It’s all coming apart now, or is it coming together? Episode six is the penultimate in Disclaimer’s brief season, and it feels that way. Though Nancy and Jonathan loom large, this is a series about living people — Catherine and her bruised son Nicholas, Robert and his bestie, Stephen Brigstocke. Nick’s overdose has finally (kinda) created a reason for these four people to be in one place, antagonizing each other. Apple released several episodes of Disclaimer in pairs, and I wish they had done the same here. Because episode six is pure set-up. Stephen admits that Nancy changed the facts of what happened in Italy for The Perfect Stranger, but for what reason? Catherine’s finally telling her story, but to what end? The Drano is in the syringe, but will it ever be injected? Potential without payoff.
The call Catherine receives from her son in the middle of the night spooks her. Like Robert, she can’t believe he would call her. Things must be really bad. Catherine uses her old key to enter her old house, and when Robert proves useless — he laughably assumes that Catherine is using this as a pretext to re-engage — she searches her son’s room for some hint to where he might be. She knows that Nick knows. If it wasn’t Robert who told him, it was that madman Stephen. Poor Sacha Baron Cohen, who is doing his best with what little he’s given. While Catherine scours the bedroom, Robert resumes the gendered moralizing he’s been rehearsing since he saw her last. The gist is this: Cathy’s a shit wife and a shit mother. And while I’ll admit that it’s shocking that she fell asleep on the beach next to her kid that can’t swim, it’s pretty damning that Robert never stops to ask himself how exhausted Catherine would have to be to behave so carelessly. Maybe Nick slept badly the night before. Maybe Catherine really needed her husband’s help.
Catherine’s just found a letter confirming Nicholas lost his job when her phone starts ringing (though her ringtone sounds more like an alarm tone to me). The Ravenscrofts rush to the emergency room but there’s no such thing as fast enough. It can’t be undone. Their baby boy — their only son — has had a stroke. He’s stable but asleep. “You can sit with him first if you like,” Robert tells Catherine, sounding like a faux-magnanimous prick. A first-class asshole. Your son just OD’d and you can’t manage a few minutes in the same room with the woman who cheated on you one time, 20 years ago, and has stood by you for every remaining second of your marriage? There are more important things. Pull up a chair and hold Catherine’s hand; sit vigil over your son in this small, sacred way. The world will still be here for you to hate tomorrow.
Alas, even with his son washed up in hospital, even while processing the revelation that his son is addicted to drugs, Robert’s most salient emotion is his jealousy. He’s been emasculated by a teenage boy, and the way he is dealing with that right now is to … phone the boy’s father? Catherine may be an adulterer and a liar, but this dude dead-dropped you lewd photos of your own wife! Stephen Brigstocke is not an above-board guy! Even Stephen can’t believe his good fortune at being invited to the hospital — a chance to “feast” on his enemies at their most vulnerable.
Most of episode six takes place at the hospital. Nicholas in bed, burdened by the tubes that are sustaining him. Robert and Catherine take turns trading places between the ICU, the waiting room, and the hospital entrance, where people go to take phone calls and smoke and scream. It’s in the waiting room that Catherine gets the dopey call from Sarah, an HR rep at Documentary HQ. Simon isn’t lodging a formal complaint against her, but the company will, of course, be looking into Stephen Brigstocke’s “very serious” allegations. Yeah, okay, Sarah. A man accused your star producer of being an accessory to murder, so the company’s options are to either ignore it entirely or call the police. But, sure, put the incident in Catherine’s “file,” whatever that is. (These scenes feel like they’re written by a person who learned corporate prattle from watching The Office, and I love that for Alfonso.)
Catherine is outside fielding a consolation text from the traitor Jisoo, which distracts her from noticing Stephen Brigstocke entering. I must confess that I underestimated Stephen, even as he puttered about the house, prepping for his big revenge finale. He bathes himself in his son’s Apex body spray, the one he found in Jonathan’s room in episode one, the one that surely smells as awful as it sounds. He practices his stammer in the mirror, hoping he’ll sound feeble and unthreatening to the hospital staff. Even as Stephen filled a comically large syringe with drain unblocker, it felt more like a prop than a weapon to me. Could this mild man, who lived a quiet life, really have murder in mind?
It wasn’t until he was pacing toward defenseless and sedated Nicholas that I finally came to grips with the fact that Stephen is indeed batshit enough to kill an innocent man-boy. He’s so gleefully proud of the destruction he’s already caused. Not just Catherine’s distress, but Nicholas’s condition. “I took him there without laying a finger on him,” Stephen narrates, dizzy at his own power. He easily talks his way past the ICU receptionist, who really needs to start checking IDs.
Luckily, Catherine returns to the ward in time, screaming that Stephen shouldn’t be anywhere near her son; she strikes the old man and pushes him to the floor. A hysterical Catherine is escorted from the unit, but with her enemy trailing right behind her, thank God. For his troubles, Stephen gets a few stitches and sleeping pills, but there’s zero sense that he’s come to his actual senses. Getting this close to killing Nicholas has only made him more giddy. Robert, who can’t spare five minutes for his wife, rushes to smooth things over with Stephen, inviting him to come again on some other occasion. There’s been zero discussion of telling Catherine’s mother or any of the Ravenscrofts whose charities Robert manages what’s been going on with Nicholas, but please, yes, invite and re-invite this Perfect Stranger to your son’s hospital bed.
Stephen Brigstocke is likely dreaming of his next attempt on Nicholas’s life when a crashing noise wakes him in the middle of the night. It can only be one person. He grabs a bat before he finds Catherine with a knife in her hand. Would he use it? Would she? I think maybe. Disclaimer is a series about pushing people to new places, new emotional states that change who they are and what they’re capable of. Stephen was an English teacher; now he’s catfishing, circulating revenge porn, contemplating murder. Catherine was a filmmaker and a mother; now she’s standing in a dangerous man’s back garden — the same place he was standing when the police knocked on his door 20 years ago with the worst news a parent could ever receive. Everything that has happened to these people lately (and will happen soon) would have been at some earlier point in their lives completely “unimaginable” to them.
So this is who Catherine has been talking to since the opening scene of episode six. We’re transported back to Italy again, but this time Catherine’s given the privilege of a voiceover. It is the first time we’ll hear the story of what happened from someone who was actually there. She starts at her own beginning. She didn’t want Robert to leave, and she didn’t want to be there on her own. She didn’t think she encouraged the teenage stranger’s attention when she noticed it, though it did give her a “little boost.”
Speaking to Stephen back inside his house, Catherine does credit Nancy for how faithfully she recreated the settings: her gilded hotel, the fine sand at Forte dei Marmi, the slant of the Italian light. But very quickly familiar moments reveal themselves to be out of place. For example: The scandalous photos taken on the beach of Catherine’s nipple and her crotch. In Catherine’s version, Jonathan must have been perving on her before they ever spoke, snapping her photo as she carelessly brushed off the sand her little boy dumped over her. In Nancy’s version, after a torrid night of love-making, young Catherine publicly exposed herself to Jonathan’s camera lens on purpose. Is it possible that Nancy changed the order of the photos? Writing them in the order that made sense to her narrative rather than the order that Jonathan really took them?
Great writers embellish and subtract, Stephen tells us. However, when he calls Nancy a great writer to Catherine, she smacks him hard. “Now I can start,” she tells Stephen as they sit across his kitchen table. They drink tea Stephen’s made for them, though he’s laced hers with sleeping pills. “It’s time for my voice to be heard,” she declares, even as we know it will be silenced. On this show, everything bad that can happen does happen. Catherine will drink every drop of that tea, I’m sure of it.
But before she drifts off, she tells Stephen about that day in Italy. Not just what happened but how it felt to her. By the time she took Nicky off the beach and to bed that night, she was happy. She was relaxed. Crucially, she was by herself. She felt like a good mother. She’d still never spoken to Jonathan. Not once. After putting her son to bed, Catherine went quickly to the bar to fetch herself a glass of wine. Jonathan leered at her there, too, but that was that. She liked being looked at. It felt novel to her. But that was that.
Earlier in the episode, Stephen ponders the liberties Nancy took when writing The Perfect Stranger. For example, Sasha didn’t leave Jonathan in Venice because there was a death in her family. She left because the kids got into a fight. And whatever happened between them, it must have been bad. Bad enough for Sasha to leave and bad enough for Sasha’s mother to call Nancy. Though we can’t hear what she says, the accusation is bad enough that Nancy slams the phone down and smashes it hard enough to break it.
But before the phone started ringing that day, Nancy was lamenting that the sky had been cloudy on the day of the solar eclipse — the last that would pass over England in her lifetime. Before Jonathan died, Nancy already was a sad sack. Why don’t you go to Madagascar to see one, her husband innocently suggests. But Nancy doesn’t want to see an eclipse in Madagascar; she wants to complain about not seeing one in London. If the rattling freezer is bothering you so much, Nancy, why don’t you get up and fix it yourself?
Fix it yourself. Is that what Nancy finally did in The Perfect Stranger? Did she take the story of her lost son’s holiday and fix it? Embellish elements; subtract others. Move the pictures. Make the order of the story work out. Kill off Sasha’s aunt and see the eclipse from her own backyard. When Nancy and Stephen return home from identifying Jonathan’s body, the first person she calls with the terrible news is Sasha. But Sasha’s mother won’t let her daughter come to the phone, it seems. Even after Nancy tells her that Jonathan is dead.
The Brigstockes never hear from Sasha again. No flowers. She skips the funeral, I suppose. Nancy embellished and subtracted, like a great writer does. Maybe the photos fell from their envelope and she collected them out of order. An accident. Maybe she was simply fixing it as best she could. Or maybe she was writing a story that could help her forget the questions that still haunt Stephen: What did Sasha tell her mother that compelled her to call Nancy? What did her mother say to make Nancy so upset? What in the world did Jonathan do to that girl?