‘Disclaimer’ Series Finale: What Worked, What Didn’t, and a Listener-Defense Mailbag

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I'm Joanna Robinson. I'm Rob Mahoney.
We are here to wrap up our coverage of Disclaimer, the Apple TV Plus series starring Kevin Kline and Cate Blanchett by Alfonso Cuaron. We have a lot of thoughts that we would like to share with you, but we're going to do things a little differently today.
We're not going to go sort of beat by beat through the episode or theme by theme through the episode. We got a ton of emails from you guys.
So many. Griefcardigan at gmail.com.
The inbox is bumping. Post finale, leading up to the finale.
And plenty of you enjoyed Disclaimer much more than we did. So we thought that we would read some of your emails, hear from some people who have defenses of the show, or at least like other considerations of the show.
And then we'll sort of respond to that with our thoughts about the finale rather than just sort of talking about counter bug for 45 minutes, which is what I want to do, or spend an hour talking about why the Ravenscroft cat didn't get to make an appearance in the finale after being the star of the show for most of the season. I know.
The Russian blue did not show up. The ginger saved the day, perhaps.

The ginger cat saved the day.

Did it?

It kind of woke Catherine up, did it not?

Oh, yeah.

Well, also got fed, I gotta say. Yeah.

Very tough for the Ravenscroft cat in that way.

Yeah, that's true.

Just not even getting its bowl of milk.

I mean, it's full on capers, probably,

from the beginning of the show.

It felt like a Selina Kyle Batman Returns moment when the ginger cat starts sort of laughing. Okay, now you're speaking my language.
I just needed to get into the right spirit of really the animus of the cat channeling through Catherine to awaken her in this moment. Yeah, there you go.
And then she has the wherewithal to throw up the sleeping medication that she's taken. Anyway, that's cat stuff out of the way.
I just want to, so we're going to get to some emails. I want to start with this very important email we got from Jefferson, who said, I'm not struggling through the end of disclaimer to not hear the Rangoon drop, give the people what they want.
So Kai, can you play from Presumed Innocent, in case people didn't listen to that podcast, Peter Sarsgaard and the Rangoon drop. What if she never consumed the Rangoon? Thank you so much, Kai.
How are you feeling about the Rangoon legacy, Rob Mahoney? The fact that it's so strong is really meaningful to me. And I'm glad that it can be a comfort to people in these trying times, Joe.
As you said, some people really love Disclaimer. We have somewhat decidedly more mixed feelings about it overall.
I would say especially this finale is not my favorite episode. But we got here together.
And that means that guess what? We do get to consume the metaphorical Rangoon of this podcast as one, as a community. We're coming together in either tough or exuberant times.
I mean, I guess what's interesting about this show, if you want to talk about prestige and art. Joe, I love talking about both prestige and art.
I know you do. It's a provocative show in that we got, I think, the most emails out of any show we've covered from people like a little upset with us in our opinions or disagreeing with us in our opinions.
Like it's contentious in the email inbox. There's plenty of people who also disagree with us and that's great.
But like, if, if it were all bad, then it would be crickets and no one would be watching and no one would be listening and no one would be caring. But like, the thing about Cuaron and we established this at the top of our coverage is like a main reason why we picked this show is we love Cate Blanchett.
We love Kevin Kline.

Um,

and we love Alfonso Cuaron,

like as a,

as a storyteller and a filmmaker.

And so we were,

we were like,

no brainer,

we got to do disclaimer.

And so I am,

I was going to ask like in my Snyder sort of,

uh,

not Zack Snyder,

but like in my more snide mode,

I was going to ask you like, is this the worst show we've covered as a pair? And I think it's the most frustrating show that we've covered for me because of what I see as somewhat wasted potential. Again, if it were all disappointing or made or mediocre, then I wouldn't feel as sort of worked up about it as I do.
What do you think, Rob? Yeah, I really agree with that. I think by the time we ultimately got to the big twist reveal in this finale as far as what actually happened to Catherine, I just felt so exhausted by the whole process and specifically these last four episodes of run up to get here.
But there probably could have been a really good movie in here. There probably could have been a really good four episode miniseries in here.
It was just the way that the backend was stretched out that really kind of, for me, like having a seventh episode of this show and this kind of plot line, it really felt like it didn't think very highly of us. That's what it felt like to me is like, do you really not give us enough credit to have seen some of this stuff coming? And if we did see it coming, it just feels like kind of we're getting beaten over the head with the doublespeak.
I think that's a good segue into an email we got from... I consider not saying who it's from, but I think I should just because he's great.
Patrick McKay is a co-show runner of Rings of Power. I guess listen to our disclaimer coverage.
Thanks, Patrick. You're the best.
He's a storyteller. He's a storyteller of long form story.
So I thought his insight was important. He or interesting.
He is somewhat of a defender of the show, right? So he says, as someone who adores the filmmakers and cast here, I was pretty enraptured for the first couple episodes. But as the show went on, that Instagram interlude, my art are faded.
Okay, but I still found the show pretty compelling anyway. When friends complained about it being an expensive melodrama, I was like, yes, exactly.
To me, it's almost in the vein of Douglas Sirk movies from 1950s, a soap opera that on the one hand is embarrassingly emotionally manipulative and cartoonish, but on the other hand is absolutely a blistering satire of the zeitgeist. How can you not cackle along with Kevin Kline and filthy clothes hobbling about the vacuum cleaner aisle? Or Sacha Baron Cohen staggering through London streets on a jealousy bender while telling himself he's better than the proles all around him? To that last point, despite its own disclaimers, I think the show is more concerned with class than gender, assault, or cancel culture.
But that's a bigger conversation. Also to me, Cuaron is giving Major Hitchcock here.
Do we really neg vertigo or, okay, dial M for murder for plausibility issues? These are genre vehicles designed to smuggle cinematic art installations to a mainstream audience. I mean, WTAF with that sex scene in episode three, my jaw was on the floor, a druggie queen Kate fighting with her Uber driver while Kevin Kline readies a hot shot of Drano at her kid's bedside.
Yes, please. But those are also two-hour films.
And this is an episodic series. So yes, while I truly feel that some of the disclaimers seeming messed up are not a bug, but a feature, the bug under the glass for seven hours, that was just a so uh patrick the counter bug was us all along yeah exactly but under the glass for seven hours like great stuff for patrick thank you so much but i to his point about like could we ingest this as like a douglas cirque melodrama if no one has ever seen a douglas cirque melodrama maybe you've seen the film far from heaven, which is like trying to be a Doug, like was a sort of homage to Douglas Sirk, a more recent film.

And I have to say that there's, yes, a version of the show where maybe that tone is consistent throughout. I think where I bump on this, and I bump on some of the other tactics, like the sort of like, gotcha you were wrong all along tactics is when the subject matter is as serious as sexual assault, as traumatizing as sexual assault, I think you have to be really careful about your tone and your tactics.
And not to say that Alfonso Cuaron is not a careful, considered filmmaker or that Cate Blanchett would sign on to something and not be thoughtful and considerate about it. And I thought, and I will say, I thought her performance in this episode, even as things got increasingly kind of preposterous around her, was incredibly good.
But that's where I get kind of agitated about it because not to say that some of these melodramas do engage, but like when you get to that, like when he describes Queen Kate fighting with her Uber driver while Kevin Kline readies a hotshot of Drayton or a kid's bedside, like, yes. We're in.
Right? We're in for that. But then like when you juxtapose that with this like harrowing sequence in the flashback, then I feel like I have tonal whiplash.
What do you think, Rob? Completely. I'm feeling a lot of the same thing.
And this is why I think all throughout the season, there's been micro elements of the show we have really enjoyed spending time with. How can you not love, as Patrick alluded to, watching Kevin Kline do his thing in this way, right? He's chewing up everything.
He's a total weirdo. Even like him, his performance as Catherine is telling her story, as becomes increasingly almost hunched and disfigured.
Yeah. I'm enjoying so many of the things that are happening in the performances and even the execution of this show.
I just think when you take it in total, it starts losing me. And I think the point about plausibility is a great one, right? This is something that, to be honest, I don't want to be talking about.
Like, I try to give shows and movies a very wide berth to tell us how to watch them. And this is where I think I'm bumping up against the same thing you are, which is Disclaimer is telling me, on the one hand, it is melodrama.
On the other, it is a very important story that's going to change the way we look at stories. And it's like, if you want both of those things at once, you have a very, very fine needle to thread.
And I don't think it gets there. And I think when we do get sidetracked into these talks about implausibility, like whether it's Steven's plot working out perfectly every time, whether it's like characters acting the way they do and that not feeling real.
I think what I'm saying as much as anything is like, the other elements are not there. Like the stakes are not there for me, right? The characters are not that compelling to me later in the show

after they've been kind of flattened out.

The plot doesn't have the momentum it needs.

And so really the plausibility argument

is saying like the spell of the show

is kind of broken.

Yeah.

And I think to your point about like

threading that extremely fine needle

to get this serious measures matter

and that tone correct.

If you ask me who could do that, I could say perhaps Alfonso Cuaron could do that. There's plenty of evidence that he is a master when it comes to the finer points of story.
We're just reiterating something we've said. I just think, yeah, this could have been a movie and maybe all of the elements would have felt balanced.
This is something that our listener, listener Caesar wrote in, the sort of the prelude to this part of the email was just that Caesar's a massive Cuaron fan and sort of admits, he's like, maybe I'm a bit too in the tank for children of men, and this is why I feel this way. But talking about Cuaron as a storyteller, he says, the key for his work, I think, is the fundamental rationality of human existence.
He's a philosopher,

and I think his stuff tends to be more fable than straight story. So the minutia of plot mechanics that you've been struggling with in the show, I think, are really incidental to him, for better or for worse.
And the story wasn't concerned with cancel culture or Rashomon POV differences, as you seem to settle on in previous pods. His concern in most of his stories, Children of men, Roma, Gravity, heck, even Prisoner of Azkaban, is the fragility of our relationality and how painful it can be when it is broken, how existentially devastating, and how vital the need for connection is.
He uses metaphor of the sea in Roma and Children of Men and Disclaimer and Space and Gravity to place characters in a circumstance of threatening dislocation and disconnection, the ultimate threat to our humanity. And symbolic of the contemporary state where there are so many forces to cause isolation, he interrogates those as his main interest.
And disclaimer, it's the way grief and pain and trauma isolate us, turn us against one another and ourselves, arrest our development, make us ready to believe the worst and delude ourselves and further our isolation.

What I most appreciated and how, in the end, another factor he focused on in the show is how truly hard it is to love, to maintain those vital connections when so much around

us and in ourselves threatens them.

It reminds me of the line from Brothers Karamazov, quote, love in practice is a harsh and dreadful

thing compared to love in dreams, end quote. I thought Disclaimer was great in the end at empathizing with that struggle.
So that's Caesar's email. There's so much being on the bone here in Caesar's email, and there's so much that makes me just want to rewatch all of Cuaron's movies again, because that connective thread between them, I think, is really fascinating fascinating and again i think there is a version of this i see yeah the fingerprints of that on on this story but i think it gets too distracted by some of these other avenues like i don't think you can say the show isn't about cancel culture when that is so much of what like sort of the back three was preoccupied with.

I will agree.

It's not only about that.

And I, and I think that idea of connection, especially as it pertains, let's say in this,

this episode to Catherine saying, Robert saying, please forgive me, please.

I mean, actually this really did hit me when Robert's like, you have to forgive me.

You have to forgive me.

And Catherine's like, you seem almost relieved that i got raped yeah and i

can't handle that i thought that was versus some of the other like sort of gotcha moments in this

episode i thought that was like a really good um moment and her just saying like i hear you i

understand what happened to you i can't forgive you and we can't move forward with this but she

is invested in doing that with nicholas and i think that that attempt between mother and child

I don't forgive you. And we can't move forward with this.
But she is invested in doing that with Nicholas. And I think that that attempt between mother and child to connect at the end of the episode was kind of effective for me.
I don't know. What do you think of what Caesar has to say? Or how did the show succeed in doing this? And where did it fall short for you? I think Caesar's email was the one that most made me wish I was watching the show that Caesar was watching.
Because the things that he's laying out clearly are true. These elements are in the show.
It's just that there's all these other elements that are muddling up the picture as far as how well those things work. I found myself looking back at this story and looking back at Caesar's kind of takeaways about the fragility of human connection and how tenuous it is and the lengths we are willing to go and how easily we are willing to turn on people.
I was almost less interested in everyone turning on Catherine, even though that's clearly a big part of what is driving this show, and more interested in Nancy and the lengths she was going to ignore everything that was going on with Jonathan and Steven by extension, ignoring everything that Nancy was ignoring. Those were like, there was a lot of meat there in a way that I almost wanted a little bit more of.
And like that, the tilt of this show is, is very precarious. Like you don't want to make it too much of a Steven show for a bunch of different reasons.
I thought his closing was probably the most satisfying endpoint of this show for me as a viewer. Like him, empty, staring into the void, burning everything.
RIP to the grief cardigan, by the way, in honor of everyone who's emailing into griefcardigan at gmail.com. For me, that ending almost worked better, not as an ending for the show, but for a character, than the Catherine Nicholas stuff.
Like, I don know i had a very different response to seeing katherine and nicholas backlit on the couch which is this this overwrought narration about katherine is finally ready to embrace her son's complete love i'm just like this is not the show that we were watching and like those are not the characters katherine and nicholas I understand that are estranged for a bunch of different reasons.

Clearly, Catherine in particular has been through so much. Yes.
And Nicholas clearly has absorbed what happened to his mom on some level, even if it's one he can't quite process. Right.
They've been through a lot. They, to this point, have not had much of an on-screen actual relationship in this show.
and they haven't had the sort of reaching for each other

but are mistimed or like don't quite understand each other, like misalignment of a relationship that makes me want them to have one. It just, it felt a lot like even Catherine by her own admission has been a very remote mother for much of Nicholas's life.
And I'm not saying that there's not reasons for that or explanations for that or a very human reason for that. I'm just saying as like

an emotional button on a show,

them on a couch and talking

about Nicholas's full love is just like,

I don't know that that was

what we were doing here, even though

clearly it's something the show is very concerned in.

Feels like, I hear what you're saying.

To me, it felt sort of like

especially the space, you know, they've

transformed the space. I got a, not an

email, but a DM from

a pal, Sam, who was talking about

Thank you. to me, it felt sort of like, especially the space, you know, they've transformed the space.
I got a, not an email, but a DM from a pal, Sam, who was talking about the, the flower and plant budget in the Ravenscroft household, because he was like tallying up the math on it. And he was just like, this is, this is an slightly unserious thing.
And then I will get into the more serious thing, but he's like, okay, so what's the weekly Ravenscroft floral budget between the four plants and the thing? This is well over a thousand pounds. The coffee table arrangement is easily 500 alone.
I mean, obviously Catherine splurged now that Robert is on the curb and she wanted a warm and peaceful environment to have this conversation in, but sheesh. So the set deck is important.
That house has always been beautiful, but now it is like even more sort of like white and glowing and, and there's nature inside of it and all this sort of stuff. We have ascended to heaven, this beatific moment.
And for me, it was almost like these demons have been exorcised, especially as we move away from the hell that is Stephen's kitchen. So I don't know.
I think there's something in that purging of almost like a cancer that was at the heart of this family. And now that you've given it sunlight, but it is, to your point, overwrought as everything is overwrought.
And again, once again, off the heels of something so serious as depicting sexual assault on screen, it is this hard tonal turn. Yes.
You know what I mean? And your point about her conversation with Robert in the hospital, I thought that was excellent. I think the combination of the incredibly salient point that she makes about Robert's behavior is great.
I think her performance and the sort of rubbing his back as he crumples into a ball of their dynamic is just really wonderful portrayal of that dynamic and that scene. And I think to your point about the set deck here, a shifting of perspective where we really haven't seen their living room from that angle before.
In part because we've spent so much time with Catherine. We've seen Catherine from the top of the stairs looking down at Robert and Nicholas having buddy-buddy time down there.
Watching Chelsea, yeah. Right.
And this is their, you know, Catherine and Nicholas's time to kind of be in there together. And for her to feel like connected and a part of it in a way that she hasn't before.
So like, again, all those things are executed well, right? On paper, there's a lot of things that should be hitting. And yet I find myself at the end like a little bit cold on that kind of like emotional payoff.
I largely agree with you. I do want to, while we're on Nicholas, I want to address two things.
One, the highest number of emails we got or messages I got on Twitter or whatever were about the fact that last week I was trying to parse what I thought was the flickering of a film reel and Catherine's flashbacks, when clearly it was the sound of that goddamn refrigerator in Stephen's kitchen,

which has now stymied me twice in this show.

That's on me.

But it was the fridge noise in the back of Catherine's flashbacks. So we were seeing Catherine's flashbacks even before she sat down to drink the drugged tea.

It was being told in the kitchen because there was the background some of the guys. They're like, hey, you want anything? I was like, I'm an adult.
I got stuff to do tonight. I'm not doing one of these like semi-retired deals, 18 holes and see how it goes.
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Well, we got this email about Nicholas and we wanted to address it. We got an email about Nicholas from a listener who was a little displeased, probably too mild, just did not enjoy the way that we were talking about Nicholas this season.
And especially since Nicholas is a hard drug user, there was this question of like, are we conflating the disease of addiction with like a 20 some year old guy who says the things that he said in the Instagram DMs of getting catfished by Steven and Rob and I, like we both individually thought we read this even when we both individually thought about it. And then we had like a pre-recording discussion of like, how do we feel about this? And I'll just say for myself, I'm not going to speak for Rob.
It's not the addiction part at all in the slightest of Nicholas that like frustrated me about that character. I have unending empathy for like the idea of addiction.
There are inherent qualities to Nicholas that are perhaps connected to his trauma. And in that way, I am like willing to say, okay, what is going on with this kid, his whole life that has led him here.
But I don't think we were wildly out of pocket with anything we said personally, even though I really did think about it, but I don't think so. What do you want to say, Rob? I feel pretty similarly.
I think to reemphasize your point, there are behaviors that Nicholas exhibits throughout this season that are well outside the bounds of what his addiction would encompass or entail or the behavior of a person who is high or is chasing after drugs in an aggressive way or is even looking to medicate his past traumas. It's possible to be both an addict and a shitty person sometimes.
And those things can be related or they can be unrelated. I feel like with Nicholas, there's probably some of both.
We also got this listener, Craig wrote in, and this is, we're going to talk about a show called Flation and Trouble. If you haven't seen it, a pretty good show and definitely, I think much better at the thing that Disclaimer is trying to do.

And we'll talk about that in a second.

Man, do you want to see a show about people staring into voids?

I have the show for you.

Complimentary.

Parentheses, complimentary.

So if you haven't seen it and you don't want to know about it, you can skip ahead a little bit.

Rob and I did podcast about it on this very feed.

So you can go listen to that if you care to.

But Craig wrote in and he said, I was thinking about what Disclaimer seems to be trying to do, which is what Fleischman in trouble did so well. So well, in fact, that if it, if that's all that disclaimer is trying to do, there's no real need for it to exist.
But broadly speaking, the project of both shows seems to be to give you a narrative and then to destabilize it with another perspective, forcing the viewer to reflect on the kinds of assumptions that it's easy for lots of us to make about women. So why does it work so well in Fleischman and so badly here? I ask because I think the answer gets at what makes disclaimer fall flat.
The first reason is that Fleischman in Trouble is a lot smarter about the way it plays with perspective. We get a third person narrative, but don't immediately realize that it's being supplied by a character in the story with her own limited perspective.
We get important pause. Lizzie Kaplan's character is narrating the story, and we assume that she's an omniscient narrator and not giving us a biased narrator.
Versus Indira Varma cutting in as who's not a character in the show. I think that difference is key.
Resuming his email. We get important information when she gets it instead of it being withheld from us.
This allows our sudden window in Rachel Fleischman's perspective to be surprising. By contrast, Disclaimer can't go five minutes without elbowing me in the ribs like, you get it? You don't have the whole story.
Do you get it? I think it's also important that Rachel's perspective complicates and recontextualizes what we thought we knew but doesn't completely invalidate it. She still did a lot of things we thought she did.
It's just that she seems messy and human instead of monstrous. Toby Fleischman is not as good of a guy as we've been led to believe, but he's not a total psychopath or anything.
I fear that the last episode of Disclaimer will not be so measured. Craig, you were right.
Okay. Finally, and most importantly, Rachel's perspective is missing from the narrative because she herself is missing.
That's in contrast to Catherine's maddening refusal to speak. I don't just mean about what happened in Italy.
Like you, I didn't want to veer into, quote, why didn't she report it territory, but she doesn't say anything ever. It's true that it's very silly that the hospital staff immediately takes Stephen's side, but also she doesn't even say something like he pretended to be my father to get in here.
She barely says anything. The call with HR is ridiculous, but any real person would have at the beginning of that call said something like, I can't talk right now.
I'm in the hospital with my son. At the end of the last episode, when she says it's time for my voice to be heard, I think it's supposed to be a big moment.
Instead, I burst out laughing. I don't think it's ever seen a character less willing to make her voice heard.
Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about instead of today's election. Love the show.
Think about what if she never consumed the Rangoon every two weeks or so. Craig? What if she never consumed the Rangoon? That might be confusing if you didn't watch Fleischman in Trouble, but the point being Claire Danes' character, who's Rachel, is missing for most of the show, and so when we finally meet her at the end of the season, we understand her point of view versus her ex's point of view as played by Jesse Eisenberg.
Flight to In Trouble frustrated me until the end, and then I thought it stuck the landing so hard that I really reversed on it. And the episode where Rachel tells her story I think is the standout episode of the show.
Claire Danes is exceptional in it. The whole pivot of perspective that we're talking about here is so well done and so well managed.
And I think it has the luxury of her being out of the show completely as they alluded to. There are serious subject matter being treated in Fleischman is in Trouble.
It's like postpartum depression and a bunch of other things that are like important, but not quite like over the line the way I think that like sexual assault... I really do think that sexual assault storylines require kid gloves and incredible intentionality when depicting them.
And so there's just an even higher standard that Disclaimer has to hold itself to than something like Fleischman and Is the Trouble did. And so I really love this email from Craig.
I had forgotten to compare those two shows, and I really think it's a really key comparison. This kind of story can work dramatically well.
It just wasn't executed well. and that might be again you know Fleischman is adapted from a novel so is Disclaimer

but it you know it was made by the author of the book who maybe had just a better sense of the rollout of the story versus Cuaron, again, a filmmaker trying to make a several episodes about what is essentially, I haven't read the novel this is based on, but it has been described as sort of like a beach read, sort of like an airplane book beach read. No knock on those.
But that's a slightly different source material than the literary fiction that is Fleischman is in trouble. So all those factors are in play here.
But I thought that was a really interesting email. Definitely so.
And I think, to disclaimers credit, there are elements of the perspective shift and recontextualization that do work. I, per the show's request, did go back and rewatch a bunch of stuff that happened before the reveal to see, is this going to hit me any differently? This is what I found, Joe, is that, in particular, parts of the first two episodes do land very differently.
I think the conversation between Catherine and Nancy at the cafe reads extremely differently after you go back and revisit it. The photographs themselves, of course, whoever was responsible for the actual photography, I think, just did an incredible job of striking that sort of middle ground where on first glance, they look salacious.

On second glance,

it's like, oh,

actually that facial expression

is very pained and very concerned.

And in particular,

Robert's repeated insistence

when he confronts Catherine

to look at the photos,

look at the photos,

look at the photos.

And the way Cate Blanchett

is like recoiling,

you know,

like she literally can't do it.

That's where you get the,

you're always the victim, aren't you? Kind of conversation that I know you and I at the time kind of blanched at. Absolutely.
We assumed a more complicated story by that point, but hadn't quite gotten around to the idea that this could be something really violent and evil. Also, I think the part of the show that does read overall much more differently in retrospect, whether you want to think about Catherine or Robert or Nicholas, are like the family dynamics once you accept and internalize that, okay, what actually happened was Catherine was raped, right? You get a lot of backstory about Catherine and Robert's kind of lack of a sexual relationship and this idea that she gets these migraines whenever he wants to have sex.
And it's like, of course, that makes sense in context. And how that would recoil into him internalizing all these things about their relationship and him being insecure.
And all of the kind of dovetailing effects, I think, do read quite differently. The problem is, once you get to episode three, which if you'll remember, is the episode where we see the perfect stranger, Nancy, fictionalized version of the night jonathan and katherine had the sex yoda incident the infamous sex yoda incident yeah um once we saw that it was very clear okay this is not reality uh reality is going to be extremely different perhaps in a in a very violent direction and basically everything after episode three i think watches exactly the same way and so i i'm sympathetic to what they were trying to do here.
I just, I think watches exactly the same way.

And so I'm sympathetic to what they were trying to do here.

I just, I feel like in the end,

they were so concerned with the sort of double speak element of every line that they forgot that like the first time

has to land too.

And it really needs to work both ways.

I also think, okay, so this is where we're getting into like

the hardest thing to talk about. The extremes between the two depictions here.
Yes. We watched Nancy's version, Nancy's fictionalized version, and Stephen seems angry at Nancy.
On the one hand, yeah, but on the other hand, at the end when he's spitefully throwing the grief cardigan in and stuff like that, on the one, yes, Nancy was like an unwell person. On the other hand, once again, this was Nancy's private fan fiction and not something she got independently published and like put in bookstores and stuff like that.
So at least she was like directing her traumatic coping inward and not outward the way that Steven was. That being said, her troubling fan fiction of her son as this trembling, like, naive, unexperienced, wowed, overwhelmed young man, and then the contrast being Catherine's recounting of the incident, in which we get a person so unhinged that the first thing he does is cut his arm and make her drink his blood.
And so the swing is so extreme from one version to another that, and this is like potentially, I'm just going to completely own this. I'm going to leave Rob out of this entirely.
Watching it the first time, I was like, are we meant to not believe Catherine either? We got a couple emails about this, actually. We got an email from Sherry.
I was like, do I even say that on a podcast? We got this email from Sherry, which I think sort of articulates this better. Sherry says, I listened closely to Kate Blanchett's lying reading during the very last scene between her and Sacha Baron Cohen in the hospital when he's asking Catherine why she never told him about the assault.
It occurred to me because of her line readings that she may have been lying after all, and she wasn't in fact, I don't agree with that Sherry, but okay. She wasn't in fact raped.
I realized this is a dangerous suggestion because it drifts into quote, we don't believe women's story territory, which unfortunately is most often the case. So something about Catherine's performance and Blanchett's acting choices just seemed often that scene.
If you or others listen, wonder about this, I'd be grateful if you discussed on the pod.

Love you both, Sherry.

Okay, so thank you for the email, Sherry.

I don't think Catherine is inventing a sexual assault.

I just don't know how to reconcile.

I don't know how to find a Jonathan

that is so unhinged

that he would cut open his arm

and make her drink his blood before he does all the other deeply disturbing and unhinged things based on no previous interaction between them other than looks exchanged on the beach and the bar. Listen, terrible things happen all the time.
People do monsters thing all the time. I'm not trying to excuse anything or say nothing like this could ever happen.
I just feel like I need a middle ground somewhere between those two that helps me connect all the dots. And I'm just having trouble.
I don't disbelieve Catherine. I just disbelieve the story, I guess.
I don't know. Not disbelieve her story, but like a bumping on the wildness of the swing.

Like, what do you think about that?

Yeah, I just think Jonathan in Catherine's recollection is the way it's shown on screen.

And the events it depicts, as you said, like starting with the blood is pitched to a level that is so heightened.

Yeah.

And so like almost absurd.

Right.

So over the top that I think it loses touch with the rest of the show. And then it undermines the story it's trying to tell in doing so is how I feel about that.
Again, it's a delicate thing. Like, rape and sexual assault are monstrous acts, clearly.
Yes. But the way that they are dialed up in Jonathan's demeanor in that scene and his perversions are just like to a degree that makes it feel kind of ridiculous to watch.
Right. I to talk a little bit about the scene.
We don't have to dwell on it. It's really hard to watch for obvious reasons.
It is as horrific as we feared it would be. The Jonathan part of it is so over the top that I think it kind of loses the tether with reality a little bit.
But as we mentioned, like Kate Blanchett's performance overall in this episode, I think it's incredibly strong. Her performance in telling the story, I think is really, like, why you have her on the show.
I think she did an exceptional job. I think the way that this scene is ultimately pulled together and the sort of, like, dulled sound, which I'm grateful of because I think it would be really hard to watch with the actual full audio, even harder to watch than it is.

And so you get score and narration and you get this sort of muted sound design and what it

drove home for me really is, I think

just the absolute horror

of Layla George's performance here

which is an impossible

thing to act.

I think she's been one of the standouts of the

show overall. I think she's really the anchor

of this entire finale, if I'm being honest. And it is such a harrowing scene.
And her ability to pull the terror and the fragile forced smiles and make it all work and make it all feel, like even as Jonathan as a character is doing wild shit, like incomprehensible shit, you believe her. Like you believe her responses.
And that's the part of it that I think really works. I really agree with that.
I think that's a really good point. I just want to make it clear for the upteenth time that I don't disbelieve that Catherine was sexually assaulted.
I believe she was. And I can understand if she was sexually assaulted and her recollection of that is just the most horrific thing we've ever seen like i can understand why that memory would feel that way to her the fact that we know that it's objectively true that he cut his arm and had her drink because we know that they he had that wound on his arm i was kind of hoping that would be more of the aha moment for steven right like because that's the kind of detail that it would be really hard to know.
I mean, I guess regardless of the version of the story that a character believes, if you were intimate with somebody, you might see that scar on their arm. But it felt like the kind of thing that would open up Stephen's attention to the fact that, oh, this might be real.
It just didn't seem to have any effect on him whatsoever. I was wondering if it was like, when I was trying to figure out what it was doing here, I was like, is this a defensive wound? Was she trying to defend herself? Right.
But it's this other thing. And I think, what I think might be true, and again, I would have to read the source material to really understand, but it was more like they were trying to like, the surprise was more important than like, showing us other warning signs about Jonathan that could lead me to say, yeah, this feels right.
We get the idea that his girlfriend came home early from the trip, something terrible happened. Something we talked about because of this disclaimer before every episode was like, did he sexually assault her? That happens inside of a relationship all the time.
Did he sexually assault her? And then sexually assault Catherine. This was something that we were wondering about, but it's still, it's, I, you know, I feel like maybe even more of Stephen's misgivings or other evidence.
I don't know. Again, the end of the day, this is very tricky territory.
I definitely believe Catherine. I believe this thing happened to her.
There's just something about the storytelling that undercuts the point it's trying to make, I guess. Can I share one other thing that I thought kind of undercut the impact of this story here? As I said, I love the way Cate Blanchett, the performer, acts in the telling of the story.

Joe, I am completely baffled by the way Catherine, the character,

finally sits down to tell her story

and how she tells it.

Again, far be it from me

to criticize the victim in a case like this,

but she starts with coming back to her room

with a glass of wine.

Then she skips ahead to the next morning

while saying that the night had drained her. Then gets to Jonathan's death.
Then circles back to the middle part where she was raped. And after everything that she has been through that night and in this series, I'm really struggling to make sense of Catherine finally getting this moment to tell her story and yada yada-ing her own rape for dramatic effect.
I did write in all caps in my notes, but why did she tell the story out of order? Like I definitely had the same thing because she like screams, Stephen's like reacting the way she screams, I'm not finished, sit down to him. Like it felt like that's the moment they wanted, right? They wanted that I'm going to circle back, sit down and listen to me moment, which I'm not saying is not deserved.
It's just like, why? And in reality, and again, a lot of our listeners are like, why are you trying to apply reality to this melodramatic show? But like in reality, I can understand why Catherine in recounting the story would have the hardest time telling that part of the story. 100%.
And so if there's a version of this where she is like, I can't, let me tell this other part. I can't get to that part.
Or like says something indicative. I'm going to come back to what happened the night before.
She just says, I woke up sore. Yeah.
And we have a sense of what's happening. I didn't get any sleep, all that stuff.
We have a sense of what's happening. But Steven in his diluted space just sounds like I woke up sore from the version of the story you think you already know.
And that's intentional to like to have another aha twist of the knife. But like, if she if she was having trouble telling that part, she would say that rather than just weirdly tell the story out of order for dramatic effect.
Do you know what I mean? And so there's a version of that where she saves that part for last because it's the hardest for her to get out that I can really ride with, but this just, again, felt manipulative as a lot of this finale and a lot of this season did to me. And to get back to the email, the idea of when she does sit down and say, finally, it's time for my voice to be heard.
This feels of a piece with that stuff with me of all of the ways that Catherine has not just not told her story, which we get, given the difficulty of sharing that kind of thing, incredibly fraught space and vulnerable space to put yourself in, especially when, as we learn, she's done everything possible to not have to relive this exact thing. And Stephen has dragged her into it against her will, and she's having to relive it all over again and do all the things that she feared she would have to do.
Justify herself, prove her innocence, all those things. Everything she ever, like every nightmare she had, she's kind of had to participate in.
But there's a difference between like, I'm not ready to tell that story and blanching at the idea of telling that story and hitting the kind of gut check fear moment of having to kind of put this thing out in the world that you've kept hidden for so long and not even being able to say like, well, this is really hard for me or I'm going to come back to that. It's like there is no signposting at all in this human person as to like, there is something here that is hard.
And I'm going to come back to it and we're going to talk about it. It's just like, I'm going to gloss by it.
And even one of the other things that hit a little different going back to the early episodes is after Catherine gets the initial vomit-induced panic attack of reading the book for the first time or scanning through the book and trying to burn it for the first time, her game plan is don't tell anybody, circle the wagons. I am aggressively not going to tell anyone about this.
I'm going to try to protect my family. That part I get.
Once the confrontations start happening, there's no indication really from her that there's something here that she is really trying to get. There are moments where she starts to try to talk to Robert, but there's, I don't know, I have a really hard time with overall the sum total of her complete unwillingness to engage and even the idea of being hurt and articulating that to other people.
Yeah. Yeah.
So there's this, it's very, were you silent or were you silenced, right? And she feels like she was silenced, but I'm like watching this and I'm like, there are opportunities here to say something. Yes.
You don't have to tell the whole story, but there is an opportunity here to say something. And I think the show wants us to feel like she didn't have that opportunity.
And I don't think it's quite successful in that. There is a version of the story where she is not given the opportunity until the very end to talk.
When she did say the thing to Stephen,

when she says,

your son's dead.

Great.

Then I don't have to talk about it.

If I don't want to,

I don't have to relive it.

If I don't want to,

I don't stand up in court and be called a liar.

That really did hit me.

Like that was very strong and profound.

And,

and so watching her,

watching him and this whole show drag that out of her, when on the one hand, it is very clear that in putting it in a box and stuffing it down impacted her relationship with Robert, impacted her relationship with Nicholas, impacted her life in general. And we can sit here at home and say, you needed to process this.
You couldn't have just kept his stuff down. But that's a person's decision to make, whether or not they want to process their own trauma.
And the fact that it was forcibly ripped from her is the horrifying thing of this whole story. I don't know.
I want to love this story for the larger story it's trying to tell

about believing women,

about letting women have a voice,

about the frustrating hypocrisy

of Stephen getting to do

whatever the hell he wants in that hospital

and her being told not to run.

But there's like,

even down to the end,

when she thinks Nicholas is,

she's too late

and the Drano has like entered this thing and Robert is like, and also I was so enraged. Sorry.
This is me actually enraged with the characters, not the show. So after all of that, Steven told Robert that his wife was sexually assaulted.
He didn't let her tell that story. Like you don't tell someone else's story like that.
And like, you know, after all of this, he hasn't learned any of that. I don't know.
I was aggravated. But the fact that like he comes, Robert comes out and is like, let's talk about this.
Not let me reassure you that our son isn't dead. You know what I mean? It was just like, anyway.
Okay. I've circled down into the territory.
I didn't want to. It was just like airing my grievances about this episode.
But like, you know. Well, if you'll allow me one similar indulgence along these lines.
Please do. For that scene specifically of the race to the hospital.
And that like, to be honest, like there are elements of this finale I think really work. There are elements that to me were just like kind of embarrassing.
Like from a storytelling perspective, like kind of embarrassing. And this was one of them, which is Catherine busting into the hospital and she sees Stephen walk out of the ICU and he gives her the very cryptic I'm sorry, and she breaks down sobbing.
Who is that scene for? Because we know what happened. Robert and Stephen know Nicholas is not dead.
Catherine is the only person who's invested in that, who thinks he might have died. And Kate gets to have her big breakdown moment.
And as an actor, I see the appeal in that. I don't know about you, Joe.
Did you feel anything? I didn't feel anything. Frustration.
I felt frustrated. Fair.
But that's not what they wanted me to sell. It was another case of characters in the show being cryptic all the time for absolutely no reason just so you can have these sort of misunderstandings.
And at that point, it was not playing well for me. Here's the bottom line for me of the show.
At the end of the episode, Indira Varmer says to, in the voiceover, Steven is burning the one and only grief card again, among other things. And there's that last minute revelation that like Nikki was in the mirror, which like nobody noticed before now.
Okay, anyway, she says nothing can atone for a wasted life. And bottom line, do I feel like I wasted my time watching the show and covering it with you? No, I don't.
Because I think this ultimately missed the mark. Plenty of our listeners, it worked for them.
I think that's great. I think it's always rewarding to chew over why a story isn't working, especially a story from someone who we both agree is so good at telling stories.
It helps us understand why other stories work better for us. It helps us better understand just the mechanics of TV storytelling, which is just fundamentally different on many levels than film narratives are.
You know, getting to see your shining face every week and Kai's shining face is a joy for me. So I'm glad we did this.
Despite everything else, I'm glad we covered disclaimer. And I'm really glad, I'm going to let not, I'm not trying to wrap this up without letting you talk about anything else you want to talk about, but I am really glad the next show we're covering say nothing.
Rob and I have already watched. I don't know how much you've watched Rob.
We've already watched enough to know that show is a banger. That show is great.
And after a couple of shows that felt like they didn't really hit the way we wanted them to, we're really excited for Say Nothing, which our coverage of will begin later this week. Rob, anything else you want to say about Disclaimer as a whole or this episode? First of all, the feeling is incredibly mutual.
I have actually enjoyed talking about the show more than I have enjoyed watching it at some stages. Of course, doing this pod with you is always a joy.
I'm glad that we got to engage with it. And I think this is a show that ultimately was probably a little more interested in being a formal experiment than it was an actual story at some points in a way that is frustrating as a viewer for me in this moment watching it.
But I can appreciate the ambition of. And I like the swing.
I like the attempt. Even if it's the attempt to turn, as you said, a beach read novel into something that's a little bit more elevated, that's a little different, that hits in a slightly different way.
I appreciate the ambition of it. I don't think it got there.
And sometimes it didn't get there in a way that I think was a little hard for me. I think the moment we get in the hospital of Robert asking Stephen, how could you not know? Why did you not question what happened to you? And you get the pregnant pause.
Wait for it. No, Mr.
Ravenscroft. Why didn't you? I don't know if that was supposed to be a laugh line, Joe, but it got me.
To wait seven hours for things like that, honestly, was a little bit painful. It's tough.
It's tough. It's tough.
It didn't land for me. Something that Cate Blanchett said about Kevin Kline is that he's known in the industry as Kevin D.
Kline because he turns down so many projects. And they were like, we can't believe we got Kevin Kline.
And I'm like, should Kevin have declined this role?

But then at the same time,

I think the show would have been much worse without Kevin Kline here.

For sure.

Doing all the things that he's doing.

So, and just the absolute,

like, you know,

to Patrick McKay's point,

like just the rumpled,

like grotesquery of him,

counterbug and all.

So we'll always have Grief Cardigan.

We'll always have counterbug, RIP.

Do you have any thoughts

on the demise of Grief Cardigan? Here's the question. Grief Cardigan, our dear friend, thrown into the fire.
Cardi G. Yeah.
In the end, do you think she got what she deserved? Do you think our poor friend Cardi G got what she deserved being thrown into a bin, set on fire? I don't know. Probably the sweet release.
Steven does not look like he has showered the entirety of this TV show. I have to imagine that wasn't a pleasant experience for Grief Cardigan to, and she didn't sign up for this.
She didn't say, I want to be an accomplice to all of these crimes. And yet there she was, trotted out to the hospital underneath his suit.
So like, yeah, you know, a release for Grief Cardigan, I suppose, in the end. A sweet, sweet release.
And for Stephen, again, a deep stare into the void. We all find our way to the darkness somehow, Jo.
Well, that has been us staring into the void. That disclaimer.
Thanks as always to Kai Grady for hanging with us. Thanks to all of you for listening.
Even if you disagreed with us, that's sort of like the beauty of talking about art with a capital A and Prestige TV. So we will be back later this week with our coverage of Say Nothing.
And Rob is going to actually hop over to House of R with me later this week to cover the beginning of Silo Season 2. We are not out of the Apple TV Plus warm embrace yet.
So we'll be talking about Silo a little bit. He's filling in for Mallory doing me a hot fave over on the house of our feed

so you can hear us talk about that later this week as well thank you to Kai Grady I already said it I'll say it again and thanks Justin Sales for his big picture work on this podcast feed and we will see you or say nothing soon bye What if she never soon. Bye!

What if she never consumed the Rangoon?