‘Disclaimer’ Episode 3 Recap: Sex and Death

What’s the responsible way to write about a TV show featuring a sex scene that matches your own sexual fetishes closely enough that you practically could have written it yourself? Dislcaimer Episode 3 isn’t my first encounter with this dilemma — I cover Industry —  but it is one of the trickiest. I suspect that there’s more to young Catherine Ravenscroft’s prolonged seduction and sexual encounter with Jonathan Rigstocke than meets the eye. (Yeah, the eye, that’s the ticket.) The show’s counting on making you too horny to notice.

In that regard it almost succeeds. Over drinks following an evening with her son Nick, Catherine coaxes a masturbatory fantasy about Kylie Minogue out of her infatuated teenage companion. Wearing less a dress than a suggestion of one, tracing her fingertips across wine glasses and the skin of her chest, leaning on all the words you’re not supposed to say in polite company, she nearly has Jonathan coming in his pants before  they leave the table. 

Instead, all confidence, she offers an invitation up to her room that he dutifully accepts, like…well, like a good boy. In the room, the older woman humblebrags about her post-maternity body. (It’s okay I guess.) She walks the younger man through eating her out, describing what he should do to her in explicit detail; no body parts are mentioned by name, but the road map she gives him is unmistakable. The scene is full of incredibly hot little details — her command that he kneel and unlace her bikini bottom himself, her declaration while going down on him that he tastes like the salt water of the sea he’d been swimming in, her fingering him the way she’d had him finger her, him climaxing almost instantly but ready to go a second time without even pulling out of her. 

The icing on the cake, for Jonathan, is that she’s not like this with just anybody. Catherine tells him that what they’ve just done is essentially cross some items off her sexual bucket list, stuff she’d wanted to try but never did. That makes Jonathan, who’s so besotted with her he talks as though he has a severe speech impediment, special. A teenager who’s come down with that kind of fuck fever is not going to behave rationally.

Put a pin in the sex stuff for now, because we’ll be coming back to it. In the meantime, Jonathan’s behavior is one of the many things about his death that doesn’t sit right with his mother Nancy, foremost among them being his death itself. There’s nothing new or revelatory in the show’s portrayal of Nancy and Stephen getting the news, traveling to Italy, identifying the body, collecting his belongings, and visiting the beach where he died — it’s rather rote, to be honest. But it’s not designed to break new ground, it’s designed to let Lesley Manville and Kevin Kline make you fucking sad, man. At that, it succeeds.

Writer-director Alfonso Cuarón’s great trick in this episode is the emotional whiplash produced by bouncing back and forth between these two very visceral, very different storylines. One moment you’re listening to an unfaithful wife graphically describe cunnilingus to her teenage lover, the next you’re watching the now-dead teenage lover’s mother run headlong into the sea where her baby died, or resting her head on the chest of his graying corpse. It’d be brutal even without Cuarón’s vivid shifts in color palette between the two storylines, dipping the sex stuff in golden honey while bleaching Stephen’s face in the sunlight as he tells his wife the police have arrived, or shooting them like Romantic/Gothic protagonists standing hand in hand in stormy seas. 

Again, bookmark the sex stuff, because somewhere in between these two poles you have Robert, dodging calls and texts from Catherine the morning after he storms out. He made it no further than his own car, which he slept in while parked on some street somewhere. Still half in the bag, he staggers onto a bus and makes snap judgments about working-class people quite unlike himself; the minute he catches himself thinking this he proclaims himself a “sanctimonious twit” and gets off the bus.

There’s a lot to like about this sequence — the naturalistic early-morning urban lighting, or Sacha Baron Cohen’s subtle work in an uncomfortable role centered on men’s insecurity about women’s sexuality, or whiplash zooms and pans that at times make his journey feel like the subject of a wartime documentary. But the voiceover narration from Catherine, documentarian though she may be, is redundant. Too often it states Robert’s inner thoughts even though Baron Cohen’s acting and Cuarón’s camerawork are in the process of making those thoughts abundantly clear. It’s as if there’s a lack of trust in the actor or the filmmaking or the audience, which is weird, because Cuarón’s not like that — unless, perhaps, there’s more to the narration than meets the eye.

Which brings us back to the sex stuff. You can tell I’m a fan overall, so let’s take that as read. But a couple of things bothered me about it. (Beyond the orange-gold indoor lighting scheme, that is — an artifact of the digital area I never want to see again, not even in the comparatively skillful hands of Cuarón. Anyway!)

First, there’s Nick. I simply don’t believe that a 19 year old clearly being hit on by a woman would suddenly be too shy to say the word “breast.” I don’t believe that a kid who spent his time with his much-loathed-by-everyone girlfriend Sasha boning at every available opportunity would be reduced to the equivalent of a virginal high school freshman, stammering and unable to sustain eye contact. I’m not convinced he’d need the cunnilingus tutorial — not that I expect him to be great at it, but Sasha’s enthusiasm for sex with him would at least seem to indicate he knew where everything was down there. From the moment Catherine makes contact with him, he’s like a 12 year old being groomed, not a college kid having a fling on holiday. It just seems…odd.

And while I’m much less a fan of the narration than the sex, there’s something odd going on there too. Stephen narrates his own material, both in flashbacks and the present day, always in the first person. Catherine narrates her own material, but only in the present day — she didn’t in the flashback where she meets up with Nancy — while also covering Robert’s material.

But there’s no narration for Jonathan. You could perhaps argue that’s because he’s dead — there’s no narration for Nancy either — but that’s really no obstacle; dead narrators have been a Hollywood mainstay since at least Sunset Boulevard. Robert is covered by Catherine, Nancy is covered by Stephen, and Jonathan stands alone as the only main character not to have narration at all. Again, odd.

Jonathan’s is also the only storyline we enter and exit via the old-fashioned iris technique. Imagine the ‘o’ in ‘odd’ slowly opening and closing on Jonathan’s face, if you will. 

Also, Leila George is excellent, but…not hugely Blanchettesque in appearance or sound or mannerism, have you noticed? She’s a beautiful blonde British woman with a kid and an absent husband for sure, but beyond that…I mean, you can cast quite effectively for similar faces when hiring multiple actors to portray the same person at different imes, if that’s important to you. (Watch Dark on Netflix sometime.) You can also digitally de-age your lead actor, particularly if they’ve been famous for a long time and have a surfeit of images for the team to work with; cf. Natalie Portman in Lady in the Lake. Blanchett herself is subtly de-aged in the flashback scene with Nancy in episode 2, even. So why not go all the way with it?

Why would Disclaimer set Jonathan’s storyline apart in all these ways, if not to convey that it belongs apart from the others? 

Why is Jonathan a complete babe in the woods and Catherine a ruthless apex predator? He has no confidence? She has no doubts?

Why does she look and act more like an idea of Catherine than like Catherine herself — an idea in the mind of someone who hates her, who thinks, as do all of the book’s readers, that she’s a horrible person?

Why are Jonathan’s flashbacks and Jonathan’s alone distinguished by the fanciful once-upon-a-time irises?

I’ll call it: because they’re not flashbacks at all. They’re passages from Nancy’s book. 

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One last note: In general, I’m not a fan of these kinds of narrative parlor games, where you’re not supposed to know what’s really going on until the rug is pulled out from under you and the story gets flipped on its head. Common across all of television, they’re especially a staple of literary thrillers about dissatisfied mothers, for some reason — particularly on Apple TV+, which tried this maneuver in both Lady in the Lake and The Changeling, to name two off the top of my head. Since all three were adapted from novels, perhaps we have to look to literature to figure out why the 2020s’ hottest narrative device is just the final flashback in Locke’s first Lost episode.

Be that as it may, Disclaimer does two very worthwhile things here: It finds the big red button marked SEXUAL AROUSAL and the big black button labeled GRIEF and leans on both of them as hard as it possibly can. This is almost certainly bound to displease the segment of the audience that can handle the tearjerking but not the regular jerking, and vice versa. It’s a big risk, in short. Why else watch television? Why else make television?

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.