Summary
Imperfect Women is really firing on all cylinders in “Fabulations”, delivering award-worthy performances across the board and major twists in the tale.
Blimey, where do we even begin? I’m starting to feel genuinely sorry for the people who might have abandoned Imperfect Women after its admittedly mediocre premiere — if I wasn’t professionally obligated not to, I might have done the same — and haven’t seen it morph into one of the most engaging, surprising, and exquisitely performed thrillers on television. Look at Episode 7. There are at least two genuinely award-worthy performances by my count, and perhaps three or four if we’re being generous. It establishes Corey Stoll’s Howard as one of the most deplorable villains on television, and then suggests he might not even be the real villain after all. “Fabulations” is genuinely great TV, in a show that started so off-putting that a good chunk of the people who might have enjoyed it will no longer be watching.
I’m not sure what to do about that outside of raving from the rooftops like some sort of lunatic, and we’ve still got to wait and see if the finale sticks the landing, just in case the ending makes an idiot of me. But the signs are certainly positive. A couple of killer redefining twists undermine our most concrete theory about who did what, and there’s a pleasing sense of ambiguity floating around the whole thing that makes it difficult to trust anyone, even the people whose side we’re supposed to be on.
Case in point: Mary is narrating again, and her opening monologue mentions her talent for storytelling. It’s a metaphor, a way to segue into the idea that the greatest story she ever told was projecting the veneer of a happy marriage with Howard. It’s also the firmament of a later twist that plays on this idea of Mary’s “fabulations”, which is what Howard calls them. But I’d argue that there’s a third point, which is to make us mistrustful of Mary in general, to keep in the back of our minds that she’s a fantasist. I don’t think that her side of the story is all a carefully cultivated fabrication, but it might be, and that’s really all the show needs.
Anyway, Artemis, after being — we think — deliberately poisoned by Howard, is going to be fine. Mary, however, is not. The Department of Children and Family Services turns up at the hospital to tell her that she’s now required to leave her home and not have unsupervised contact with her minor children, since Howard is pushing the idea that Artemis getting her hands on Mary’s drugs was due to Mary’s negligence. Of course, we know, and Mary knows, that the drugs were on the highest shelf in the house, and that the kids couldn’t have gotten anywhere near them. But Mary’s fear of losing her children is so profound that it makes her act like a nutcase, which plays right into Howard’s hands.
Elisabeth Moss, by the way, is remarkable here and remarkable throughout the episode. I’m not going to mention it every time, but it’s worth pointing out now just so that it’s understood. Corey Stoll is also great, in a completely different way. I hate Howard with every fibre of my being, which must constitute a job well done. Honestly, he’s the worst. Truly dreadful.
Mary takes what she has learned to Detective Ganz, whose scepticism at this point is bordering on contrivance. She’s the weakest part of the narrative for me, since she’s mostly just a mouthpiece for how dysfunctional this so-called friendship was and at this point is blatantly ignoring really compelling evidence, like the page from Howard’s book strongly implying his affair with Nancy, which is at the very least worth a look in the context of a murder investigation, and Nancy’s claddagh ring being in Howard’s possession. There’s some justification for her not taking the ring seriously, though, since Howard had earlier visited the station and deposited a box of Nancy’s belongings from around the house. It turns out Mary regularly stole things from Nancy, small cosmetic products that she wouldn’t notice were gone. Howard, realising that Mary wasn’t going to tell him where the claddagh ring was, found a way to dull its relevance.
This solidifies a trend in Imperfect Women Episode 7 of Howard being several steps ahead of Mary. He has an answer for everything. Since circumstantial evidence won’t be enough to convince Ganz, Eleanor introduces Mary to a PI who works for her attorneys, in hopes of turning up something more concrete. He shows Mary the crime scene photographs of Nancy with the back of her head smashed in, but that isn’t enough. Mary wants to visit the crime scene in person, where the PI outlines his theory of what happened. Nancy’s fatal skull fracture seems to have been sustained by being pushed into a wall by a much bigger man. Her body was dragged about thirty feet, first with two hands, and then, after a while, with just one. The PI’s theory is that the killer switched his grip because he was nursing an injury, perhaps a bad back — I’ll have to keep this in mind if I end up killing anyone — or a bum left shoulder.
Ana Ortiz, Corey Stoll and Elisabeth Moss in Imperfect Women | Image via Apple TV
Who has a left shoulder injury? Well, Howard does, so Mary sneaks into the house to steal his medical records to prove it. Howard catches her, though, and preys on her love for their children by implying that if he’s arrested, the kids will go into foster care. Mary seems to be resisting the gaslighting, especially since she has the smoking gun of Jenny’s scars from Howard’s abuse, which visibly throws him off his game, but he’s able to rally with another big reveal. Those items that Mary would steal from Nancy were used as part of an elaborate cosplay routine, where Mary and Howard — largely at Mary’s behest, it seems — would pretend to be the Hennesseys to get their sexual kicks. Good luck telling the police that little detail.
Mary is defeated. She resigns herself to the idea that Howard’s too smart to take on, and that, if he is, she’s going to lose the kids. Eleanor tries to talk her around, but even though they go to bed together that night — no, not like that — when Eleanor wakes up, Mary is gone. She has returned to Howard, promising that she “won’t say a word” and that she’s “going to be good”. Yuck! Either way, Howard lets her in the house that I’m pretty sure she’s not legally allowed to be in at the moment, and Mary gratefully crawls into bed with the kids.
Thankfully, Eleanor isn’t having this. She rushes to Mary’s house and makes a scene when Howard won’t let her in, and then, at a loss, turns to Robert, who’s extremely drunk and being berated by his father. Eleanor tells Robert that Howard killed Nancy, and that he was the man she was having an affair with, and Robert finally stands up for himself and insists that his dad pulls some strings with the chief of police. If he doesn’t, Robert will go public with all of the family’s dirty secrets and tarnish the Hennessey name beyond repair. Joel Kinnaman is great here, showing up for a single scene and almost walking away with the entire episode.
Robert’s dad is true to his word. Ganz turns up at Mary and Howard’s house while they’re eating breakfast with a warrant to bring Howard in for questioning. Naturally, he assumes Mary is at fault, so he makes sure that the DCFS removes the kids from her supervision. The best-case scenario, custody-wise, is that Howard is innocent. Even on the back foot, he’s still a scumbag on a grandmaster level.
But does that make him a murderer? The final scene of Imperfect Women Episode 7 suggests not. In a breaking news bulletin following an anonymous tip, the prime suspect in Nancy’s murder is revealed to be her step-dad, Scott Reed, who was caught on CCTV footage on the night of the murder. Now what?
