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Terms and more at applecard.com. Hello, welcome back to the Prestige TV podcast feed.
I'm Joanna Robinson. I'm Rob Mahoney.
We are coming to you from the recent past as we recorded this episode well in advance of when you're hearing it, just for some scheduling reasons. So if you have sent us an email about the TV show Disclaimer, which is what we're about to talk about in the last week or so, perhaps we have not gotten to see it, but we have gotten a couple emails for you guys already.
We are excited to hear what you all have to say going forward. Rob, remind the listeners where they can find us on email, please.
I'm so glad you threw this to me, Joe. They need to send their emails immediately to griefcardigan at gmail.com.
That's griefcardigan at gmail.com. Not to be confused in these episodes with grief pink blanket.
Also very powerful, very moving, but it just doesn't hit like the cardigan does. It's true.
It's true. Okay.
Follow-up question. Were we a bit hasty on the email address? Because I have a couple options to throw to you based on episodes, installments, chapters three and four of Disclaimer, which is what we're here to talk about today.
Should we have considered sexyoda at gmail.com? It was right there. We just didn't, we didn't watch enough.
See, here's the thing. We hadn't seen it.
If we had just said after one and two with no context for our listeners, by the way, our email is sexyoda at gmail.com. I think you get put on a list somewhere.
No, I feel like they trust us at this point to know what we're talking about. Follow-up question.
Speaking of being put on lists, kyliesnipple at gmail.com. Do you think that would have put us on a list somewhere? Or how do you feel about that?

I got to admit, I had lots of thoughts watching these episodes.

We're going to get into it.

One of them was, how does Kylie Minogue feel about all this?

Yeah.

I would love to get the interview.

Can we get a Kylie interview at some point on this season of this podcast?

I think that'd be wonderful.

We would be thrilled and honored.

Miss Kylie Minogue, if you would care to join us. Last but not least, and I don't know if this is really going to convey the event, but I'm going to go with fingertea at gmail.com or fingerstirtea at gmail.com.
Anything you want to say about this incredible Prestige TV moment we experienced? This is just a huge moment for fingers. You know, it's, I don't even know what to say.
Other than, look, it's just an extremely weird look. If what seems to be true turns out to be true, which is that a grieving mother is writing fan fiction about her son getting the old fingers up the back end.
There's no wrong way to grieve, but that's not the right way. No, I wrote, what did I say? What kind of, it's kind of sick of Nancy to write this sexually explicit content about her son.
But sick is, I had other words, perverted, perhaps. I don't know.
I don't want to be judgmental of Nancy. We all grieve in our own ways.
I kind of do though. This is quite a way to grief.
Yeah. Is what Nancy, we're going to talk a lot about Nancy.
The finger tea I was most sort of alluding to. Do you remember when like- Oh, the finger tea.
Oh, I see. Multiple finger teeth in these episodes.
When Catherine is being annoyed by her coworker and she just like throws a teabag in, doesn't let it steep, tosses out, stirs it with a finger and gives it to him and was like, get out of my way. And he's like spluttering.
He's like, but you can't... I'm like, once the lady has stirred the tea with her finger, I don't think you need to talk to her about the technique.
This is a fuck off gesture entirely, my friend. She's knuckles deep in that cup of tea.
Okay. Chapters three and four.
Something we thought about doing in the first couple episodes was talk about sort of filmography of Kevin Kline. And I do want to get to that.
but I do think we have to start with Nancy because Nancy as our assumption being that all of these vignettes that we're getting in the past in Italy, we're essentially reading The Perfect Stranger along with Robert in the diner, et cetera, et cetera. Nancy has written this very sexually explicit story starring her teenage son and a woman that she doesn't know and as her way of griefing.
Now, if you had to rank the grief tactics, would you rank this above or below quasi drowning yourself in the bathtub to just to know how it feels to have been Jonathan.

That one's not great.

It does strike.

I mean, it comes from a very empathetic place, clearly,

of trying to put herself in her son's position.

She wants to feel how he felt.

Completely.

Writing the full sexual escapades that you imagined for your son based on some photographs is a different level.

And I think the biggest tell we have in this direction so far is the glaring Kylie Minogue poster on his bedroom wall. I knew that Rob Mahoney room detective would clock the Kylie above.
It feels very Kaiser Soze. Like she Kaiser Soze together this story based on the items in his room.
Yeah. What were you going to say? Well, I just think it's clear that she has these discrete data points that in themselves are true, right? Jonathan was with some woman at the beach or saw some woman at the beach.
He has photos of her in all kinds of suggestive positions. He loves Kylie Minogue.
And I think based on Catherine's previous helpful flow charting, we can assume that there's maybe like a waiter in the mix who saw them together at the restaurant. And so maybe she even knows that they had dinner together or had a drink together.
There are like enough things here that are true that she has drawn a straight line. And I think probably based on what we know of the character of Nancy so far, genuinely believes that line to be the truth.
Yes. The problem is that now like Robert believes that line to be the truth.
Other people are going to come in contact with this story, and because Catherine herself has not filled in any of the gaps and seems very reluctant to, the truth is getting away from her. Right, and Robert says, like, you know, the voiceover says a couple times on behalf of Robert, like, he can only trust what's written in the book here.
She has lost her ability to tell her side of the story for him. And I'll get back to Robert and his extremely efficient tactic of getting her out of the house.
Here are the two competing contextual clues that I think it's worth thinking about. One is what Stephen says about his son when they are first in Italy identifying the body.
He says that he considered Jonathan privileged and misguided, and he couldn't think of any other time when Jonathan didn't put himself first before anyone else. That is sort of Stephen's assessment, but then confronting the fact that his son died a hero.
And so he's like, oh, I must have been wrong. But was he, question mark, wrong about the nature of his son? I think putting that up against the sort of like quivering depiction of this young man, like, again, Louis Partridge as Jonathan, if he has been instructed to do like a caricature of like an innocent lamb in over his head, this is what we're getting in the restaurant scene in this episode.
But contrasting that with what Steven says about his son, also, how did he get that cut on his arm? The X marks the spot on the arm and a few other inconsistencies. And then putting all that up against Nancy's reaction to finding out that she was the subject of Jonathan's photographic experiments and how pleased she was to be the object of his attention and how that part of her

would bump up against

discovering these photographs

where Catherine is the object

of his camera's fascination.

So how do all of those pieces

sort of fit together for you?

I really relish this time

kind of getting to know

the Brickstocks before

and during the processing

of Jonathan's death.

Because right off the jump, their relationship and the balance between Steven and Nancy is very peculiar. And I'm trying to put my finger on it.
This whole, he's doing all the grilling. He's clearly taking care of her in a way she's kicking back and relaxing.
But when the doorbell rings, he needs to be the one who goes and gets it. There is a way in which she's bossing him around that I think is fascinating from the jump.
And then, of course, you see the quick evolution or devolution of who Nancy is and what she cares about and what Steven honestly even is to her, which at the start, we see her as somebody who wants to get out in the world. She wants to go see this new Rembrandt exhibit.
An Almodovar film. She's ready.
So I did some forensic accounting on this front. Nicholas is 25 years old in our present day timeline.
He was four years old in the version that we see of Jonathan's death. So it's been 21 years since Jonathan has died based from the present day.
If we assume the main timeline is roughly 2024, that puts us somewhere in the ballpark of either talk to her or bad education, which, look, you got to make time for those. You got to make it to the cinema.
It's definitely talk to her. I definitely think that that's the element of our film.
A little movie about passion and obsession? What would that have to do with any of this? Who knows? Love that. Thank you for doing that.
Value you value you as a colleague. Um, we did, we did get an email from a listener.
Uh, and, and I agree. I, we didn't point this out, but given that, okay, it's early aughts, Jonathan's traveling out with his Nikon.
Yeah. And he takes like a selfie.
He and Sasha take a selfie and our listeners pointing out, that's not really what you do with the night. Like we didn't really take selfies.
And that's true because like you couldn't tell whether or not you captured it, you know, like, um, anyway, so maybe some people were, but it was not a common thing to do. And the fact that he like kind of perfectly framed them, uh, in the Nikon is, I mean, Jonathan, I wasn't aware of your photograph game.
We're much closer to the mirror selfie era than the true selfie era. Correct.
Um, okay. So you were, so Nancy's someone who's cultured, wants to get out, wants to be in the world.
And then we see this decay and decline of her, of the state of the flat, of the garden. Oh, yeah.
Again, we are in the Fleabag universe. The foxes are at the gate.
I mean, I don't mean to be flip or callous. I have a tremendous amount of empathy for Nancy.
But I think at this point in the story, we are meant to be really interrogating because on the surface level, the story is Catherine is this horrible villain and Nancy, the poor grieving mother. But I think we are supposed to be constantly questioning what we're being fed, what we're being told.
And so in that way, Nancy's grief is tremendously understandable, but where she directs it, that's, I think, the question we should be asking ourselves. So what else do you want to say about Nance here? It's also a lot of Nancy's grief and Nancy's story from Stephen's perspective, who is literally outside the door, unable to get in for a lot of this portion of her life.
And I really did admire the way that even the parts of this that seem really warm on first glance end up kind of twisted in retrospect. You know, like the still image of them standing out in the ocean together, holding hands, feels like such a comforting moment until you look back on it and realize like this is Nancy like examining looking for every possibility anything to cling on to to explain what happened to her son beyond what people are telling her and for Stephen it feels like he's actually trying to process grief he's actually trying to absorb what happened to their son and admittedly his relationship by his own admission is very different to Jonathan in a way that almost kind of mirrors Catherine.
I was going to say the exact same thing. I think the way in which we're given these family units that are sort of fractured and favoritism and like subgroups inside of a family unit is a really interesting parallel that is being somewhat overtly, but not like overtly, overtly drawn.
And I think it's interesting to think about, again, it has to do with perception or what kind of person are you, how much do you share with other people? And then, yeah, how you can just feel alone inside of your own family. And that's something that, you know, if we get, and I feel like we must, Catherine and Steven screen time, will they be able to find any sort of common cause in their life experiences or not? Well, especially because the modern version of Stephen is barely recognizable from the version that Kevin Kline is portraying here.
And if anything, part of what makes Nancy's descent and increasing isolation and her version of processing her son's death or not processing it, what makes it so traumatic and so hard to watch is the way that it weighs on Steven too. And how increasingly, how quickly they go from two people who are doing this together to he is now on his own and the way that Kevin Kline delivers the line about how he can respect her decision to move into the room, but can we please talk about this? Like, can we please have a conversation? And there's no more conversation to have.
Like, Nancy is too far gone. And the fact that he berates himself after the fact for not pushing himself into that room, for not confronting her about all of that, I thought.
Yeah, and I think their reactions to, their different reactions to seeing the body of their son. Again, all modes of grief are modes of grief, and I'm not here to judge one or the other, but I do think we're supposed to note that Steven is asking questions like, why isn't his face bloated? Why is that cut there? And he's holding his hand, there's tenderness there.
But as he says, the grief breaks Nancy, that her mind becomes this dark thing.

thing. And we see that Leslie Manville, an icon of her era, the way she is over his body and then just continually withdrawing into herself, screaming that she hates Stephen as he pulls

her out of the bath, all this sort of stuff. Again, I have a lot of empathy for her.
But then we are seeing the after... I mean, to her credit, she's not the one who self-published this book and is systematically trying to destroy Catherine's life, but it is the ripple effect of her particular coping style, which was to concoct, it seems to me, a fantasy version where her son is tremulous victim and also hero at the same time.
And Catherine is so obviously like a cold, heartless bitch who is playing games with her son, right? The woman who can just walk away before the body is even cold on the beach and ignore the fact that this happened because it's more convenient for her if he goes away. I think there are enough of those tells too that the distortion and even caricaturization of both Jonathan and Catherine in that story on both ends, there's just no way that that's an accurate portrayal of anything.
Right. I do think, so to go back to that thing that Stephen says that he considered Jonathan privileged and misguided, and there couldn't think of any other time that Jonathan didn't put himself first before anyone else.
I think then we should go back to that train sequence where we meet him for the first time, having sex with Sasha, the train collector comes in and he like takes the blanket away from her to cover himself so that he can get the ticket.

I just, I think these are like details

that we're meant to be like processing

and thinking as we compare it

to this fantasized version

that again, Nancy has written alone in her room.

But what is important also for us to process

is that, because the flip can't entirely be true.

It can't just be that Catherine is like, because Catherine says to Robert as he's kicking her out of the house that she wanted Jonathan dead. She did.
There's a difference between wanting someone dead and doing what the woman in the flashback does, which is just see him actively drown and not say anything. I don't know if that will wind up being the case exactly, but there is some, again, as we said last week, there is something that Catherine recognizes in this version of her that's in this story.
And I think there could be some competing theories that are along very similar narrative lines, but the tone is totally different, right? If it's as simple as she has this affair, but Jonathan is maybe obsessive with her in an unhealthy way, if he's stalking her, if he's following her, that reads as very different than her just kind of like blowing him off when he's no longer of use to her. Right, exactly.
As far as the Jonathan piece of it goes, and I agree with you, like the portrayal of him as the person clinging to the sheet to cover himself is a great comparison point. I mean, as far as we understand, that's also a scene from the book.
And so is this a distortion of reality or is this just a character on an arc, Joe? You know, is this just Nancy being an excellent writer? Wow, I don't know if you know how much I like a character on an arc, but I'm a fan. I've heard all of it.
I'm a big fan. Okay, let's talk about Kevin Kline as a performer inside of this episode.

One thing that I,

a little,

it's not a little detail,

they do it a bunch of times,

but his like habit of opening the freezer

to like, I guess,

cool himself off

because they don't have AC.

Yeah.

I don't know.

And then he does it across timelines.

It's just like a little,

a little moment that I really love

that is, you know,

either probably in the strip or is his choice.

Kevin Kline, okay, wait, I want to play a quick game with you

inside of this very somewhat dreary show that we're watching.

Have I ever talked to you about the game

that my friends and I invented called

the Robert Downey Jr. game?

I actually don't think you have.

Please explain the rules.

This game always hits with people like you, like Kai, who have seen a lot of things so the game the game goes like this we think of an actor and then the game is i was just a guess for you it's called the robert dine jr game because i first played it with friends about robert dine jr but like what is the film that you most you rob most identify with this actor and i have to guess based on what I know about your tastes. Interesting.
What did I know about how old you are and what you might have seen? And it's not necessarily like the movie you saw first or even like the movie. It's just like, if I say Kevin Kline, what is the movie that comes to your mind? Do you want to play this game? I would love to play.
Okay. Do you want to guess for me first? I would.
Joanna Robinson. Yeah.
The movie that hits you first when I say the name Kevin Kline is A Fish Called Wanda. Rob Honey, that is correct.
Okay. Okay.
Rob Honey, the film that you think of first when I say Kevin Kline, I'm less certain. Is it Dave? It's not.
Although that's probably honestly the other movie of his I've seen most recently. He's delightful as expected in it.
Okay, I'm going to guess again. And basically you can guess until everyone's tired of guessing, but I won't drag it out on a podcast.
Rob Mahoney, is the movie you most identify with Kevin Kline, The Ice Storm? It's not. I don't think you're going to get it.
I'm embarrassed to say that the answer is Wild Wild West. Wild Wild West is an incredible answer.
And now I feel like I know you a bit more. Some of it's introduction.
Like it's how are you first introduced to that actor. And as a kid, for me, it was, who is this guy? And honestly, I think Wild Wild West is an absolute garbage fire of a movie.
But it does capture something very important to Kevin Kline, which is the sort of upright, over-educated sensibility that he plays in a lot of his roles. And I would say the counterpoint, the Fish Called Wanda counterpoint, is erratic weirdos.
And the fact that he's getting to be both of these things on this show is what I'm loving about his role in it so far. So something that I told you that I was talking to Sean Fentasy about the show and he was like asking me about Kevin Kline's filmography.
And I think what's really wild about Kevin Kline is like sort of the choices that he's made in the last, I guess, two decades. Because like then, you know, 80s and 90s, Kevin Kline makes a lot of sense to me.
Would you call him at any point a movie star? I think he's an excellent actor. I think he's a welcome screen presence.
I think he was a fixture in a lot of movies of a certain quality and a certain kind. But did he ever hit that like bankable level that we talk about with the other kind of...
Oh, in terms of like can open a film? Right. I just never thought of him that way necessarily.
I think when he wins the Oscar for A Fish Called Wanda. Right.
And then does things like Dave, things like French Kiss, and things like In-N-Out. I would say all of those are like, this is a Kevin Kline vehicle.
We're here because we know who Kevin Kline is.

I wouldn't say that is a broad, you know, marker of his career, though.

But I would say he had his era in that sort of, like, in the 90s, essentially.

But yeah, I mean, to your point, he's like, you know, he starts, he's like, he's a Shakespeare guy.

He's a musicals powers of panzance guy. Like, a stage actor that is part of his thing.
And so I think some of the choices that he makes to make Midsummer Night's Dream or various other things, The Emperor's Club, which is just basically a dead poet society swing and a slight miss, feeds into that. Eccentric Weirdo is my favorite mode, I guess.
It's it's very good is what i uh most identify but also like in and out which is just like um allowing him to lean into that eccentric weirdo side of him so yeah um but yeah after after de lovely which was sort of like his last sort of big bid for, which is a Cole Porter biopic, the last big bid for maybe I can get another Oscar, is sort of what DeLovely seemed like, or a passion project for someone who loves a musical. The choices he makes after that are sort of increasingly confusing to me.
Anything you want to shout out from the post-2004 Kevin Kline filmography? I wish there was. I think literally the only thing I've seen him in, or in this case, not seen him in, but heard him in, in the last 20 or so years is Bob's Burgers, which he is excellent in.
Oh, he's wonderful in that. Amazing as Mr.
Fish Odor. But like, other than that, I'm probably pulling back to like Prairie Home Companion.
As far as the last time I saw him on screen, you know, I'm not a definitely baby guy. You know, this is, that's not where I'm coming from.
I can't believe he's in No Strings Attached, presumably as like somebody's parent. Is he one of the strings? I definitely saw Ricky and the Flash.
Okay. In which he is the co-lead.
So that is something I definitely... A movie that exists, yep.
It does exist. And then he plays crazy old Maurice.
He's always good for a laugh in Beauty and the Beast. And that was a choice in and of itself.
I don't know, Last Vegas? Like, there's a lot of things that he did that I'm like, but why Kevin Kline? You don't have to do this. You're Kevin Kline.
He also just doesn't... I don't know.
Maybe this is me being like overly optimistic about the bankability of kevin klein or whatever it doesn't seem like he cares that much about working i don't know it's just stuff here and there it doesn't make a ton of sense to me grief card again in gmail.com if you feel like you can make a better sense of kevin klein's please last 20 so years of his career but here he is and um again doing affecting a british accent having to play a man over several decades of his life um i love in the sort of um styling him department the socks and shorts where we first meet him grilling when he finds out about what happened with Jonathan.

Also, the short sleeve button down that he wears. Also, when they go to identify the body and he's wearing as they're standing out in the ocean together.
This is just great, great little character detail work of a man who has just always been like sort of just looks slightly ill-fitting sort of wherever he is. Do you know what I mean? Also, not to be needlessly cruel, but elite dad looks at the time where he is saying goodbye to his dadhood.
You know, it's tough. It's tough.
But he has to transition in his wardrobe as he transitions in life. And honestly, for as much as we need to unravel about what happened in Italy overall, how Stephen Bristock became this older version that we see in the story is probably the most interesting mystery to me.
How that character became that version of that man. I hope we get to see more of the interim years.
It's been many years, or at least it seems so on his face since Nancy died because we see him bury Nancy. There's that heartbreaking idea that Jonathan has his plot and Nancy's buried next to him, which is what she would want, and that he'll be buried alone.
Devastating. But he looks still eons away from where he is when we meet him here, which I don't know on the timeline he's that much further away, but the isolation, the though, even though Nancy locked herself away from him, at least she was there.
But once she was gone and even, even earlier when they find out that Jonathan's dead and the police ask if there's anyone who could go identify the body for them. And he says, there's no one.
So like, this is such a small family and he has so few people and Jonathan dies and then Nancy dies and he has his, his pal, his colleague who's a little perturbed that he wants to create a Facebook for a fictional teen, but like. A little creeped out, rightly so.
A little weirded out, but other than that. Well, first of all, a huge flaw in your supposed research methods.
There are no teens on Facebook. Like you're barking up the wrong tree.
It's true. We should be on TikTok.

I would love to see old Stephen

Bristock try to figure out TikTok.

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I do have two theories as to how he may have devolved so quickly. Tell me.
One, eating all these old preserves. It seems like it could age a man.
It's not great. It's not what you want.
Like riddled with Nancy's hair? I know. It's not wonderful.
It's not wonderful. And along the same lines, like whatever it is that's growing in the fish tank, I think we could be inhaling some fumes that could really challenge your whole system, really.
There's also just like a general swamp area in the backyard at this point. So yeah.
Another thing I want to point out, and I don't know how important it is or not, in Among Robert's devolution inside of these episodes, there's a moment where he's sitting on the desk and he looks at a photo of younger Catherine with Nicky when he was a baby. That's Cate Blanchett, a younger Cate Blanchett.
And And that is a younger Nick than the Nick we meet in the flashback. So again, I wonder, I mean, I think it would have been, I wouldn't have liked it if they had digitally de-aged Cate Blanchett to put her in the flashback.
But if you're going to cast someone else to play or younger, why is that not the face in the photo on the desk? Is it meant to further underline what a fictionalized version of Catherine we're watching in the past? Do you know what I mean? I'm guessing that's part of it. I'm guessing part of it's also just kind of narrative visual simplicity of avoiding that moment of confusion of like, who's that other woman in the photo? Like, why would that be there? But I agree with you.
Based on the timing of what we know, it should not be Cate Blanchett, particularly because we've seen photographic evidence of what she looked like in the past, supposedly. It's not just the conjuring of these scenes.
We've seen the photos in present day. Yeah, you're right.
You're right. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Nevermind.
And then it's just like a production design. I guess.
More than anything else. Okay.
Robert, I mean, we talked a lot about the style of the camera and the cinematography in last week's episode. So I don't, we don't need to go like long on it, but I do want to, the Robert camera work really stuck out to me in these two episodes.
We are like in just an out of control space with the camera that's following him on the bus in the diner. There are these jerky, erratic zooms in on his face, or we're in a camera that's in a car going past him.
As a choice to have the camera so clearly mirror the chaos, the turbulence that's going on inside of him, but does that work for you in the context of the other stylistic choices in the show, or does it stand out to you? How do you feel about it? It absolutely worked for me. I think both the disorientation of that sort of style and movement, also the focusing on these minute details, whether it's the snapping pencil, the Alka-Seltzer boiling in the cup, basically.
All that stuff really worked for me. And the idea that this person is clearly distracted, clearly at least hung over, if not just outright drunk still at this point.
I don't know where he got the bottle of booze from. Did he pick it up on his way out of the house? Did he steal it from that pub? He took you know, no, I don't know.
He stopped at the corner market and got it. The age-old British or alcoholic question lingers on.
Your disclaimer.

Well, and to see him go from

this man who has this

refined wine-tasting

palate to someone who's swigging

the swill from the bottle

is, you know, I mean,

I did not play bottle detective on that.

It might have been a very expensive bottle

of whiskey or whatever he was drinking.

But he does seem out of sorts in general. I think it's not just the camera work, but him on the bus, him in the cafe.
The status of the wig is quite ruffled. How much do you think a wig ruffler? I would love to know the day rate to be the ruffler of the wigs.
I think I could do that job. I think you'd be great at it, but I think you can aim a little higher in your life.
Thank you. I think you can do more.
No offense meant to the wig rufflers of the world. Something worth thinking about in all of this, in the Sacha Baron Cohen of it all, is how much do you want to spend with Robertbert yeah in these episodes who's the character you most we get very little modern-day catherine in all of this who's the character you most want to spend time with where is your attention most drawn in the show i think my attention is most drawn to recent past steven processing trying to understand nancy trying trying to get his way through the door, Stephen.
That era, I think, is the character I'm most interested in at this point. But I love present-day Catherine, too.
Look, I love Cate Blanchett spinning out, as I have mentioned before. This is ultimately an episode that does not give her that much to do in the present day.
But I can always use more. I'm never going to argue with that.
I think the Robert piece of it is interesting because part of his anxiety in this episode is not just feeling jealous, but feeling small about his place in the book that he's like an afterthought in the book. Doesn't even get named.
And he may end up being an afterthought in the show in the grand scheme of things. That's interesting.
I think the puzzling part of my brain is most drawn to watching the vignettes of the Perfect Stranger book and trying to figure out what's the truth underneath this thing that Nancy has strung together from various context clues. Yes.
And one thing I want to think about when I think about that is we talked about the beauty of the cinematography in those vignettes and it continues. We get the lighting and the restaurant was just like absolutely incredible.
This restaurant scene overall, I think is just spellbinding stuff. Yes.
It's ridiculous sometimes. There were a couple line reads that genuinely made me laugh, including you touch Kylie's boobs? Question mark.
Yeah. It's brilliant.
It's Nancy. What a writer Nancy is.
Really? She's got a gift. No, I agree.
I was sort of like, I was compelled. I was drawn in by all of that, obviously.
But like the lighting is so gorgeous. The, even before they go to the restaurant, when the camera is just following them, like Jonathan's carrying Nikki and they are walking up to the hotel.

That is just like one long shot. Yeah.
That is a handheld camera that's different from the jerky zooms that we're getting around Robert. It's sort of like a more like it's almost like a queasy sort of like swinging handheld camera that like made me feel a bit queasy because we're we're we're barreling towards an inevitability we know where this is going which is to jonathan's death so every choice that's made every step that's made yeah is drawing us close to that when we see the kid with the injured foot get rushed past by the lifeguards we're like, okay, we are moments away from disaster here because that's where the lifeguards were when they should have been helping with Nick and Jonathan.
All that's to say, the golden hour of the incident itself, the fact that it's shot as the sun is setting, the sun is going down across the horizon as Jonathan dies, is some of the most beautiful things. The light on the water, the camera on the water, all of it is so beautiful.
And in addition to the beauty, I'm sitting there wondering what I'm meant to be taking or retaining from this because we know the outcome. We know that Jonathan is going to die.
We know that he does not survive this. So there's no dramatic, will he make it tension there.
So how does that sequence hit with you knowing that we're sitting there, knowing how this is all going to play out? I think the tension is so much more about Catherine. And it's so much more when she gets back to the beach with Nicholas, what will she do? Is she going to draw anyone's attention? Is she going to point out to the water? Is she going to do literally anything, or at least this version of Catherine that we get? And spoilers for the season of industry.
I thought there's a lot of overlap between the like, oh, I see someone dying out in the water and I'm going to consciously choose maybe not to do anything about it. I thought that this kind of mustache twirling moment from book Catherine.
Yeah. It's a lot.
It's telling. It is still incredibly dramatic.
And I love the way that the actors are playing. And I love the way that the scene unfolds.
And I think there's something incredibly realistic about, true to this idea of Nancy anchoring on moments of truth and creating a narrative around them. The idea that a child would be in danger in the water and other people are swimming out to get the child and you get the child back to the beach with such urgency and such care and such attention that you forget one of the other people that went out to save them.
Seems entirely plausible to me. And so the overall sequence of events makes sense in the way that it probably made sense to Nancy.
It's both plausible and there were multiple times where I'm like, how is he possibly not going to make it? Here are two other strapping men swimming out here to get him. Why does he not just hook his tired arm over the back of the dinghy to get Toad to shore? There's no way.
There's so many people in the water. There's no way.
And then he does. And to your point, I agree.
They're all swept up and they padding the backs of the two men who like to nick to shore, all this sort of stuff like that. So there is a tremendous amount of tragic tension in that where I'm just sort of like, well, how possibly could they forget him? He's right there.
And yet they, and still, and yet they do, but Catherine doesn't. And that version of Catherine, that fictionalized version of Catherine, like, yeah,

is more evil, which

then, of course, yeah, prompts these people who've read this book

to be like, aren't we so delighted she got her

punishment? She absolutely sucks.

They're really hammering that note. Who do you think

in this story will be the first to refer

to book Catherine by the C word? Because that

is coming. Someone will do it.

I don't know who it's going to be yet.

In the book, it's exactly what we were talking about last week. You brought up the easiest way to turn an audience against a female character is to portray them as a bad mother.
And she is the mother who is leaving Nicholas on the beach to go bone with this teenager in the shower and falling asleep and completely ignoring her son. Yeah.
It's all coded right there in a way that would make it very easy for a reader to think, oh my God, this woman is the worst. The way they cut back and they're still having sex in the shower.
And I was like, meanwhile, back in the shower, this is still happening. First of all, we know enough about Jonathan's work to know that that's not how that's going.
Some pictures only have one speed, you know? And I appreciate that Sex Yoda is doing all she can do to coach him up. They've been together one day.
Not even 24 hours. And he's like, you know I would do anything for you.
Nancy. Once again, Nancy.
I have some questions about the way that you've written your son here. Incredible stuff.
As you want to do occasionally to weigh in on perhaps the NBA accuracy of a likeness of an actor, something like that, I would like to bring to bear my exterior expertise, which is how bookstores work. And I will just tell you this from me to you right now.
Please. It's incredibly hard to get a self-published book to be placed in a bookstore in the first place, not to mention a bookstore as small as that bookstore.
And not to mention a self-published book with the most self-published book-ass cover I have ever scene.. Exactly.
So let's say you can't, let's say we do get the owner to read it as it plays out in the book. She does love it.
She wants to champion it. You are getting a stack of five at most at the register.
That is the most we can do it. We are not taking half of our window display and like a ton of bookshelf besides and a whole entire display table inside of the store to promote your with love and respect self-published book unless you are el james and you've written 50 shades of gray that is that is our uh exception so i just had to call bullshit a little bit on um the placement of the book the fact that it's there in the bookshop and he like scoped out which bookshop she would go into, that all could still have worked with five copies stacked at the register.
We still could have caught Catherine's attention and made her queasy. She also does strike me as someone who would hashtag shop local.
She's going to the small bookstore for sure. Absolutely.
I mean, she got her soul at the local fish market. That fishmonger, by the way, that guy was legit.
I need a fishmonger like that in my life. Do you not have...
I really feel like you should have a fishmonger. You seem like the kind of guy who should have a fishmonger.
Even living coastal, finding a good fish guy is harder than you would think. A monger in general is not sort of easy to come by outside of the UK, I would say.
My kingdom for a monger. Yeah, cheese monger, something like that.

Okay, what else do we want to talk about

inside of these two episodes?

We don't get a lot of Nicholas in these episodes.

He pops up a little bit,

and I think kind of as a pawn of Robert's in a way,

he's kicking Catherine out of the house.

He's bringing Nick home,

who obviously it was her decision

to kind of push him out into the world,

out of the nest in the first place, and hope that her 25-year-old failed son could do literally anything. But Robert needs someone to commiserate with and I think wants some company.
And what it admittedly is a very difficult moment. And I think there's a larger conversation to be had about Robert is understandably very hurt and very wounded and very angry.
And you can even hear it in sort of like his internal monologuing as he's seeing other women in the world and the attributes that he ascribes to be positive versus negative. It's like he's clearly in a very fragile and angry space.
Oh, right. He's also committing blatant fraud at work in a way that this whole like manipulation of the truth idea that is clearly so central to this show, the whole purpose of the meeting he's in is like, how can we create a narrative that explains all the money laundering? When he starts to shout about integrity to Catherine at the end, and my parents always said, you had no integrity and I abandoned them for you.
And then, yeah, he's committing active charity fraud. It's not great.
Not the best. But so Nick, he has brought Nick home.
And one thing I would love to outsource this to our listeners, because I'll admit I'm out of my depth as far as Nick commiserating about his football club and its current state. I would love to know if people have a guess as to which club a creep like Nicholas would be into.
And so if you want to email us at griefcardigan at gmail.com

with whatever club aligns most closely

with the Nicholas we've seen so far, I would love to hear it. I have an answer, but I don't want to say it because I don't want to piss off those supporters.
You should say it. Jo, you simply have to say it.
I have to say, I will add my opinion when we get other... I don't want my opinion to be the lone opinion that's sitting here.
So let's just get some other voices in the mix and then I will add mine. Can I say this? I have the utmost respect for you as a colleague.
I love doing this podcast with you. You're being a coward.
Well, what's your guess? I have no guess. I don't know anything about football.
It's West Ham. Okay, so you flagged this last week and it was a really good flag because I think we get another sort of red flag on it this week.
Jisoo, who's Catherine's assistant, who is looking into Steven, gets put off the case by Catherine and is pissed about it. And I do not believe for a second that she is not going to continue her own little side investigation into what is going on with Steven.
Frankly, as she should, because Catherine comes in and is so mad that Jisoo is literally doing her job. And this is, I guess, the challenge of the show or a challenge of the show.
Catherine, not a great person. No, no.
Tough hang. Not great.
Not terrible, but not great. And that's what we're the sort of choppy waters we're forced to navigate here is just sort of like, can we continue to find sympathy for this person as we peel back the layers on them? What made them not great in the first place? What happened in their life to get them here? All of that sort of stuff.
I really appreciate how unmistakably unlikable she is though. Like she's not over the top.
Yes. top intolerable, but it's so clear.
It comes out in most of her interactions with most people. There's like a part of her that is just very unpleasant.
Well, just to Robert's assessment, this idea of like she's used to getting her own way. She's always gotten her own way.
Yes. Robert not listening to her is the first time in their entire relationship that he's not just sort of allowed himself to be led by her it would seem i'm curious to see more of her interaction with her mom like i recognized her mom's voice on the phone the actress jemma jones who's great so i assume we're gonna see you know where is she gonna go when she gets kicked out of the house i assume she'll go see her mom she's terrible in such a really realistic way and someone someone you know who's just sort of has been privileged in every way, is absolutely gorgeous, is absolutely wealthy, is very smart, very successful, all of that sort of stuff.
And so is never, well, I don't want to say never because we don't know the story. There's something that happened in Italy and we don't know what happened.
And we're making assumptions just as Robert was on the bus about the various people he was seeing there. So that's part of the lesson of the show.
The show really wants to catch us out and be like, uh-huh, you thought that, and I'm trying not to fall into its clutches. We don't want to be the sanctimonious twits.
Only Robert. Only Robert.
All right. Anything else you want to say about these episodes? I think there's a couple of small throwaway things I want to just flag for future reference.
Please. In Catherine's home office, on what I think was like a windowsill, there's like a posable figure, but it has the head of like a bull or a minotaur or something.
Okay. I don't know what the thematic or symbolic significance of that would even be, but it's not something that everyone has in their office.
I'll tell you that. She also has giant green horse statues in her office that I thought were pretty excellent.
I really liked them. She is 100% a horse girl.
It's not even close. She definitely grew up with a lot of equestrian access.
Quick sidebar on Cate Blanchett, cat owner. Kai shared with us this piece that was in The Hollywood Reporter.
They were reporting on a on a like onstage Q&A that actually saw a video clip of later where Alfonso Cuaron was talking about how Cate Blanchett ruined the cat that was hired to play the gray cat inside of the Ravenscroft household because that the cat wrangler was upset because the cat used to be like took years and years to get the cat trained. And now the cat just does whatever it wants or more importantly, whatever Kate wants it to do.
And that according to Alfonso Cuaron, quote, she has ruined the cat. And Kiblaich's response to this is my favorite.
I don't know that this made it into the article. Maybe it did and I missed it, but she said, cat wrangler is an oxymoron.
She was just sort of like, who wrangles a cat in the first place? So ruined or liberated. Yeah, exactly.
Who wrangles a cat? Come on. I am contractually obligated, as you are too, to mention any possible fleabag comparisons, and we've already talked about the foxes.
In a sexual encounter, or at least a suggestive one, a character tells another one to kneel, and look, that's just always going to be fleabag coded to me. Correct.
Andrew Scott says, you can't steal my entire game. What are you doing here? I did think in the grand scheme of how Jonathan is portrayed in the book, in these book scenes, which again are quite racy.
In a way that I think we were led to believe based on the photos alone, like those could have been a plot device without being as suggestive as they are. And so the fact that it ultimately got as erotic as it did, again, very weird move for Nancy.
Also very weird that Jonathan basically turns into Austin Powers with the camera. Again, wild inconsistency inside of this character.
Completely. Nancy is spitting a compelling yarn.
We were spellbound by the restaurant scene, but in general, the depiction of the characterization of Jonathan just keeps on

moving around the map in a way that, again,

is supposed to set off alarm bells, I think, for us.

But yeah, the quivering mask

that he is in the restaurant versus

taking control of the camera and

giving her lingerie to pose in and stuff

like that is like, what are we doing here?

Even within the bedroom,

the pitch of his moans

is not consistent with the Austin Powers-esque figure that is art directing this entire photo shoot. And frankly, the sheer amount of candles that are lit in that room is not a realistic depiction of any kind of reality.
I'm sorry. It's just not.
That is one of the most beautiful hotel rooms I've ever seen in my entire life. It looks incredible.
It looks like something out of a book. All right.
So I think we did it. Nancy, we have some questions that we do respect your grieving process, but you didn't need to take it there maybe necessarily.
But there we are. Here we are.
Their meaning where exactly? Which there are you referring to? All of the sex Yoda-ing, I would say. The number of times the phrase Kylie's nipple is uttered, I think, is where I would offer some edits for Nancy.
Yes. Personally.
I mean, it got flagged by legal, that's for sure. How is this book publishable? Again, the rules for self-publishing are very- It's pretty fast and loose.
Very last. But yeah, they'll be hearing from Kylie's lawyer, I'm sure.
Okay, so here's your assignment, prestige listeners. Find Rob a fish or cheesemonger somewhere in the peninsula, the Bay Area.
That would be great. And please tell us who you think Nikki is cheering for.
Nikki and Robert. It's their shared team.
It's their team, for sure. What is their team? We might be able to figure out if we did forensic look at the TV screen that they were watching a couple episodes ago.

That might be something to pursue.

If you're a West Ham supporter, you don't have to email me.

It's okay.

I know you're mad.

I would recommend if you did, though.

I support you and your anchor.

It's fine.

We will be back next Monday.

We only have one episode to break down, so we might do a bit more of a granular speed through. Also, let us know if you should eat old preserves with your wife's hair in it.
I don't know. They're preserved for a reason.
I think this is a last a long time. I mean, the canning process is quite effective, but a decade, I don't know that I'd be doing that.
Yeah, I feel like once there's like a thick layer of dust on them, then like maybe it's time to move on. Also, hashtag let that bug out of that jar.
That's all I have to say. Release the bug.
Free the bug.

Thanks to Kai Grady, who's the best always.

And we will see you soon.