‘Big Little Lies’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: “She Knows”

The women of Big Little Lies are not doing very well. In fact, things were going so badly on this week’s episode, “She Knows,” that you could cut the tension with a pumpkin-carving knife. And I’m not just talk about the core disco moms of Monterey, although they’re definitely on the list. There’s also Bonnie’s (Zoë Kravitz)  mother Elizabeth who spends most of this episode in the hospital or stricken with transcendental terror, plus Mary Louise (Meryl Streep) who got the sensible spectacles slapped straight off her infuriating face (unrelated note: it’s official, Mary Louise sucks).

But all those auxiliary players are still just orbiting within the chaos vortex created by the Monterey Five, whose lives are, indeed, falling apart completely. And that means it’s time to start throwing around some blame…

For the first time, it’s called out that Madeline (Reese Witherspoon) was the one who came up with the mostly unnecessary plan to say Perry “fell” down the stairs. But they’re not blaming her—they’re just mentioning it! No one is blaming anyone! They’re just saying all the bad things happening in Monterey aren’t their fault, they’re someone else in the near vicinity’s fault. And there are a lot of bad things happening in Monterey. So many, the Otter Bay moms can’t just throw an extravagant party or rent a luxury van to go to Frozen on Ice to cover them up anymore.

Season 2 of Big Little Lies has already become so much more cerebral and mystical than its first whodunit installment that it felt foreign, almost nostalgic, to drop in on the women chatting casually at a pumpkin-carving party. All the signs of normalcy were there: Renata and Amabella in coordinating outfits; Celeste (Nicole Kidman) darting her eyes at her boys when they do something alarming like paint blood on a pumpkin; Jane’s (Shailene Woodley) bangs (they’ve willed me into submission!); Chloe being precocious; Madeline fretting outside and smoking a cigarette while insisting she never smokes.

Then along came season 2’s agent of chaos to fuck it all up. The grandmothers of Monterey seem to have a way of looking right past the masks of normalcy that their offspring and offspring-adjacent try to paste on—even while clearly wearing masks of their own. Mary Louise shows up at Madeline’s door all smiles, bundt cake in hand, saying she heard from the twins there was a party going on, but she can be “gone in a flash if it’s an imposition.” Of course Madeline invites her in, and of course Mary Louise immediately starts making references to “all of [her] grandchildren,” asking Ziggy if he’d like to come stay with her some time because she got a unit in Jane’s apartment complex.

Just as she’s turned to look Bonnie skeptically up and down, Celeste pulls Mary Louise aside and says that her lack of boundaries is starting to feel a little perverse: “Moving in with your son’s rape victim, for god’s sake, it’s not right!” Mary Louise agrees and says she’ll try to be more cognizant of her behavior…

Just kidding, she says like eight offensive things in a row, including but not limited to that she’s not convinced that Jane is a rape victim and wondering why Perry would have even been with her that night. “What was he looking for, or perhaps seeking refuge from?” she goads Celeste. “How many other women did he go to? If there’s one, there are others—”

BOOM—Celeste has had enough! And listen, I know she shouldn’t have done it, but Celeste’s spontaneous slap felt more therapeutic than anything that’s been going on with Dr. Reisman lately. Well, at least in the split second before Mary Louise tuts in response to Celeste’s instantaneous apology: “No, no, no, what do we call that—foreplay?”

Reader, I gulped.

Mary Louise walks this line between concerned mother/grandmother, and willfully manipulative monster that makes me absolutely hate her—I mean, I really hate her—but I also can’t ignore that some of her concern may be warranted. After The Slap, Celeste and Mary Louise meet at Monterey’s favorite outdoor coffee shop, where Mary Louise says that she’s worries about the boys: “You seem unwell—erratic.” If I were to be seated on one of the many available wicker thrones next to Mary Louise, I might point out that she tends to personally provoke much of Celeste’s more erratic behavior. But I wasn’t there, so instead, Mary Louse she launches into another tirade on how Celeste isn’t grieving correctly.

“It’s meant to be shared, grief; it’s insurmountable, too difficult a battle to be waged alone,” Mary Louise tells her, even though moments later, it’s revealed that she herself had to grieve alone after the death of Perry’s younger brother because her husband left her.

“I deserved the blame, to be left,” Mary Louise says matter-of-factly. She says that her ex-husband made a new life, started a new family, and became a devoted father. “It’s good, people can move on after tragedy—just not together sometimes.” While you weigh out if that’s a threat or a warning, I’d love to pose a question: When exactly are we going to learn that Little Perry had something to do with his brother’s mysterious death, and at that point, how is Mary Louise going to keep denying any former insight into her son’s violence?

For now, we wait, because the Wrights can’t hog all the trauma! There’s also Madeline, whose scorned husband Ed continues to both give her the cold shoulder but also leave her in limbo as to whether he’s going to stay with her or not. There’s Bonnie, who killed a guy, and whose mom is maybe psychic and maybe onto her. And of course, Renata, whose husband’s financial malfeasance has landed them at bankruptcy court which includes the physical removal of Gordon’s Rolex, Renata’s wedding ring, and their Tesla keys on the spot.

This all converges at the blowout 70s disco birthday party (y’know—how 2nd graders love nostalgia?!) Renata is throwing for Amabella as one last rich-person hoorah. Watching all of the women walk into the glitter-doused mansion with their accompanying husbands and children felt a lot like watching them walk into Trivia Night last season. It seems a little early in the season for someone to die, but something bad was clearly going to happen here.

Indeed, the mood is tense: Bonnie, showing much more fire inside her than she has to this point in the season marches right over to Madeline and Celeste and demands, “What exactly does your mother-in-law known?” She says Mary Louise was giving her a weird look at the pumpkin party, but Celeste assures Bonnie that if Mary Louise is suspicious of anyone, it’s her. Madeline asks Celeste if all that suspicion bothers her, and Celeste is like, Well, YEAH, if I had it to do over again, I would have just told the truth because there was nothing bad or suspicious about us defending ourselves against a man who was actively attacking us. Madeline, picking up on just the smallest hint of blame in what Bonnie and Celeste are throwing her way, accuses them of talking behind her back.

“No,” Bonnie tells her. “It’s right here to your face.”

Yes, new Bonnie!

But Bonnie’s mother Elizabeth isn’t feeling reassured by Bonnie’s newfound edginess. When she first entered the party and shook hands with Renata, Elizabeth got an odd look on her face, and now, as she watches three of the Monterey Five speak tensely to one another, she looks concerned. On the dance floor, where Bonnie historically does some of her best work, Elizabeth harshes her vibe by telling her that she saw her talking with her friends, and she doesn’t like the energy around her. Bonnie tells Elizabeth it’s her imagination, but Elizabeth takes her daughter’s head in her hands and starts doing… That thing that Bonnie really doesn’t like.

While Bonnie and Elizabeth have a clairvoyant battle on the dance-floor of a child’s birthday party, Ed stands stark still in the middle of the grooving crowd, wearing a large afro and looking miserable. Madeline asks him if he wants to dance, and he says he’d love to dance with her, but not here in front of all of Monterey: “I’m sick of pretending … look at this room, this is pretending—you, me, us everything.” And after Madeline storms off, if you can believe this, Nathan moseys over to rub a little salt in Ed’s wounds.

Is Nathan in love with Ed? There really is no explanation for the way he follows him around, pretending like he’s looking for a fight, but mostly just seeming like he’s desperate for Ed’s approval, and when he inevitably doesn’t get it, setting up for a fight instead. But this time, it’s a real one! The boys start—well, it can only be described as tussling.

Renata zooms over to break it up, yelling that this party is about happiness, dammit, and she won’t let all these men ruin THE LIFE SHE MADE FOR HERSELF. (Okay that last bit was directed at Gordon when he asked if she could ever forgive him and she told him that she simply blamed herself for “marrying a man who would take my life and all my accomplishments and just turn them to shit”). Both Madeline and Nathan spot Bonnie and Ed dancing and laughing together later, and though I really don’t think anything sexual is brewing there, something is brewing amongst that doomed foursome for sure.

Jane alone stands as our beacon of kinda-doing-okay-right-now; probably because Jane has been dealing with feeling like she’s about to snap for most of her young adult life. She brings Corey to Amabella’s birthday, but after flashing back to the night of her rape while innocently slow dancing with him, Jane disappears outside. When he finds her, she tells him about that night, not because she has to, but because she wants to. “I was raped pretty violently by a man who I thought was sensitive and kind,” Jane tells him, and he takes her hand, kindly and sensitively, and we understand just how complicated this is all is for Jane. But also, how hard she’s trying.

As for things there’s no way for us to understand yet: when everyone is leaving the party, Elizabeth touches Renata’s hand while taking a gift bag, and suddenly she’s frozen. The water imagery we’ve seen over and over this season flashes across the screen and then Elizabeth is on the ground.

At the hospital, the doctor tells Bonnie that it was a stroke that caused the seizure. While Elizabeth is in surgery Bonnie thinks back to her mother holding her head at the party, and then much further back to a memory of being a child and Elizabeth angrily shaking her in a bathroom. And between Bonnie’s repressed memories and Mary Louise’s ongoing narrative about Raymond, it might just be about be time for a full flashback episode, right?

Bonnie’s father arrives and does a nice little job of blaming Bonnie’s recent behavior for her mother’s stroke because “you know how upset she gets.” At this point, Bonnie is a rubber band ready to pop, and all it takes is spotting Detective Quinlan at the hospital, for her to unleash fury: “Seriously, what the FUCK!” Jane, who’s just arrived, ushers Bonnie away, telling her she’s there for a totally unrelated case, and the doctor explains to Quinlan that Bonnie is the daughter of a patient. “I know who she is,” Quinlan replies, glaring at Bonnie’s receding figure.

From the moment “SHE KNOWS,” the title of this Big Little Lies episode flashed across the screen, I assumed it was a reference to Mary Louise. But now, it seems like it could also refer to Elizabeth or Quinlan, as well. Because as it’s revealed over and over again while Mary Louise manipulates and machinates her way around Monterey: knowledge isn’t what makes Mary Louise dangerous. In fact, she’s happy to move forward in the face of complete, willful ignorance.

Each new time that we hear Mary Louise coo about Perry to the boys, it feels more and more like she’s grooming them to have an idyllic image of their father with a purpose. Never has, “people are never really gone because they live on in the hearts of those they leave behind” sounded more sinister than when spoken about Perry Wright. Especially given what we now know: while the other women were showing off their curls and statement eyeshadow at Amabella’s birthday party, Mary Louise was at her lawyer’s office, being advised to call all the best family lawyers in the area so that, if Celeste calls them later, they’ll be conflicted because they’re working with her… Because Mary Louise is getting everything in order to file for custody of the twins.

Mary Louise takes the twins for the night so that Celeste can hang out with Jane at an establishment with a handsome bartender. While there, Celeste and Jane have a typically fun conversation when Jane asks if Perry ever raped Celeste. She says he didn’t. The next morning, Mary Louise barges into the house with the boys bright and early, and Celeste is frazzled. I assumed she was simply hungover, given her disheveled state and the way she’s telling Mary Louise that she thinks she might be coming down with something, but then—zoom!

Like a scene out of Sharp Objects, there’s a lightning fast image of a shirtless man lurking in the background of this otherwise idyllic family morning in the kitchen. Eventually, that visage reveals himself to be real. But just because he wasn’t a ghost, doesn’t mean his reveal didn’t play out like a horror film. Celeste was apparently so high on Ambien (presumably mixed with alcohol) from the night before that she didn’t even remember the bartender she brought home was in the house until he had to come into the kitchen to retrieve his shirt, right in front of a watchful Mary Louise.

Mary Louise takes the boys, and when she returns, she tells Celeste that she thinks she needs to take some time to heal, and in the meantime, the boys should live with her. Celeste tells her that won’t be necessary, last night was just a misunderstanding. Mary Louise starts going in with her weirdly religious language about how the boys are at physical risk with Celeste, “And I’m their grandmother, and I will not forsake them—and I will not forsake what I know Perry would want me to do for them.”

Indeed, Perry loved weaponizing Celeste’s children against her to get what he wanted—I wonder where he might have picked that little trick up?

Celeste screams at Mary Louise to get the fuck out, so Mary Louise passes over the papers we’ve known were coming and sniffs, “I’m going to give you this as a courtesy.” She says she’s filing her petition for guardianship the next day: “We need to do what’s best for the boys.”

Celeste goes to see Dr. Reisman because she’s worried her therapist will be called upon to testify against her. Dr. Reisman assures Celeste that she can “trust her,” and Celeste cries back, “I trusted her, so don’t talk to me about trust right now—I let her into my life, I let her into my house.”

I can’t quite tell what’s going on with Dr. Reisman this season. I assume the way her voice has changed from calm and monotone to more impassioned is a performance choice, but is it good or bad? It feels… Bad. Especially because Celeste is always storming out of there, as she does when Dr. Reisman brings up the idea of settling with Mary Louise because she’s seen the way these things play out, and no one wins. “Whose side are you on for god’s sake?!” Celeste yells as she grabs her pocket book for an extra hasty exit.

Jane, currently the most hinged of our moms, marches over to Mary Louise’s apartment, and when Mary Louise invites her in and tries offering her tea, Jane responds, “No, I’m fine, I’m just a little curious as to what you’re doing and if you plan to take my kid next?” Mary Louise sputters, as though that’s simply unimaginable. “You’re a wonderful mother,” Mary Louise exclaims, like she has any real knowledge of what kind of mother Jane is. She just knows that she likes keeping the idea of herself as a doting grandmother fresh in Jane’s head, perhaps because she wants a relationship with Ziggy, but just as likely because she sees a use for Jane in the future. In her wide range of dealings with Celeste’s friends, my guess is that Mary Louise sees someone like Jane (who, for the record, is tall) as much more malleable than Madeline (a noted untrustworthy short-stack).

Jane stands up for Celeste, saying that she’s a good mother too, but Mary Louise tells her she’s become concerned for the boys’ physical well-being. She tells Jane she’s seen the drawer full of prescription pills and asks if she’d ever put Ziggy in the car with Celeste. We don’t hear the reply.

Still at the hospital, Bonnie is by her mother’s side post-surgery. Elizabeth appears to be waking up from a dream, so Bonnie reaches out and touches her arm. Elizabeth’s eyes fly open; in the hospital she sees Bonnie looking back at her…

But in her mind, she’s staring back at Bonnie—faced-own, drowned in the ocean.

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 4 ("She Knows") on HBO Go