‘Lady in the Lake’ Episode 6 Recap: Dream a Little Dream

In Lady in the Lake, dream books are used by players of the underground numbers game to match imagery from their unconscious mind with, ostensibly, a lucky number to play. After this episode, an enterprising player would have enough imagery to place a bet on all the numbers. Hey, one of them’s got to be the winner!

When the episode begins, Maddie is in the hospital, floating in and out of consciousness and fever dreams as she recuperates from the stabbing she incurred at the hands of murder suspect Stephan Zawadzkie’s enraged mother. Getting stabbed, it turns out, was exactly what was needed to crack the case. In prison, Stephan admits to the attempted rape of Tessie Durst, but reveals he was caught by his mother, who killed the child herself in order to cover up the crime. This accounts for her violent temper and for her suicide after stabbing Maddie.

But all this is revealed by Bob Bauer, sleazy and sweaty as ever, deep into the episode. We begin with a flashback that’s one more lynchpin in the entire Maddie Morgenstern edifice. At a Halloween party years earlier, a relatively newlywed Maddie — dressed as aquatic Hollywood sensation Esther Williams, for highly symbolic reasons — hooks up with a repentant Allan Durst. Drunk off his ass, he apologizes for his, let’s say, less than consensual treatment of Maddie. (Water under the bridge, she assures him.)

But Allan also reveals that he knew about her secret affair with his father Hal before that incident, and tells her his father is not a good person. When he impulsively kisses her, he pulls away in disgust with himself, saying he’s the same as his rotten dad; she responds by pulling him back in and kissing him back. Nine months later, li’l Seth Schwartz is born. So that answers that question.

Another long-awaited shoe drops outside the hospital walls. Though newly minted Detective Ferdie Platt is looking in all the right places for the truth about Cleo’s death — he has zeroes in on Shell Gordon and his fish-loving apprentice Reggie, even as his colleagues frame Cleo’s husband Slappy for the crime — his own “crimes” come back to haunt him. The ghastly Officer Bosko seals him up in their captain’s office, then says he can either resign quietly, or they’ll throw Maddie in jail for cohabitating with a Black man. 

But that’s happening on the solid ground of reality. The majority of this episode is spent deep within Maddie Morgenstern’s mind. If I tried to catch every reference, note every symbol and allegory, within those dreams, we’d be here all summer. Suffice it to say it’s a kaleidoscope of racial anxiety — about Jewish people’s precarious position among other white people, about Jewish people in America’s unquestionably privileged position relative to their Black counterparts. 

There’s an elaborate dance number with Ferdie as Maddie’s partner. Cleo rises out of a sparkling fountain in an Esther Williams outfit identical to Maddie’s. Maddie has to wear a Holocaust victim’s coat. Cleo’s dying son shows up in the same morgue as Tessie, both of them sitting calmly on their slabs. Maddie gives birth to a nightmare infant made of newspaper. “Amazing Grace” and “Me and My Shadow” loom large, as does her mother, as does Cleo.

As does Reggie. Wearing a boxing robe with a Pharaoh emblazoned on it (symbolism everywhere for this nightmare-plagued Jewish woman!), he repeatedly limps away from Dream Maddie every time she gets close to Cleo or the truth. At the very end of her dream, when it’s just her and Cleo in the lake (which is also somehow a run-down segregated swimming pool), it’s Reggie who rises out of the water to brain her with an oar from the rowboat he used to reach the fountain that fateful night.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, comes the part where reviewing dozens and dozens of television shows for the past decade-plus comes in handy. During that entire time — during an entire lifetime of watching television, in fact — I have never once encountered a dream sequence that ends at the end of an episode, only for it to be revealed in the follow-up that this was a lie and the dream never ended at all. Never, not once. The only time I can remember a dream sequence even continuing from one episode to the next is the Kevin Finnerty episodes of The Sopranos, and no one popped up at the end of the first to tell Tony/Kevin that he wasn’t dreaming.

My point is this: When Cleo Johnson shows up dressed like a nurse at the end of the episode to reveal her former identity to Maddie, I think it’s real. I think that’s a real thing that’s happening. I think Cleo Johnson is still alive.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? For one thing, we know Reggie genuinely loved her as a friend, and loved her best friend Dora even more. We saw how upset he was after he was given the order to kill her; doesn’t it make sense that he’d defy it? Morover, we now know he’s been hiding her big win in the Christmas lotto from his boss and benefactor, Shell Gordon; why would he do that unless she was still out there with the money somewhere? 

For that matter, when was the last time anyone saw heroin-addict Dora? Why, it was that same Christmas Eve that Cleo disappeared, wasn’t it?

And the show made a point of how Cleo’s body was unrecognizable, ID’d only by her mother via her trademark blue coat. In Maddie’s own dream sequence, which at one point features dozens of women in identical blue coats, we see how easy it might be to mistake her for someone else who wore, or was made to wear, that telltale garment.

And that posthumous voice-over narration we’ve been getting from Cleo…well, is it posthumous at all?

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.