Disclaimer Recap: Forever Young

In a way, nothing terribly new happens on Disclaimer this week. Episode four was about kicking Catherine Ravenscroft to the ground, and episode five is about making sure she stays down. Forced out of the grand house she shares with Robert, she trudges back to the modest bungalow she grew up in. Stephen is able to turn Catherine’s entire office against her with shockingly little effort. And finally, he comes for Nicholas, who we already know to be a peculiar, frail person. Like shooting fish in a barrel, really.

It’s more of the same, and yet episode five represents an enormous shift in how our story is being told. Disclaimer switches perspectives and timelines as it always has, but it’s no longer encumbered by the plot of The Perfect Stranger, which for most of the season masqueraded as the past. The Jonathan that Nancy brought to the page no longer exists; neither does her version of Catherine — a femme fatale conjured from a measly roll of boudoir photos. Their absence from this episode has unexpected reverberations.

From the outset, Stephen Brigstowe’s elaborate plotting has been tinged with madness, but it’s also been played for laughs. For example, there’s the silly miming of a grenade toss every time he delivers a copy of The Perfect Stranger or even his bumbling conversation with the Notting Hill bookseller. But without Nancy’s novel constantly insisting that Catherine’s a bad person, Stephen’s conduct feels more outlandish to me. His eccentricities — once easily dismissed as the affectations of a lonely man — read maniacal. Whatever happened in the past, no matter how close it might be to Nancy’s account, Stephen is also a bad person. He’s the kind of man who would slowly torture a living thing to death — a bug, a stranger — just because he can.

This episode picks up with Catherine in the car Robert called for her at the end of the last. It seems the Ravenscrofts don’t own a well-appointed country mansion or even a bolthole in Cornwall to which she can escape. Instead, Catherine ends up in front of her ailing mother’s house. Honestly, until she exited the car in Little Whinging, I’d forgotten that Catherine had been given a mother suffering from dementia — a conspicuous ailment in a series about storytelling. Still, Catherine doesn’t burden her mother with what’s happening to her now. She lays in her mother’s bed, thinking about how old the room smells. The subtext is clear: Stephen needn’t bother coming between these women. Time will steal Catherine’s mother from her soon enough.

Until that happens, though, she’ll always be Catherine’s mother, a kind lady who leaves headache tablets on the bedside table. Who welcomes her adult daughter into her bed without prying. In the middle of the night, when Catherine finally breaks down and admits what’s brought her home, her mother sleeps through the speech or perhaps politely pretends to. Either way, it’s the first time anyone has let Catherine get a word in edgewise, to tell her side of the story. (The audience, of course, isn’t privy to Catherine’s confession, which gets drowned out by voice-over. So, so much voice-over.)

Catherine and her mother aren’t the only parent-child pair getting reacquainted in episode five. With his wife out of the house, Robert is free to move Nicholas back in. But the two aren’t as close as Robert believes. After dinner, Nick’s eager to flee his dad’s aggressively cheery façade. He’s even having sympathetic thoughts for his mother, whom he despises. He can tell “something” is “going on” between his parents, but he doesn’t bother to ask about it, help with the dishes, or even respect the house’s no-smoking policy. Nicholas is basically pathetic, but in this one small way, he’s oddly powerful: Robert won’t risk alienating his son the way Catherine has.

Then again, they already are alienated, aren’t they? Robert doesn’t know anything about Nicholas. He doesn’t ask about his friends or his new girlfriend, assuming she exists. Robert doesn’t know that after he says “goodnight” to his son, Nick will creep down the stairs and out the front door. He will make his way to his dealer’s squat and cough up an extra fiver for permission to shoot up right then and there on a dirty mattress, the glare of train lights coming through the broken window.

Stephen, too, is spending time with his son again — summoning his own incarnation as Nancy did before him. Tommy, an old student of Justin’s, has set up an Instagram account for Jonathan Brigstocke, populating it with Jonathan’s photos and interests. Crucially, Tommy also teaches Stephen how to use the account: how to send messages, how to use abbreviations without sounding like a noob, TYVM. If this were a real 19-year-old boy’s account, there would be mention of his favorite music, Tommy says. Stephen suggests a post about Hesse’s bildungsroman Demian, too. No, not books, Tommy tells him. (Neither Stephen nor Alfonso Cuarón are above a li’l cross-generational jibe.)

Until now, Catherine’s professional life has really only been gestured at. We know that she is an award-winning documentary maker and that her most recent accolades are for a project about private education. She has a colleague named Jisoo — a research assistant or something — to whom she has mentioned Stephen Brigstocke before. Earlier this season, when Jisoo continued looking into him despite Catherine waving her off, they had a mildly fractious interaction about it. Catherine has another colleague named Simon — someone with roughly equal seniority, I think — who completely sucks. He’s jealous of her lustrous filmography and occasionally condescending; Catherine, for her part, isn’t above needling him. Despite this, we’ve mostly been given the impression that she’s good at her job and that people like her.

Which is why I found what happened at work in episode five so baffling. Stephen shows up at Catherine’s office with copies of The Perfect Stranger for Jisoo to distribute to her colleagues. I must admit that I find this aspect of Kevin Kline’s performance confounding. Stephen is a decently self-assured guy, but every time he’s about to do a little revenge, he becomes a troll. He hunches over; his voice goes grumbly. He seems deranged to me, but Jisoo is inexplicably keen to believe his unsubstantiated story: that her esteemed boss and mentor, Catherine Ravenscroft, has actually been threatening this skittish little man into silence because he knows she let another man die, or so he says.

Which brings me to my second point of consternation: If I were Jisoo, I would probably think something like, “Wow, what a weirdo. I should ask Catherine about this, given I’ve known her for years, and these allegations are bananas.” But instead, Jisoo goes running to Simon, Catherine’s known frenemy. Never mind that just a few episodes ago, Jisoo was tickled to see him teased by Catherine. She then distributes copies of The Perfect Stranger to the entire office like a one-woman Scholastic Book Fair. Is this all because Catherine waived her off a story without saying pretty please? Even if Stephen is right about Jisoo’s unchecked ambition, destroying Catherine won’t make her any more successful. (It will, however, leave Jisoo less well-connected.)

Well, whatever. When Catherine arrives, the confrontation she has with Simon and Jisoo turns ugly fast. He’s grandstanding, parroting Stephen’s allegations in front of the entire office and lecturing her about integrity. He doesn’t even have enough shame to use his inside voice or read the book first. Catherine, quite rightly, tells him to mind his own business. This is a personal matter. It doesn’t become a professional one just because Stephen Googled their office. And while it’s probably right that Catherine shouldn’t have asked Jisoo to find Stephen’s address for him, it’s the moral equivalent of using the work printer for an Amazon return label.

But Simon pushes. When he doesn’t feel sufficiently listened to, he grabs Catherine’s shoulder. Twice. On the second grab, as Catherine tries to leave the office, unwilling to divulge to these backstabbers what she’s yet to even discuss with her husband, she smacks Simon. This is clearly a big mistake. Clearly. And afterward, it would have been a better idea to say “I’m so sorry” than what she did say: “You asked for it.” And yet! I’m still stunned by how every person in the office was handed a shitty self-published copy of this JV erotica and thought anything much of it. One out of five stars — I wish I could give it zero, but Goodreads won’t let me. DNF. “You’re so canceled!” Jisoo calls after her boss by way of goodbye. (Another li’l cross-generational jibe.)

It’s hard to say if Catherine’s career will outlive the social-media outrage her slap inspires, but she doesn’t seem to care right now. Besides Robert and her work, there’s only one more thing left for her to lose: Nicholas. She heads to Stephen Brigstocke’s house to confront him. To stem the bleeding. To save her boy. But she can’t even convince Stephen to come to the door. Her pleas to be heard, screamed through the letterbox, are no more effective than Robert’s plan to win Stephen over by treating him to the carving trolley at Wiltons. There’s no Bordeaux expensive enough, though Stephen does relish the chance to pat Robert on the hand across a dinner party. To be the source of pity rather than its object.

And it’s all besides the point anyway because Stephen’s game is already afoot. Using the Instagram profile he made for Jonathan, he’s been messaging with Nicholas all day, toying with him and earning his trust. He laughs at how eager and pathetic this 25-year-old man is to chat with his 19-year-old son; he never pauses to consider how unhinged it is that he’s an old man posing as his dead son to ruin his dead son’s ex-lover’s son’s life. He manages the task easily, of course. Over IG, he informs Nicholas outright that he’s the little boy saved in The Perfect Stranger, which makes Catherine the “whore” he hates so much. Stephen even sends Nicholas the dirty photos of his own mother. Maybe he tells himself that this final awful act is to establish his credibility, but he’s gleeful to press send, drunk at the possibility of tipping this family over the edge.

Nicholas, whose life is a disappointment to him, who can tell that his life is a disappointment to his parents, can’t handle it. He calls his mother in hysterical tears. By the time he makes it back to his dealer’s yard, he already looks pulverized — even the dealer tells him to clean himself up. But Nick doesn’t want to clean himself up. He wants to let himself drown. He wants his parents to stop asking about Italy. He lays back down on the dirty mattress and hopes (in voice-over) never to leave this place again. We can’t be sure when the episode ends that he won’t get his wish.

“I have kept Jonathan young,” Stephen says of the internet profile he establishes for his son early in the episode (in voice-over.) “He is forever young, forever on his gap year, about to start at university. Now our son has a future.” But you can’t keep someone young by writing them into a novel, and you can’t preserve a boy who died before Instagram was invented by imagining what he would have posted on it. She can crawl back into her mother’s bed, but it won’t make Catherine a child again.

The reality, of course, is that there’s nothing Stephen can do to give his boy a future. He’s simply willing to steal Catherine’s — to trap her and the people she loves under an upturned glass and see how long they’ll survive it.