‘Lady in the Lake’ season finale recap: Life and/or death (2024)

SPOILER ALERT: This recap contains key plot points from the seventh and final episode of “Lady in the Lake.” Read the recaps for Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 here.

The previous episode of “Lady In The Lake” hovered between the ongoing real world aftermath of the death of Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram) and the shifting, swirling story going on in the mind of delirious reporter Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman) as she recovers from a near-fatal attack. But it ended with a shocking cold slap of reality: Cleo’s not dead!

Maddie is stunned. She’s made the search for this woman’s murderer into a whole personal and professional crusade, and now the victim is sitting in Maddie’s hospital room.

The name of this episode is “My Story,” and Cleo’s ability to tell it herself upends Maddie’s claim to that story as her own. Laura Lippman, who wrote the book the show is based on, acknowledged that reporters (particularly white ones) have been guilty of using Black pain for their own creative purposes. That’s the case with Maddie, too. But now, her subject says, that has to end. “If you really tell my story,” Cleo tells her, “you’ll be the one who really kills me.”

We flash back to 1952, when Cleo and best friend Dora (Jennifer Mogbock) get caught sneaking into Shell Gordon’s club to enter a talent contest. They’re about to get thrown out, but Shell (Wood Harris) tells Cleo if she’s as good at counting as her father was and agrees to do his books, she and Dora can stay to sing.

Right before they hit the stage, the memories of her dad are too much, and Cleo tells Dora to go at it alone, which she does, sweetly serenading her friend: “Tell me you’ll love me for a million years, then if it don’t work out, then you can tell me goodbye,” she sings. But the scene shifts to a weeping Cleo closing the eyes of a still Dora. She’s overdosed. A final, thwarted goodbye.

Dora’s anguished boyfriend Reggie (Josiah Cross), who’s been ordered to kill Cleo, tells Cleo that she should shoot him instead. But our intrepid accountant has a better idea. Dora was planning to leave for Europe indefinitely, right? What if the world believes she did? Cleo puts her own ring and powder blue coat on her dead friend and Reggie puts Dora in the fountain.

This truth upends the story Maddie’s crafted her life around — of her hero’s journey as a great reporter. Most people who get to know her figure out sooner or later that she’s a user who reduces humans to symbols. Son Seth (Noah Jupe) represents her disappointments; he destroys the diaries that prove Milton (Brett Gelman) isn’t his dad. Her lover, Detective Ferdie Platt (Y’lan Noel), represents her reclaiming of the artistic life she abandoned to be a perfect wife and mother. And Cleo has represented her ticket to ride to a byline and acclaim.

But if Cleo’s not dead, and she insists Maddie stop writing about her, where does that leave the story? Cleo explains that she waited long enough for the body to decompose so everyone would assume it was her, and that she’s the one who sent that anonymous letter to the newspaper’s helpline. Cleo offers Maddie a better story: the downfall of Shell Gordon. And Cleo will even help her with it — if Maddie lets the accountant stay dead.

While Maddie considers her next play, she finds out that Ferdie has resigned from the police force rather than let their illegal interracial romance be revealed. Maybe the two of them could go to Virginia, where the mixed-raced married couple the Lovings have a promising court case, and be together in the open there, he asks? Oh, you sweet deluded dummy. Maddie’s ambition and racial realities are bigger than her feelings for Ferdie. He just doesn’t know that yet.

Plus, Maddie can’t leave Baltimore right now. She has finagled her way into a real reporter’s position by promising the definitive story on her attack by Stephan Zawadzkie’s mother if they will let her write about Cleo, too. Maddie visits Cleo’s husband, Slappy (Byron Bowers), who’s in jail for Cleo’s killing, and tells him there’s actually been no murder. (Watching this from 2024, I’m instantly worried this is all going to be caught on video, but that’s not a thing back then.) An initially disbelieving Slappy tells Maddie that if Cleo really is alive, she’s doing this for their sons, and he’s willing to stay in prison and shut his mouth to let her plan play out.

That plan: For Cleo to disguise herself as a man so Reggie can sneak her into Shell’s building and get incriminating evidence against him from his own books, and start a fire as a distraction so she can get out. Meanwhile, Cleo’s son Teddy (Tyrik Johnson) has gone to Shell to tell him Reggie’s offering money to put down on a specific number, but it’s part of the ruse. Shell sees Cleo running away, but brave Reggie finally tells the gangster at gunpoint that they’re both turning themselves in. Cleo stays dead, and the Gordian Hotel burns.

Also D.O.A.? Maddie’s hold on her big newspaper story. Reporter Bob (Pruitt Taylor Vince) calls to tell her that Reggie confessed to Cleo’s murder, and since Maddie wasn’t answering the phone, he’s writing it himself. Bob’s such a weasel. “That’s my story!” Maddie protests, but Bob insists that it’s his, too. The truth is that neither Maddie’s nor Cleo’s stories should end in this apartment in the Bottoms.

Maddie meets with Cleo, glamorously anonymous in a scarf and sunglasses, so Cleo can give her the evidence to nail Shell for good. Maddie confesses she visited Slappy in jail to tell him his wife was alive “because it was the better story,” but Cleo should know he planned to suffer in jail to let his wife live. That she was willing to hurt Cleo to get that story is very obvious, but as the resurrected lady in the lake rises to leave, Maddie says that under different circ*mstances, they could have been friends.

“What possible circ*mstances could those be?” Cleo says plainly, walking away for good. Even to the end, Maddie’s trying to make herself the hero of every story. It’s satisfying that Cleo wants her to know that’s not true. And just like that, Maddie’s time in the Bottoms is over. She packs her car, says goodbye to her friend Judith (a character who will become very important in another Laura Lippmann story), and then to Ferdie. She’s moving back closer to Pikesville, so those dreams of marriage in Virginia are never to be, but maybe he can spend the night sometime? The former detective realizes he’s just another part of her story and literally locks the door on his chapter.

Maddie’s sad, but being the plucky, self-centered survivor she is, she goes on to write a nonfiction book called “The Lady in the Lake.” In a voiceover, Cleo says Maddie captured it just like Cleo asked.

In real life, Shell’s been arrested, and Slappy’s free after a confession from Reggie. We see Cleo and her sons sail off to a new life in Europe, even as Baltimore is “stripped down” in the real-life civil unrest that follows Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Now it’s 1976, and as Maddie signs books at the George Peabody Library at the Peabody Institute, we see a woman named Dora Carter take the stage at a Parisian club, singing Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.” It’s Cleo, of course, in a beautiful Donna Summer-esque wig. It’s a new dawn and a new day for her, she sings, as Slappy sips wine in the audience.

Back in Baltimore, Maddie’s finally a beloved writer, but at what cost? As she leaves her book signing, she sees a booth selling tickets for the brand new Maryland Lottery, which the state’s taken over from Shell. It’s illegal for Black people, but shiny and new for the government.

The reality Maddie now faces is that the truth depends sometimes on what you look like and where you’re from. She’s thrown away real people for this story, which has made her famous and isn’t even true — a secret she shares with a not-dead woman across the Atlantic. Cleo seems to have her feel-good ending. But it’s finally dawning on Maddie that the price she’s paid for her own ending is heavier than she’d imagined.