‘Big Little Lies’ Season 2 Episode 3 Recap: “The End Of The World”

After two break-neck episodes featuring patent-pending necklace acting, FBI arrests, Ambien-driving, affair exposures via teen, and so forth, Big Little Lies now finds itself dwelling in the aftermath of these various explosions in episode 3.

Aptly titled “The End of the World,” this hour slows life in the what-you-see-is-not-what-you-get town of Monterey down significantly, giving its residents some time and space to ponder the current status of their various circumstances (angrily, and in the direction of a disconcertingly serene therapist, if at all possible). Where the central thrust of Season 1 was the mystery of who died at Trivia Night and by whom, the motivation of Season 2—as far as it concerns keeping our main moms tied together—is a much smaller affair. A truly little lie about the precise way in which Perry died while attempting to kick his wife to death. It’s the difference between two words: fell and pushed. And perhaps, when you really get down to it, between two charges: manslaughter and self-defense.

There’s no reason to ever expose this lie—if you ask this recapper, not even morally speaking. The only thing to be done with it is a personal reckoning of sorts, both for the audience, and the five reeling members of the Monterrey Five. It makes the driving force of Season 2 a much more cerebral affair, which becomes especially evident in episode 3 as the excitement of the first day of second grade and speaking loudly about affairs in the family kitchen fade away into anxiety, regret, and extremely productive therapy sessions.

The big secret takes a bit of a back seat as these women deal with the sun-dappled shambles of their personal lives, but the major reveal in episode 3 is that no one has been keeping this big secret especially well. There may be no proof that Bonnie pushed Perry to his death, but there is not a clueless husband, a startlingly articulate 8-year-old, nor a barista, dog-walker, or mailman who has not noticed that something is up with the most notorious moms of Monterey in the last 10 months since they witnessed a man fall to his death. So we’re left to wonder, with a secret that’s already fairly exposed, and has little reason to play on anyone’s conscience too much—what could possibly cause the crack that finally breaks this dam?

Enter, Mary Louise: agent of unpredictable chaos and a bit of a bespectacled anti-#MeToo nightmare. I mean, this woman should add a “trigger warning” pendant to her cross necklace she makes my heart jump into my throat so often. Mary Louise’s desire to separate the goodness and the badness in Perry, allowing one to outweigh the other, as opposed to accepting the facts—that her son was a rapist and an abuser—is nearly as nauseating as Perry’s actual abuse. It feels like a punch to the gut each time she implores the women he’s already hurt so much to silence their stories, to lie in the name of the man who abused them.

That’s a toughie! This episode is a toughie! Even our usually unbreakable Madeline is as down as she’s ever been, opening the episode atop the jewel-toned cushions of Dr. Reisman’s office. At first, it appears she’s alone on the couch, telling Dr. Reisman, “I fucked up, there’s no other way to say it.” But it’s soon revealed that Ed is also there, a safe five feet away, huffing out, “Thank you!” when Dr. Reisman asks Madeline why her husband should trust her claims that she would never stray again. But Dr. Reisman isn’t here to defend any men scorned: “I’ll turn to your betrayal in a minute,” she shoots at Ed. “Adultery is one for of infidelity; indifference is another.”

That! Woman! Is! Terrifying!

And hopefully not simply turning into a cheap plot device to explain the psychological inner-workings of characters to us, but to be fair, we already knew that Madeline is trying to force Abigail to go to college because she’s insecure about her own lack of college-level education and associates that as the starting point of what she deems an inadequate life. Madeline just didn’t know about that, and of course, has only angry scoffs in response. But when she hops into the Buick-of-truth with Celeste later, she gets vulnerable in a way she wasn’t able to in the therapy session when Dr. Reisman asked about Madeline’s own family. The Buick will do that to ya.

Madeline tells Celeste that when she was three or four, she walked in on her father having sex with another woman. Her father pulled her out and told her there are some things her mother didn’t need to know about. She never talked about it with either of her parents, and when Nathan left her, it confirmed something she learned so long ago: “That [marriage] is not to be trusted.”

And speaking of not-to-be-trusted: Mary Louise has arrived to ruin someone’s day in the name of protecting her awful son. I can have empathy for Mary Louise as a mother who lost a child; it becomes difficult to retain that empathy when this grown ass woman refuses to recognize the mountain of proof in front of her that said child grew up to be a man who attacked women, and confronts sweet Jane and her poor, godawful bangs at her place of work demanding a paternity test on Ziggy.

I felt like a proud mother when Jane spit back at her, “I know exactly who my son’s father is,” not just because of the terrible memories of that night, but also because she says Perry was the only man she’d been with. And I felt like one of those mothers who could lift a car off a baby, ready to use all my maternal adrenaline to fight someone, when Mary Louise sniffed back, “That you can recall.” But Jane didn’t need me or my protection. She tells Mary Louise once more that her memories are accurate—Mary Louise’s son raped her.

And while Jane can be strong-willed in the face of that truth, she still feels the weight of that violation every day. After a very cute date with her seemingly cute (and hopefully not sinister) aquarium co-worker, Corey leans in for a kiss, and Jane shudders away. Jane tells Corey she has to “idol in neutral” for a while, which he doesn’t mind, continuing to respectful of her boundaries after that, but Bonnie later encourages Jane to be honest with Corey about her history if she thinks she wants it to be a serious relationship. Then Bonnie gives a dark chuckle: “I’m such a hypocrite—Nathan has no idea who I am.”

What’s! Up! With! Bonnie?!

Ignore everything I said at the top of the recap: THIS is actually the motivating secret of season 2. It might not be motivating all the women at hand, but I’m dying to know just what lies in Bonnie’s past that she would marry a dolt like Nathan just to keep it hidden. Throughout the episode, she flashes back to memories of her mother, both carrying her on the beach, and holding her in a pool, where she eventually forces little Bonnie’s head under water because, “If something ever happens, we don’t want you to drown.”

Drowning continues to come up this season, both literally and metaphorically, and it seems that poor Amabella is drowning in anxiety. During a reading of Charlotte’s Web in her second grade classroom that somehow turns into a lesson about global warming, Amabella faints in a closet (honestly unclear how she ended up in the closet unnoticed). At the hospital, the doctor diagnoses it as an anxiety attack due to stress, so naturally, Renata and Gordon proceed to hiss at each other over her tiny little body about who is more stressful to her.  

And while I am concerned for Amabella, I cannot help but appreciate the all-star Renata moments her precarious state gifts us with. First, Renata and Gordon hire a child psychologist for Amabella, who apparently makes house visits in a terrifying Little Bo Peep costume that just pulls the truth right out of anxious little nuggets…

I was personally very anxious listening to this grown woman speak in a high-pitch Bo Peep voice, but once Amabella goes outside to play and the false teeth come out, it’s all business: Amabella isn’t being bullied. She’s anxious because her dad is about to go to jail, she thinks something has been going on with her mom, and she’s scared the world is going to end because of climate change…

I’ll give you one guess which of those anxiety-inducers Renata latches onto.

She marches into Principal Nippal’s office and tells him—along with Amabella’s teacher who tells her that it’s important they deconstruct climate change for the children—that they “deconstructed my little girl into a coma.” Principal Nippal informs Renata that they have to serve the entire school, not just her daughter, which Renata takes as an attack on her recent outflow of wealth, resulting in her informing them, “I will be rich again, I will rise up, and I will buy a fucking polar bear for every kid in this school.” And listen, Principal Nippal may be a little smarmy, but he has some lines of his own; he just waits until Renata’s out of earshot to tell the teacher, “These second grade mothers, they’re fucking Shakespearean, and that woman? She’s the fucking Medusa of Monterey.”

And right on theme, it’s nothing short of a tragedy what’s happening in Celeste’s home, where she’s trapped between clinging to the good memories of Perry for her twins, and Dr. Reisman’s encouragement to cling to the bad memories in order to move on from a relationship that remains as toxic in his death as it was when he was alive. Dr. Reisman compares Celeste to a veteran who wishes to return to combat because life after war seems too mundane.

I certainly don’t blame Celeste for being angry with Dr. Reisman’s instruction to reject her good memories of Perry. She’s in an impossible situation that other people seems to think she should be abel to paint in black and white. Mary Louise wants her to excuse Perry’s violence, Dr. Reisman wants her to harness it, and she wants to figure out how to help her boys mourn a father who she wants them to be nothing like, all while she herself is still missing the good parts of Perry and being haunted by the bad.

But it’s this compartmentalizing of the man that Perry was that continues to burden all the women whose lives he touched. After Mary Louise super-creeps on Jane and Ziggy, she can no longer deny that Perry is Ziggy’s father because, as she shows Jane in photos, he looks exactly like Perry’s brother Raymond who died a small child. But being disproven of something she was so sure was a lie doesn’t make Mary Louise ease up on any of her other accusations.

It’s so nearly a sweet moment when Jane sees these photos of a relative who looks so much like Ziggy, and Mary Louise proposes the idea of being in her grandson’s life. But nothing sours a moment like the reminder that someone prioritizes the memory of a violent man over your actual, living truth. When Jane tells Mary Louise that Ziggy is a sweet boy, Mary Louise returns that, “there was never a gentler, more tender little boy than Perry—he was so sweet and gentle.”

Looking physically ill (it feels redundant to mention the amazing performances of all the main players, but…Shailene Woodley is so good this season), Jane whispers, “He grew up to be neither.” That at least makes Mary Louise stop waxing poetic about Perry, but then, it gets worse: “This is perhaps an unfair question, but on the night of your rendezvous with my son…who initiated the encounter?”

“Does that make a difference?” Jane rightly asks. Mary Louise just innocently wonders if Perry might have been “tempted,” or given what Celeste has told her about their violent sex life, “perhaps he misinterpreted or misread a signal from you.”

Jane tells Mary Louise plainly: “Your son raped me. And as he was doing do, I was screaming for him to get off me. I don’t think that you misread that.”

I hate that Jane has to say this at all, but it’s clear that there’s nothing any other woman could tell Mary Louise about her son that could make her believe them. She’s arrived in Monterey for answers, but only the answers she wants to hear, and none of the women she’s reached so far have given her that. Even Detective Quinlan keeps quiet when Mary Louise arrives in her office, pointedly asking, “You don’t believe my son slipped, do you?” But there are still a few strings left to pull, notably those member of the Monterey Five she hasn’t terrorized yet…

Which has finally dwindled down to just Bonnie, because like terrifying ships passing in the night, we’ve now seen Renata and Mary Louise in a room together, just as Renata is telling Madeline how Principal Nippal allegedly told her to go to hell in their recent meeting.

Renata tries to politely remind Mary Louise that they’ve met before, at Perry’s funeral, and she’s so sorry for Mary Louise’s loss. “You were there when he feel,” Mary Louise responds with her signature x-ray stare. Madeline tells Renata not to worry about it as they walk away: “She’s very strange.”

Plus, Madeline has other things to worry about. Even though they opened the episode in therapy, Ed shows no signs of coming around on Madeline’s betrayal of their marriage. When she walks up on he and Bonnie laughing at the coffee shop, showing the first signs of happiness we’ve seen from either of them in quite some time, she asks him how long he’s going to punish her. “For as long as I need or want, I guess,” Ed replies. And when Madeline asks how he can be so uncharacteristically cruel with her when he was just so warm with Bonnie, he really shifts into high gear, telling her that it would be “sort of a twofer” to piss Nathan and her off at the same time, implying…well, nothing good.

There is a sweet moment back in the ol’ Buick where Madeline breaks down to Celeste about how poorly all of her most important relationships have gone, including her friendship with Celeste because what kind of friend could she be if she didn’t recognize the pain Celeste was in with Perry, and if Celeste couldn’t feel comfortable telling her. But Celeste just tells her that she wishes she had told her: “You would have jumped into that pool and pulled me out so fast.”

Still, all of this is weighing on Madeline as she winds up getting called to the front of the parents assembly that’s been called over the issue of climate-change-induced anxiety in Otter Bay’s second graders. Always ready with an opinion, Madeline is chosen by Principal Nippal to get the grievances started, but what follows is—well, first a lament of how “we lie to our kids,” filling their head up with Santa Claus and happy endings…

Then there’s a brief detour into a lyrical breakdown of “Rainbow Connection,” which Madeline can’t quite remember the actual lyrics of, but she’s pretty sure there’s a bit about rainbows being illusions, and we have to tell kids that: “You can’t tell them part of the truth, you have to tell them the whole truth.” That’s about the time that Madeline remembers she’s speaking to an entire crowd of people, but when she looks up, she only sees Ed, standing in the back…giving her nothing.

She runs out of the auditorium, and when Celeste sees Ed outside, she asks him if it was too much to get up there and help his wife (once again showing that it’s so often easier to stand up for your friends than it is to stand up for yourself). “Thanks for the tip, Celeste,” Ed says back sarcastically: “Maybe we could get coffee, and you could fill me in on whatever else I’ve missed.”

So the question that presents itself this episode seems to be: How can anyone move on with a past that’s this poorly hidden? In the montage that closes the episode, every character finds themselves sitting in the misery of the life they’ve already lived with Bonnie mysteriously thinking back to walking on the beach with her mom, Madeline remembering her affair, Renata looking out from the windows of her bankrupt mansion, and most concerning, Celeste masturbating to an old video of Perry moments after telling Mary Louise that her drawers are full of pain meds because sometimes she needed them after beatings at the hands of her husband…

But then there’s Jane, perhaps the only one who was unburdened the night Perry went down that flight of stairs. At the end of the episode, Corey asks if he can hug her, and they end up quietly slow dancing. It’s a sweet moment—something which Big Little Lies has conditioned me to respond to directly with heart-eyes, and then immediate, inescapable fear for what’s to come.

Jodi Walker writes about TV for Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly, and in her pop culture newsletter These Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Stream Big Little Lies Season 2 Episode 3 ("The End Of The World") on HBO Go