‘Lady in the Lake’ Series Finale Recap: The Great Divide

Why can’t Maddie Morgenstern be forgiven? It was through her that Tessie Durst’s body was recovered, that her attempted rapist Stephan Zawadzkie was captured, and that her murderer Kasha Zawadzkie is dead at her own hands. Maddie’s also the reason Shell Gordon, the most powerful mobster in Black Baltimore, is behind bars instead of perpetuating his genteel reign of terror. It’s way too much to give her all the credit for any of these things — Cleo risking her life one more time by dressing in male drag to break into Shell’s records room has a lot to do with it, for example — but she deserves a bunch, that’s for sure. 

But her son Seth can’t forgive her, telling her she doesn’t belong in the Black neighborhood to which she moved. Ferdie Platt can’t forgive her, not for the loss of his job but for refusing to quit her own to settle down with him in a future post–Loving v. Virginia world and become a housewife again. Her offer to continue their illegal rendezvouses is callous; she just turned down what amounted to a marriage proposal, and now she’s inviting him to keep risking their necks with a clandestine love affair. But it’s her calling that’s calling to her here, not comfort, or at least not primarily. She doesn’t want to be anyone’s missus anymore.

And Cleo Johnson, who winds up living the life of a Paris nightclub singer under the name of the best friend, whose corpse she and Reggie swapped out for her own, with her husband and children by her side: What is it she can’t forgive Maddie for? It’s not Maddie’s ambition — she says so in so many words — nor her dogged determination to report Cleo’s supposed story even when she was better off forgotten. Ultimately, it’s The Way Of The World that separates the two of them. When Maddie suggests that “under different circumstances, we could have been friends,” an exhausted Cleo sighs, “What possible circumstances could those be?”

I can’t really explain to you the right-wing critique of liberalism; for that you can simply turn to the actions of the Nazis and racist cops in Lady in the Lake, I guess. What I can do is explain the left-wing critique of liberalism, which is that rather than actually redress and alleviate suffering, liberals simply bear witness to it. They are right to decry racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, poverty, and so on — liberals are not conservatives — but they offer little by way of concrete action to attack these ills on a systemic level. The emphasis is on acknowledging one’s complicity in these systems where applicable, and voting Blue every Election Day.

So when Lady in the Lake appears to extend more grace to actual murderer Reggie Robinson than it does to Maddie, I don’t question its approach to Reggie. Reggie is, in fact, a splendid character, complex and compelling, additional layers appearing almost every time actor Josiah Cross shows up on screen. These reviews have rightfully focused on lead actors Moses Ingram and Natalie Portman, but Cross — and Byron Bowers, whose Slappy Johnson is a similarly fascinating latticework of competing demons and drives — prove the men can bring it on this show, too.

What I question is why Reggie, an honest to god murderer (as Cleo puts it, he falsely confesses to her murder in order to “atone for the things he did do”) is extended more grace by characters and filmmakers alike than Maddie Morgenstern. No one — not even Shell! — tells Reggie to go fuck himself the way Seth and Ferdie and Cleo basically do to Maddie. 

Similarly, I’m glad Cleo gets to have it all: a life, an awesome family, a glamorous and creatively fulfilling career, a great city of the world to live in, a way to both cheat death and honor her late best friend. It’s strange, then, that Maddie, as best we can tell, winds up alone with her book about the case — a book she and we both know must be full of bullshit.

As with the kindness the show demonstrates towards Reggie, I don’t begrudge Cleo her relatively happy fate. For god’s sake, if anyone on this show deserves a break today, it’s Cleo freaking Johnson. This woman hasn’t caught a break since she was a teenager: In a flashback, we learn that young Cleo too upset with the deal she’d just made to work for Shell, the man who ruined her father, to go on stage at his nightclub and sing her expected duet with Dora. She’s overdue for a break! (As are we in the audience, for the chance of hearing Moses Ingram sing.)

Lady in the Lake closes in part with a news-footage montage of the chaos that erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when Black people took to the streets and white authorities brutally cracked down in the classic recipe for “race riots.” It ends on this image —not on the earlier image of a Nazi rally violently busted to pieces by Black people, the only citizens of Baltimore willing to stand against the fascist threat. 

“If only these people were as strategic as they are brave,” says a rueful and yet somehow still racist Milton Schwartz as he drives Maddie home from the hospital. “They just haven’t figured it out.” Someone hasn’t, anyway! But it’s strange: In extending grace to basically everyone but Maddie, whom Black and Jewish characters alike condemn for her naïveté and whose attempt to bridge the divide between them is riddled with lies both personal and professional, Lady in the Lake renders that divide as insurmountable as Milton thinks it is.

Not that Lady in the Lake, like Milton, thinks Black people’s problems are at least in large part of their own making. By contrast, it goes to great lengths again and again and again to correctly show how white racism — both of the active, violent kind and the subtle, privileged kind — is the killer app that has ruined so many Black people’s lives. Not for nothing, it’s also made clear that Milton is a raging asshole.

But who is responsible in the end for actually uttering the words that break off solidarity between a white woman and the Black people she’s come to be closest to? Maddie is a jerk, but Ferdie’s the one who breaks things off permanently. Maddie is oblivious, but Cleo’s the one to say they could never have been friends. This feels like liberal guilt, put in the mouths of other people to be directed at a liberal — a kind of televisual self-flagellation. Suffering is acknowledged, but attempts to redress it are rendered as clumsy and doomed to fail. Isn’t that right, Maddie Morgenstern?

One need look no further than outside their window or on the news to see how America’s monstrous racism continues to plague many of its people — and again, there’s a long tradition of criticism of liberal inaction by the left on this issue. It’s not being addressed nearly as swiftly and seriously as it needs to be.

But the nice thing about racism is that it has no basis in fact. It’s entirely made-up nonsense. It’s bullshit, it’s bupkis, it’s a fabrication, it’s a myth. This is why all the groups rattled off by that awful Officer Bosko in the previous episode — the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, presumably Polish people like himself — have been able to “overcome” racism and “become” white. Race is sociopolitical Calvinball: The people in charge get to decide who counts, and it has nothing to do with any qualities that are innate to anyone. They make up the rules as they go along!

In other words, people are treated differently, and their different experiences make them different in many ways, but people are the same. The family you see on the news, crying for their slain child in a pile of rubble half a world away, feel the same grief and pain as the family you see on the news, crying for their slain child at a school shooting in an American suburb, who feel the same grief and pain as the family you see on the news, crying for their murdered daughter/sister/mother killed by cops for committing no crime at all. Lionel, Cleo’s son with sickle cell anemia, and Anne Frank, seen in a photo hanging from the wall near Maddie’s desk, are united by far, far more than what separates them. But you don’t have to take my word for it: Ask the Nazis in this very episode.

I’m not asking every TV miniseries with a mind for social justice to suddenly investigate and tear down every axis of oppression that exists. Besides being impossible, that would be a shitty show, and Lady in the Lake is emphatically not that. Portman, Ingram, Cross, Y’lan Noel, Wood Harris, Jennifer Mogbock: The characters played by any one of these talented actors has the charisma and complexity to hold down a show of their own, and creator/showrunner/director Alma Har’el makes them all look like stars. This makes their constant peril, explored through some genuinely gripping mystery storytelling, all the more tense: You don’t want to see those stars snuffed out. It’s right to remember that this is a show, not a thinkpiece.

I’m also not asking every TV miniseries to provide optimism, or a concrete action plan for solving the problems it depicts. I’m not a child, and I don’t need false uplift. Certainly the nearly 60 years that have elapsed since the events of the story prove that progress moves in fits and starts, if and when it moves at all, and enormous effort by us is required to do the moving.

But to have made a whole show about the racism that divided Maddie and Cleo, just to have all the relevant characters — including Maddie, who moves back to a white neighborhood just as Seth wanted her to — reinforce it in the end? To bear witness to all that Black and Jewish suffering, only to close with the message, consciously delivered or otherwise, that the divide causing much of that suffering is intractable? Lady in the Lake told its story with great skill, but to hold hope for the future, I can’t believe that story to be true.

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.