‘Lady in the Lake’ Episode 2 Recap: “It Has To Do With The Search For The Marvelous”

I haven’t read Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake, and I think I’ll be fairer to Alma Har’el’s Lady in the Lake that way. I prefer to go into adaptations cold, I really do; Evaluating a television show’s quality based on its fidelity to a story told in a completely different medium, a different art form, is a mug’s game to me. But I’ve done a little research, and discovered that in the novel, the surname of the murdered child Tessie and her mystery-shrouded family isn’t Durst, but Fine. 

Why make that change, I wonder? Perhaps creator/showrunner/writer/director Har’el thought “the Fine family” was a bit too cutesy, a bit too on the nose — putting too Fine a point on it, as it were. (Sorry.) But if that’s the case, why change the last name of Tessie, her grieving mother (a devastating Hallie Samuels), her hunk-gone-orthodox father Allan, her famous surrealist artist grandmother Louise (Rebecca Spence), and her conspicuously friendly grandfather Hal (Mark Feurstein) — who young Maddie discovers has painted a nude of her, floating in the lake — to Durst, of all things? As of the first season of The Jinx, that’s the last name of one of the most famous Jewish multiple murderers in American history. You might as well have called them the Lanskys or the Siegels or the Berkowtizes. 

And it’s not like Lady in the Lake is above being a little wink-wink with its nomenclature. In one of this episode’s strongest sequences, an emotionally exhausted and thoroughly stoned Maddie Schwartz has sex with police officer Ferdie Platt, a Black man. Even a glancing acquaintance with German or Yiddish can help you get this goofy pun. I’m agnostic on whether there’s much to be mined from such a direct nominative parallel.

I’m not agnostic on whether it’s hot to watch a baked Natalie Portman come on to, and I mean come on hard to, a younger man she barely knows, from across any number of racial, religious, class, and career divides. The formation of desire, from its first primordial stirrings to the moment when the chemistry between mind, heart and body bursts into sensual life, is one of the core features of cinema. Har’el captures that spark of desire, the moment when the idea of sex goes from “huh! interesting!” to “I am making this happen,” beautifully here.

On the complete opposite side of the ledger, so is the wonderful, horrible day experienced at the same time by Cleo Johnson. Cleo learns that her political idol, Myrtle Summer, was once on the take from her gangster boss, Shell Gordon. She learns that Summer won’t hire her because of her current job with Mr. Gordon — a job she wouldn’t have to keep if she worked for Summer. It’s a Catch-22. In response, a distraught and possibly day-drunk Cleo deliberately torpedoes a local TV spot about Summer’s candidacy, discussing in blunt and powerful terms how she can have either her dignity or the money to support her children, but not both. 

To make some of that extra money, Cleo takes up Shell’s repeated suggestion to bring her husband Slappy, from whom she’s currently separated, back to the club for a gig. Ignoring all of Cleo’s warnings, Slappy immediately launches into a foul-mouthed routine on Southern racism so brutal and ferocious it nearly shatters the glasses in the patrons hands. But those same patrons love every minute of this dripping-raw material, and thanks to the razor-sharp delivery of actor-comedian Byron Bowers, it’s easy to understand why.

But Cleo’s happiness for Slappy is far from the end of her story that evening. For one thing, it signals to Ferdie that she’s probably still off the market — leading directly to his uniform-on, hand-up-the-dress hook-up with Maddie at the end of the episode. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you want to make a hot sex scene, have one character visibly touch the other character’s junk. Instant heat, baby. Bending her over the side of her bed, contrasted with the kind of bland missionary sex she was having with an uncomfortably vocal Milton? Another nice touch.)

For another, it’s cut short by Reggie. This young macher in the Gordon organization is the reason Cleo’s sexy, gifted singer friend Dora Carter, his inamorata, is getting gigs in the boss man’s nightclub all the time. (Reggie refers to Shell as “Mr. Gordon” best guess is that maybe he’s secretly Shell’s son, like Addam and Alyn with the Sea Snake on House of the Dragon.)

But Reggie has been warned by Ferdie’s crooked partner Officer Davis (David Johnson III) that the cops’ earlier guns-blazing standoff with the fish-store guy — who is, indeed, crazier than a shithouse rat, and spends most of the episode wearing a gas mask for no reason — is only technically the end of the Tessie Durst investigation. The man’s abusive mother (Masha Mashkova) insists that “a Black guy with a black eye” is the real culprit. Best to lay low until that shiner clears up, Davis tells Reggie.

So Reggie, in an act of idiocy to rival anything you’ll see on TV this year, sends bartender, bookkeeper, department-store mannequin, and mother of two Cleo Johnson on a mission to pay someone to assassinate the politician she volunteers for. That’s right: The simple envelope drop Reggie tasks her with is to pay a hitman named Duke (Kenneth Nance Jr.) and his Lynchian assortment of hangers-on and ne’er-do-wells, like the drunken Russ (Michael Dillahunt Jr.) and the cowardly Sponge (Gavin Peppers), to murder Myrtle Summer.

This they do, or at least appear to do, swiftly and brutally. But they don’t count on Mr. Summer and his shotgun — nor on an escape attempt by Cleo, whom they force to come with them since they don’t know if they can trust this strange woman otherwise. The episode ends on a dramatic freeze-frame on Cleo, fleeing through the streets.

But how far can you really run from systems that pit survival against dignity, the way the one in which Cleo is ensnared does? When they attend Tessie’s funeral, held as quickly as possible after her death per Jewish custom, Maddie and her mother Tattie (Mindy Goldberg) encounter horrific anti-Semitic graffiti on some of the gravestones. Tattie remarks that she’s glad her mother, a Holocaust victim, isn’t alive to see it play out again in America. Tell me about it, Tattie. 

Meanwhile, for every Officer Platt in the Baltimore P.D., there’s a crooked Officer Davis, or a racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic Officer Bosko (Ronnie Gene Blevins), who harasses both Maddie and Ferdie by every means available to him. The savage racism Slappy jokes about — before he smooths things out with some good-natured dirty jokes about Harriet Tubman (you kind of had to be there) — is very real. The news media, represented by sleazeball Star reporter Bob Bauer (Pruitt Taylor Vince), is eager to create salacious stories about menacing queers. (Bosco and Bauer both theorize that Maddie and her teen sidekick Judith are lesbian child molesters.)

And the patriarchy has such a lock on things that Maddie can’t sell her own car without her dreary husband Milton’s permission, which of course he won’t give. She’s forced to commit insurance fraud by staging a break-in and hiding her wedding ring to get the money to cover her rent. (Ferdie figures all of this out inside 60 seconds of being called in on the case; his willingness to play ball with her about it is, essentially, foreplay, and it’s as sexy as anything else the two of them do in this episode.) 

In essence, what binds Maddie and Cleo, despite the condescension toward Maddie evident in Cleo’s narration — and who can blame her, considering how much worse her plight is than Schwartz’s? — is that they’d like to live in a world that wants people like them living in it. That’s a world worth dreaming of. That’s a world worth fighting to keep.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.