What is the price of freedom for a woman like Cleo? For a woman like Maddie? And what does that freedom look like? These questions are at the heart of the third episode of Apple TV+’s ambitious literary adaptation, The Lady in the Lake. Ostensibly, we’re following Maddie Schwartz, née Morgenstern, as she slowly uncovers what happened to Cleo née Eunetta Johnson — namely, how she ended up dead and left at the fountain by the lake. But as previous episodes have made clear, writer-director Alma Har’el, much like novelist Laura Lippman, is interested in the larger questions that the titular figure drums up in late-’60s Baltimore.
These are two women whose lives are brought together by a dead body. Two, actually, since it’s Maddie’s involvement in the Tessie Durst murder that eventually leads her to pursue Cleo’s own. But their lives keep running in slightly parallel, slightly askew ways, try as they might to reinvent themselves against the strictures of the many men who’d rather they stay in their place.
We begin with another dream sequence. A young Black girl is playing hopscotch in an abandoned alley surrounded by billowing white sheets. She sees a young lamb (remember when Maddie saw and caressed one just last week in the living room of the home she left behind?). This is young Eunetta (she’s not Cleo yet), who clearly escapes into a dreamy world as a way to fend off the reality where her mother yells at her father for his irresponsible gambling. It explains why she’s so intent on keeping her young boy away from the numbers game … but also ironic, given what we’ll see her being driven to do by the end of the episode.
In the present, Cleo is now rightfully paranoid that her stint as a runaway driver of a would-be assassination attempt against Myrtle Summer will bring her more trouble than she’d care to deal with. And for what? Gordon Shell’s support? Unlikely, given that she soon realizes there’s no way her boss at the Pharaoh is aware that his second-in-command, Reggie, let Cleo drop money and serve as an unwitting accomplice in the hit gone wrong. She keeps finding herself running out of options. No matter what she does.
Meanwhile, Maddie embraces her newfound freedom with newly pierced ears and a fanciful ambition to become a newspaper reporter. “Your writing dreams ruined your life,” Cleo’s voice-over tells Maddie. “Now you wanted those same dreams to rewrite it. But why did you need to drag my name into it?”
It speaks to her privilege and inflated sense of self that she merely waltzes into the Baltimore Star offices and all but demands Bob Bauer (Pruitt Taylor Vince), whom she’d talked to a few weeks back, help her land a byline. She’s a foolish woman, yes, but also a zealous one. And so she decides to take matters into her own hands when Bauer handily dismisses her: She has no more leads; there is no more story; she should just let it go.
Nevertheless, she sits down and writes to Stephan Zawadzkie at the psychiatric hospital he’s being held at: “I was the first to see her dead,” she writes, giving the episode its title. “You were the last to see her alive.” She attaches a photo of herself. Maddie has never found a man to deny her (Bauer notwithstanding), so it’s obvious she’s leaning in hard on what’s worked for her in the past. In that, she’s not that dissimilar from Cleo, who decides to cope with the trauma of the night before (and the paranoia she now lives with while at work and at home) by getting all done up and dancing up a storm at the Pharaoh club where she all but makes a fool of herself. Thankfully, Slappy is there to bring her safely home, even if he’s unable to get her to open up about what it is that’s troubling her.
There’s too much to share. Where would she begin? She’s having reverends drop by trying to squeeze her for money as they preach futile hope to her boy, who’s ill with sickle cell anemia. She almost helped her political icon get killed. She can’t even keep her other son from gambling like her father did. In one of the more poetic moments of the episode, we hear her summing up her current situation: “I looked to the politician for deliverance. I looked to the pimp for protection. I looked to the preacher for salvation. But in the end, I was on my own. I was sinking, Maddie.”
Lippman’s novel alternated between not only Maddie’s point of view and Cleo’s own (the latter always addressing Maddie as if from the grave) but interspersed their respective voices with sections narrated from the points of view of others: not just Bob Bauer and Cleo’s son, say, but people Maddie encountered as she went about her life. With a tighter focus on these two women here, Har’el makes more of their similarities and differences — some of which are cultural and others more personal.
Take their approach to motherhood: While Cleo seems almost blinded by her devotion to her sons, Maddie is more detached from her teenage son, Seth. When she arrives late to meet him at his school’s college fair, she’s pragmatic and aloof, almost to a fault. But he’s also a bit of a pain, finding every chance to needle his mother for leaving the family. As she tries to rebuild a rapport with him by bringing him back to her shabby place downtown, the irritable back-and-forth between the two erupts into a shouting match that’s punctuated by a scene-stopping revelation: Milton is not Seth’s father! Only that’s not the end of it: Seth already knew! He’d read Maddie’s diaries before his bar mitzvah and has basically been sitting on that nugget of information without knowing what to make of it other than acknowledging that Milton is his father, no matter what. No wonder he’s resentful of Maddie and why her leaving hurt him all the more. It’s all enough to rankle Maddie, though it’s unclear how she’ll proceed now.
Meanwhile, at the Pharoh, Cleo’s standing with Gordon continues to bring her grief. We knew her easy-to-spot and easier-still-to-describe baby-blue coat she was wearing would come to haunt her: When Ferdie starts working the streets trying to get intel on Myrtle’s assassination attempt, that’s the detail that eventually leads him to Cleo. Smart woman that she is, Cleo knows that it’s best to cooperate if only to buy herself time — the only thing Ferdie can offer her. And so, while she gives the cop the details of the car she drove, she plans to make enough money to disappear once and for all.
Yes, it involves gambling. And, yes, it involves Reggie. And, yes, it involves a rigged game. This is all to say: It’s a risky proposition, but one she hopes Reggie will go along with, seeing as it’s in his best interest to keep her from cooperating even more with Ferdie. But will she be able to do it before it all comes crashing down around her?
Just as risky is Maddie’s line of communication with Stephan, who agrees to see her in person. Will that impending meeting pay off, especially now that Maddie’s been learning more about the other gruesome details of Tessie’s murder? From the coroner, which she visits with Bauer, who begrudgingly admits “Miss Morgenstern” may have a knack for being a reporter after all, she learns Tessie had scratched someone before she died (though Stephan had no scratches on him to speak of) and had likely been sexually abused (though her hymen remained intact). Will it be too much for her to stomach, or might she finally get to be the dogged reporter she one day imagined she could be?
Clues & Things
• I want to give a shout-out to Claudia Humburg (makeup-department head) and Jose Zamora (hair-department head), who really are doing wonders and telling stories with Cleo and Maddie’s many looks. In particular, Cleo’s eye-popping eye shadow and eyelashes at the store make those close-ups of Moses Ingram’s face all the more impactful. Maddie’s constantly tousled and unruly hair helps further tell the story of a woman reinventing herself and maybe letting her petty-bourgeois sense of style go by the wayside.
• Speaking of below-the-line folks who deserve some recognition, Marcus Norris (Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul, and Summer of Violence) is doing some lovely work with the jazzy score, which helps ground those dreamlike sequences and maintains a nice tether between Cleo and Maddie’s worlds.
• “Are you chewing gum?!” We often talk about how teenage girls can be brutal in their reads, but that infantilizing question sums up so much about how little Seth thinks of his mom.
• Some props for Ingram’s performance are due. We often point to big moments when praising great performances. But I’ve always insisted that you can watch great characterization by watching how an actor plays the smallest of moments. That’s what I felt when watching how Cleo grab her martini drink and, in one fell swoop, lets the olives drop before she downs it. It’s such a throwaway gesture, and yet it tells you so much about this woman (she’s done this before; she’s uncaring about being sloppy at the bar; olives won’t slow her down …).
• The same goes for Portman, whose breathy “Have I done something wrong, officer?” while greeting Ferdie back into her apartment for a quick hookup has the whiff of a woman who’s been eager for such sensual role-playing for years, all the while one clearly practiced in the art of wilful seduction.
• More and more explicit moments wanting us to point our fingers at Reggie, right now the man who most has to gain from disappearing Cleo: “If I come up dead,” she tells Dora, “I want you to know who it was.” But is that too simple a motive?
