Episode 6
Season 1
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
We all knew it could come to a fatal showdown between Cherry and Laura, and that’s precisely what the finale delivers.
Photo: Prime
That there was room for only one possessive psycho in Daniel’s life was clear from The Girlfriend’s first episode; the subsequent five episodes rode on the tension of whether it would be Cherry or Laura who would ultimately persevere. In a way, I admire the show’s straightforwardness: I expected the finale to culminate in a showdown between Cherry and Laura, and that’s precisely what we got. Of all the elements of their final fight teased in the show’s opening sequence, only the pool and the bloodied heel are of consequence. There are no gunshots involved. The projector might have been a reference to the recording Laura captured of Mrs. Cherry confessing to Cherry’s history of violence. The fact that we finally learned Mrs. Cherry’s name — Tracey! — is the second-most-pleasant surprise in the finale.
The first is that, at the very last moment, The Girlfriend abandoned the two-perspective structure. The finale plays in one continuous act. As a result of Laura’s estrangement from Daniel, Laura and Cherry live in completely separate realities; they barely come into contact until their final confrontation. That explains why the two-perspective structure couldn’t be justified in an episode like this and exposes the weakness of the conceit in the first place. It was never all that revelatory, chiefly because it focused on the least engaging aspects of each of their points of view.
In the finale, we learn that Cherry’s father didn’t simply fall 20 feet from a building site — Cherry pushed him because he abandoned her and Tracey with a bunch of debt. When Laura confronts Cherry with this information, Cherry states simply that “he deserved it.” This revelation is supposed to tell us that Cherry’s psychosis is relentless, but it feels tacked on, too brief to be engaging. As for Laura herself, all of her obsessive issues come back to her late daughter, Rose.
Maybe if each turn in perspective focused on how these particular torments shaped Laura’s and Cherry’s worldviews and drove them to action, rather than on slightly different interpretations of the same conversation (Laura yelling or not, Cherry staring demonically at Laura or not), they could have pushed their characters further. The Girlfriend’s characters are like well-built models: All the parts are there — Laura’s late daughter, Cherry’s childhood psychosis, Daniel’s resentment at the expectation that he’d fill the void left by Rose, Howard’s bitterness at the way his own grief was dismissed. But like a model, they have no singular perspective to speak of, no true personality; they are not alive.
That said, let us go over the events that culminate in the final fight. When we pick up on the finale, Cherry and Daniel are blissfully returning from a shopping trip, having picked out an absolutely monstrous rock for an engagement ring. Daniel wants Cherry to wear it right away, but she wants to wait until she has gotten her nails done so she can announce the engagement “the official way: on Instagram with French tips.” Excuse me just a moment — on Instagram? And I have had to type the word Connesta this whole time? Daniel doesn’t want the news to go on Instagram or Connesta or anywhere else; he hopes they can enjoy their happiness in private after the absolute shitstorm brought on by their public commitment. But Daniel has no real backbone or strength when it comes to Cherry. One sad look from her and he’s convinced: They should have an engagement party.
Laura learns the news from Daniel himself. He hasn’t picked up her calls since Cherry came home from a gallery visit with a bloodied head, so Laura waits for him outside the hospital, where he works — the only time in six episodes we have gotten confirmation that he is actually training to be in the medical field. She tries to convince him that she would never hurt Cherry, that she’s not a violent person — a refrain that will become important later — but he doesn’t want to hear it. He blurts out that they are engaged and storms out to meet Cherry, who from the car window sees Laura standing helplessly. Neither of them acknowledges her presence.
To make matters worse, Laura gets home to see Howard there, packing his stuff. He is still convinced that Cherry is a “nice girl” — so nice, in fact, that she donates money to a nursing home. Laura can intuit the fishiness of that statement, but Howard is angry about much more than just the Cherry problem. He is tired of fixing Laura’s messes; he has spent the past several years begging his friends to buy the ugly art she shows at her gallery so that she could keep her “hobby” alive. She never left him any room to grieve in their relationship, and he thinks — this one he delivers as he’s walking out — their failed marriage is her choice. The scene is rough to watch, not because of the emotions on display but because the acting and dialogue are so unpolished. There’s nothing to convince me that Laura feels an ounce of anything for Howard, while Howard’s show of frustration is too functional. Howard exists only to oppose Laura’s righteous view of herself — he exists only to say these things.
Even then, all Laura takes from the conversation are the words Cherry and nursing home, which remind her of that bill she seized through illegal means after Daniel’s accident. She goes to the nursing home to dig further. She sits with John, Cherry’s father, and makes up a story to fool the nurse on watch that she knew him before his accident. When he hears Cherry’s name, John begins to grunt and tremble — according to the nurse, the mere mention of Cherry is enough to agitate him. She also tells Laura about the building-site accident, though she doesn’t explicitly suggest that Cherry had anything to do with it.
The nurse, just a fountain of information, also tells Laura that Tracey works “at a butcher’s,” Laura’s next stop on her tour through Cherry’s past. Even for someone used to covering for her daughter’s wrongdoings, Tracey is remarkably self-possessed as Laura pries mercilessly into her life and accuses Cherry of every crime under the sun. One of the very first things she says to Tracey is that she doesn’t want Daniel to “end up like [Cherry’s] father,” implying that Daniel’s climbing accident — which was, as we saw, an actual accident — was anything but. She wonders how Tracey can protect Cherry, this coming from a woman who is willing to do anything to make sure that her son doesn’t kiss a girl she doesn’t like. When Tracey counters that she does it because she’s a mother, Laura says she’s a mother, too, and she’ll stop at nothing to protect her son. “If Cherry finds out what you’re doing,” Tracey says, “God help you and your son.”
This is the exchange that Laura secretly recorded, and later we’ll learn that Tracey said a lot more than just that. Laura voice-notes Daniel that she needs to speak with him urgently, but the texts come in while he’s in the shower, so Cherry has the chance to listen to and delete them before Daniel can see them. She pretends to be looking for wedding songs when he catches her with his phone in her hand. Wedding preparations are in full effect: Howard and Cherry have toasted to the happy couple with a glass of bubbly, and Howard has agreed to walk her down the aisle.
In fact, Howard is the only parent planning to be in attendance at Cherry and Daniel’s engagement party the next day. Tracey is simply up to here with Cherry’s mess. When Cherry learns from her mom that Laura has been asking questions about her father, she goes nuts. She puts on a little bandit outfit and goes to the gallery, which she can easily get into because she knows the code is Daniel’s birthday. With her stilettos click-clacking in the night, she burns Lilith’s portrait of Laura in both eyes with a cigarette, then spray-paints “LIAR” across all the other canvases in the show. She leaves Daniel’s creepy “Mama Bear” teddy outside Laura’s door to make sure Laura knows whom the message is from. When she gets home, Tracey gives her a disappointed look.
However unwise Lilith might have been to show her art at the gallery, it’s not fair that her work is collateral damage. She instantly starts crying when she sees what happened to her canvases, but Laura is sort of … ecstatic? She finally has something tangible to show the police, so for her, the whole thing is a net positive. “This is perfect,” she tells a shocked Lilith. “We got her!” This is a woman who hasn’t been part of Laura’s life over the past several years; who is we? Which reminds me: We never got to the bottom of their whole affair. Laura told Cherry a million years ago, in Spain, that Howard “didn’t even know the half of it.” What was the half of it?
Lilith’s hurt is not enough to stop Laura, who kicks into full gear. She sneaks up at the engagement party just as Cherry and Daniel are giving a toast. I expected her to jump on the mic and play the recording of Tracey, humiliating Cherry and proving herself right in front of all the people who had doubted her, but she took a milder route. Gently, Isabella grabs Laura by the shoulders and tries to get her to leave. Before she can, though, the police arrive to arrest Cherry “on suspicion of criminal damage.” Cherry doesn’t resist, and it occurs to her before questioning that she can blame the vandalism on Harriet. She can hardly suppress a smile when the idea comes to her and, later, when it works. Of course, it works partly because Tracey covered for Cherry once again — and once again, she’s not happy about it. Tracey has the clearest view of Cherry and Daniel’s relationship: “It’s not love; it’s ambition.”
Whatever Laura feels for Daniel is something else altogether. When he comes by the house, she tries to play him the recording, but he throws her phone across the room before she can pull it up. His resentments come gushing out: He’s always had to be her golden son, to be both himself and Rose, to live his life in fear of upsetting her. Realizing that reasoning with her son will not work, Laura tries a different approach. She pretends to give up. She tells Daniel that she will miss him very much and will never stop loving him. It’s almost as if she knows already that she is going to die. Persuading him to stay for “one last drink,” she drugs him with tranquilizers. And to think that if she were slightly nimbler with her phone, she could have avoided all of this …
I thought Laura would drug Daniel enough to, like, lock him in a room, tie him up, and force him to listen to the recording. Maybe I’m the psychopath? Instead, she plays it for him as he is half-asleep in his drugged state. It seems unlikely that, even if she had been able to play it all the way through, he would’ve had enough clarity to process it. But it hardly matters because Cherry arrives before Tracey has gotten to the “God help you” part. And she is pissed.
First things first: Cherry wants to know why Laura hates her. She almost sounds reasonable when she wonders what Laura thinks will happen if she is able to break them up — Daniel will never meet another woman, and she’ll control his life forever? But Laura isn’t interested in discussing the ifs and buts. She pulls her phone out to call the police, but because she apparently suffers from a terminal case of butterfingers, Cherry grabs it and also throws it across the room. Then she hears Daniel grunt upstairs. She pushes past Laura and runs upstairs to find him nearly passed out on the floor.
Laura is able to shove Cherry hard enough to pry Daniel away from her and lock her in the room, but Cherry jumps out of the balcony, sacrificing her ankle, and maneuvers herself back into the house. Laura meets her with a knife by the pool. “This isn’t you,” Cherry tries, echoing Laura’s own appeal earlier. “You’re not a violent person.” She’s able to wrestle the knife out of Laura’s hand just as they hear Daniel call out Cherry’s name. Laura pushes Cherry into the pool and they struggle, trying to drown each other. Sobered by the sight of his fiancée and his mother fighting to the death, Daniel jumps into the pool and wrestles Laura away from Cherry. Distracted by the purpose of keeping them apart, he holds Laura down for way too long, something that Cherry notices but lets ride. After a long beat, she shouts at him to stop. When Laura bobs back up, she’s dead. The smotherer has been smothered. And hey, now Cherry and Daniel have something to bond over — they have both killed a parent!
One year later, Cherry and Daniel are married and expecting a baby. At the townhouse with Howard, they are the picture of a happy family. Moses, Laura’s cat, who had returned shortly before she died for the explicit purpose of this scene, meows at the side table, under which Laura’s phone had slid when Cherry threw it all that time ago. Daniel picks it up, plugs it in, and looks through it. He finds the recording that could’ve saved his mother’s life and, who knows, potentially his own. Cherry smiles at him as he hears Tracey explain that “sooner or later, she’ll want something from you you’re not prepared to give, and she’ll get rid of you.” Sweet fool!
• What does everyone think happened to Harriet? Did she go to jail for Cherry’s high-heeled crimes?
• Laura managed to call the police on the landline before she drowned, and as that scene closes, we hear approaching sirens. But we’re not shown what Daniel and Cherry told the police to explain the whole thing or how he got away with it. More important, how Cherry got away with it — she had just been in custody not 12 hours ago, and now here she is at a crime scene … the officers must be just as gullible as Daniel.
• The Girlfriend’s ending reminded me somewhat of the final act of Gone Girl, David Fincher’s masterful adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 book, which more or less originated this whole genre. One of the most terrifying parts of that movie is when Nick realizes that, however crazy Amy might be, there’s no way he can ever liberate himself from her. She controls him. So too does Cherry control Daniel — she has merely stepped in for Laura. I only wish the show were more willing to dig into that horror as perceptively as Gone Girl did.
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