of her annoyance when she breaks things off between them, but it doesn’t really amount to much since she ends up driving right back to Robert’s anyway for a second round that is more tender than the first but ends up being worse for different reasons.
The flagrancy with which Eleanor and Robert are carrying on is, I think, a deliberate stylistic choice to show us how self-absorbed and delusional these people are, because it doesn’t really make sense otherwise. The two of them are literally frolicking half-naked in the pool when Cora and her friend get home, and their babbling excuses don’t make the slightest bit of difference to an aghast Cora (props to Audrey Zahn, who plays her, by the way, because she really sells this moment). Even after this, Eleanor still spends the night and has the gall to drive away with a giant smile on her face.
Not that the smile lasts long. Imperfect Women Episode 3 quickly becomes about the complete dissolution of Eleanor’s public and private image, the version of herself that she presents to the world and allows herself to believe she is. Cora doesn’t ignore what she saw; instead, she posts a video about it on TikTok, which quickly goes viral and then becomes mainstream news. Eleanor is humiliated in the office, damaging her company’s reputation, and, of course, giving her a motive for killing Nancy in the first place, positioning her as a more viable suspect. She tries to get Mary onside by claiming that she and Robert slept together ages ago and Cora only just posted about it, but she also sees through her and throws her out (Elisabeth Moss is so good when she gets going). To add insult to injury, Eleanor tries to take solace in Robert, whose family has now taken over crisis management to preserve their reputation, and he tells her that his lawyers have advised him to cease all contact with her. She’s on her own.
Well, not entirely. She has Donovan. And at the end of her rope, she finally has to tell him the truth about everything she did that night, which includes revealing to a legal team about her sexual relationship with Jordan, and having to veer off to pick Marcus, Mary’s son, up from a ropey-looking casino where he owed some bookies some money, accounting for the gap in her alibi. Marcus is on probation, so his name needs to be kept out of it, but until this information is verified we have no idea whether Eleanor’s even telling the truth or not (for what it’s worth, I think she is).
Eleanor is leaving something out, though. In a flashback, we see that on the night she left Mary’s party, the night Nancy died, Nancy approached her and asked her for help in breaking up with David. Apparently, the situation wasn’t a simple breakup, was “so much worse” than that. Eleanor said no and forced Nancy to get out of her car. She turned her away at her most desperate moment, clearly out of jealousy over her taking her marriage to Robert for granted. And she hasn’t mentioned this to anyone, not even her brother or new high-power legal team.
Imperfect Women Episode 3 doesn’t exactly end with Eleanor exonerated, then. But it does end with Mary turning up at Eleanor’s door and telling her that she knows who David is. But that’ll be a matter for the next installment to address.
