Summary
Imperfect Women delivers its strongest storytelling yet in “Nancy”, which refreshingly shifts focus to its title character and her past.
Imperfect Women has very much been about Nancy since the beginning, which has made it a little awkward that she was killed off in the first episode. Episode 4 is the first instalment to really give her some necessary space, and it ends up paying off, since I thought “Nancy” was the most engaging of the three thus far, at least in part because it keeps Eleanor and Robert’s presences to an absolute minimum.
Obviously, there’s a bit of delayed gratification going on here, since the third episode ended with Mary announcing she has figured out who David is, and yet this is a flashback set entirely in the past, and doesn’t pick up that thread. But context is important! There’s also a good chance that the enigmatic David is in this episode without anyone really realising, and there are a couple of compelling candidates in that regard. More on this shortly.
The setting for “Nancy” is an incredibly extravagant New Year’s party that Nancy is throwing on Robert’s dime, which we’re to understand is a regular thing for her. But it’s less a show of opulence – which, to be fair, is how a lot of the attendees interpret it – and more an internal reset for Nancy, a way for her to pretend that perhaps this year she’ll fit into the lifestyle that her marriage to Robert has afforded her. This arc is central to the episode; Nancy has imposter syndrome stemming from her childhood with an abusive stepfather and an indifferent mother, and she feels intensely trapped by it.
Nancy’s own foreboding narration fills in some of the blanks here. It’s a relatively clunky device, but it’s one that the show has adopted, so we’re going to have to deal with it. Through it, we get a sense of how her once-idyllic marriage to Robert has become stale over the years; how the grand and ridiculous parties now carry with them the reality of a financial pressure that didn’t exist before, with Robert’s family always looking at her askance for blowing cash (though not, crucially, blowing her husband, despite her best efforts. Robert’s under a lot of stress).
There’s a better-than-even chance that Imperfect Women Episode 4 identifies the real David. There are two candidates, though the latter is implied to be the real one, especially since it’d be a much juicier development. But we’ll go over the initial David introduction first, since that’s how it happens chronologically, and he’s also tied thematically to Nancy’s childhood, or at least adolescence, which we see briefly in flashbacks-within-flashbacks.
David is the young, handsome bartender working the party. He immediately establishes a bit of a flirty rapport with Nancy, and later reveals that they’re from the same hometown. When he asks Nancy if she ever returns, though, she replies in the negative. David assumes that it’s because she thinks she’s above it now, but it’s really the opposite; Nancy worries that returning there would remind her of how much she hasn’t changed, despite all appearances to the contrary.
Plus, she seems to have several good reasons for not wanting to revisit the past. Her stepfather – played by Wilson Bethel, continuing his ongoing villain arc, since he’s also playing a bad guy in Season 2 of Daredevil: Born Again – abused her for money, and Nancy’s mother literally tried to kill her, almost succeeding in a car crash, explaining Nancy’s physical and emotional scars. One of Nancy’s secondary internal paranoias is not only being unable to evolve past her background, but actively becoming her mother, an idea most directly expressed in Nancy’s fraying relationship with Cora.
I’m not sure how well this bit necessarily takes, since Cora deserves the slap she gets in this episode. Her attitude to Nancy is a disgrace, and Nancy is right that she and her rich friends cosplaying poor people for fun is in pretty bad taste – especially when Nancy used to be the kind of poor person she’s now parodying. Cora points an accusatory finger at Nancy’s hypocritical lifestyle, and Nancy lashes out at her. Robert is framed as Nancy’s protector in this episode, so to speak, shielding her from the family’s financial issues and from Cora’s wrath when Nancy tries to make amends, but you’re not pulling the wool over my eyes. These are acts of control, obscuring acts of secrecy, which was made clear earlier when Nancy found evidence that he was in the process of legally separating their assets. It’s presented in the context of his filing for divorce, but something tells me it’s probably a bit of a red herring.
Anyway, let’s cap things off by talking about the second potential David – Mary’s husband, Howard. Initially, he isn’t a suspect, since his name is obviously Howard, but Nancy gets him a job through Phil, who famously gets people’s names wrong. He called Howard David, in much the same way he often calls Nancy Louise, so as a bit of banter, those are the names they call each other by in these scenes. There’s a very good chance that Nancy was having an affair with her best friend’s husband, just like Eleanor is now sleeping with her dead best friend’s husband. Just how dysfunctional is this social circle?
