The Girlfriend Recap: Girlboss Down

Laura really didn’t think this whole thing through. A lie of this magnitude — pretending someone who is very much alive is actually dead — is like a flame; you have to nurse it so that it stays alive. But Laura, used to getting away with murder, just neglected Daniel’s imaginary corpse after conjuring it. Her biggest oversight was not to have imagined that Cherry — the threat to her family life in the first place, a person capable of throwing an innocent cat out the window — could, and would, out-psycho her. Don’t get me wrong; Laura is plenty psycho. But Cherry plays in the major leagues.

As hard as she tries, there’s no possible way Laura can explain with any semblance of reason what she did — or, more important, why she did it. She is incapable of stating God’s honest truth, which is that she is batshit crazy. When Daniel finds out that she told Cherry he was dead and buried, he stops picking up any of her calls. She’s able to keep Howard in the dark for a bit, but when both of them speak to her again, they want to know why. She can’t say. It doesn’t help the fragile state of her marriage that, while Howard was away on a business trip, Laura spent a night unwinding with Lilith, the one extramarital partner Howard was “sensitive” about.

In life, things tend to happen all at once, and it’s only worse for Laura that she angered a vengeful, coldhearted stalker, to boot. Poor Harriet, a gallery assistant who has been harassed since the pilot, gets the brunt of Laura’s frustration. When Laura comes by the gallery the day after Daniel and Cherry reunite, she reprimands Harriet for telling Howard that she hadn’t been to work since Daniel’s accident; then she chews her out for not telling her that Jamal, the artist she is showing next, came by the gallery the day before. Harriet tries to defend herself. The event was on her calendar, and besides, she never picks up the phone when she’s out with Daniel. Laura fires her on the spot.

To clarify, Laura fired Harriet because Laura failed to attend a meeting that Harriet had scheduled on her calendar. News of this is like Christmas to Cherry. After Cherry learned that Daniel was still alive, and Daniel learned that Cherry didn’t abandon him in a comatose state, he followed her home. He told her he loved her and wanted to start over. Cherry was hesitant at first. She considered listening to her wise mother, who reminded her that, unlike Cherry, prone to doing something she’ll regret, rich and powerful people like Laura Sanderson can get away with anything. Besides, Cherry was just beginning to piece her life together. But what can you say — Daniel’s puppy eyes are apparently irresistible?

So, she meets him at the hotel later that night. In the morning, he tries to be nice by bringing her coffee, except she doesn’t drink coffee — something he didn’t remember. In fact, there’s a whole lot from shortly before the accident that Daniel doesn’t remember; their walk through the old church, for example. Implicitly, then, he doesn’t remember telling Cherry he wanted to marry her. Not remembering the details of the day you fell several feet down to hard rock seems different than not remembering that the person you’d spent several months with doesn’t drink coffee, but Cherry is hardly splitting hairs. Doors are opening one after the other, opportunities to be seized.

Cherry and Daniel go pick up some of his things from the townhouse. To Laura, they appear like ghosts — Cherry especially is like an apparition in her kitchen. “You ruined my life, Laura,” Cherry taunts, with a demented grin on her face. “Now watch me ruin yours.” In Cherry’s memory, Laura yells at her; but Laura only remembers being cornered. Cherry picks up a knife and slashes Laura’s tires on the way out, for good measure. It’s the least insane revenge act she will commit. Laura, already smart to the snowball that is beginning to form, goes to the police. Despite her conviction that Cherry slashed her tires and is capable of much worse, she doesn’t have any evidence, and there’s nothing the police can do.

Meanwhile, Cherry and Daniel try to rebuild some sense of progress. They get a new apartment together, a place nice enough to impress a group of friends, including Brigitte, whom they invite over for dinner. It emerges that they all thought Daniel’s parents had blamed Cherry for the accident, which is why they broke up; Brigitte seems to still be under the impression that Cherry left after Daniel went into the ICU. The particulars of what the friends were told are opaque — did they think that Cherry was upset about the suggestion that she had something to do with the accident, which is why she left Daniel at the hospital? Or does Brigitte think something different than the rest of them, as she’s closer to the Sandersons? Either way, Cherry tells them the truth about Laura’s lie. Brigitte is floored. After apologizing for the way she spoke to Cherry at the club, she says that Laura has been acting irrationally lately: She fired her friend, Harriet, from the gallery for no reason. Ding, ding, ding!

From information gathered through Harriet’s “Connesta,” Cherry plots to attend the same yoga class as Harriet. They talk about Laura. Harriet is still incensed and loose with her knowledge, telling Cherry that all of the gallery’s security codes are Daniel’s birthday because they were the only numbers Laura could remember. We could say that’s like giving a child candy, but it’s more like giving a psychopath a grenade. Cherry persuades Harriet to publicly expose Laura, to talk to journalists and manufacture a viral story. “Let’s do it over brunch,” she suggests, hilariously. “It’ll be cathartic.”

The story catches like wildfire. When Laura comes into the gallery, she sees Jamal packing up all of his paintings — he has to protect his brand and “align [himself] with the right kinds of people.” Laura checks her phone and sees that she is being “canceled” online. Not so funny when it’s your neck on the line, huh, Laura? She starts thinking she can see Cherry in corners; she imagines Cherry in her swimming pool. Paranoia sets in.

Isabella comes by with a bottle of wine to comfort her canceled friend. She reassures Laura that these things blow over, but Laura doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that her reputation is in jeopardy right as Cherry has returned to her life. She tells Isabella about her lie, or at least a version of it. “I let her think that he’d died” is how she puts it, rather than admitting to the full scope of her deceit, burner phones, social-media hacking, and all. Isabella is horrified, claims to be worried about her friend, and still, I think, takes it way too easy on Laura. This is a person who is so convinced of her own righteousness that she reads Isabella’s reaction as unfair judgment rather than worry or bafflement.

In my last recap, I called Lilith “wise,” but I’d like to formally retract that characterization. Lilith must be just as insane as her ex-lover, because not only is she not really fazed by Laura’s conduct, she agrees to help her try to recoup her gallery’s reputation by showing her work, which hasn’t been exhibited in over ten years. What’s more, she makes Laura feel so safe and cozy that she falls asleep on her couch, even though she has been having so much trouble sleeping that she’s taking pills with wine. What’s even more, she convinces Laura to stay for the night and unwind, reasoning that she “deserves a bit of fun.” That is not what she deserves! She deserves to sit with her heavy consciousness and think through why it is so heavy. And I hate to say it, but she deserves comeuppance.

Cherry, obviously, is on it. Daniel’s loyalty is already beginning to waver. At a polo game (We get that he’s rich already! Can they do something normal?), he tells her that he didn’t tell his friends the truth about what Laura did because it makes her sound too crazy. Not unreasonably, Cherry points out that his covering for his mom makes her look even crazier. It’s worth noting how avoidant Daniel is in general. At the polo game, when Cherry confronts him about the insanity of Laura’s actions, he excuses himself to get another bottle of wine. When Cherry tells their friends at their apartment what Laura did, he also goes to get another bottle of wine. Is he developing a small problem?

I get it: There’s no way to be normal about this. And Cherry doesn’t need much to encourage her dormant psychosis. At first, maybe remembering her mother’s advice, she shows restraint even as she decides to surprise Laura at Lilith’s opening at the gallery. She knows that she barely has to do anything; Laura has more than enough rope to hang herself. Once Laura whisks her downstairs to speak privately, hoping to avoid a scene in front of all those people, Cherry lays out the situation: “Your reputation is a joke. Your marriage is hanging by a thread. Your son hates you.” The provocation works: Laura jumps at her throat and squeezes, then, delusionally, says that the difference between them is that she knows “when to stop.” Then she calls Cherry a “cheap little whore with a bad temper.”

Laura, of course, is only giving Cherry what she wants: a match on her own level. Cherry breaks a Champagne flute on her own head and runs out of the gallery, screaming that Laura attacked her. Blood drips all over her white blazer. At home, a semblance of reason seems to return; she starts packing her belongings, knowing she has to get away from these people. Seeing her freak, Daniel asks what happened. After a moment of consideration, half a beat of flirtation with decency, she tells Daniel that Laura attacked her. Though his first reaction is to ask what Cherry did to provoke this — perhaps he’s not as dumb as he seems — and to insist his mother could never hurt anyone, ultimately, he convinces her to let him treat her wounds. Insanely, as he puts two Band-Aids on her head, he makes his choice and asks her to marry him. Cherry is shocked, as she should be, because it takes a special kind of person to commit to this lunacy forever.

In a way, the choices Cherry faces are Austean. Should she marry for security? You can’t convince me that she loves this man that much; apart from money, there is hardly enough there to justify the hellish war that is certain to break out between her and Laura, and even less to suggest that it will ever end. The only way Laura and Cherry can get along is if one of them is dead (likely the outcome of this whole thing) or if they unite against a common enemy. Maybe Howard will get the short end of the stick? Maybe they will both realize that Daniel is literally just some guy rather than a god? Maybe they will unite against the patriarchy that pits women against each other? Would you march with Laura?

• One question that has lingered for me: how did Cherry know that Laura had anything to do with her firing from the real estate agency? Surely, she has a hunch, but while there was plenty to make sense of why Laura kicked her out of the apartment or why Daniel’s messages didn’t reach Cherry, she didn’t explore the Connesta hacking much.

• Burdened by an obvious, over-the-top script, Olivia Cooke is doing what she can to evoke Cherry’s ambiguity and remorse here. There is a palpable sense of push-and-pull in her actions that is missing from Robin Wright’s surface-level performance. I don’t believe that Laura is tortured by anything other than her wish to be on top, while there’s so much more complexity driving Cherry. This unevenness wouldn’t bother me if the show accepted Cherry as its main character, but as it insists on the two-perspective approach, the difference becomes a hindrance.

• The cinematography and the direction aren’t doing The Girlfriend’s underbaked script any favors, either. The handheld, woozy shots, combined with the relentless nearness of the camera to the actors, work to align the show with a particular kind of genre: the prestige streaming kind, based on mass-market, lifestyle-porny novels, often revolving around a crazy, rich white woman hoarding secrets; the sort of thing likely to get picked up by a celebrity book club. But the prestige-coded creative choices add very little to the story. Imagine how striking it might be to watch Cherry lose her grip in a more austere, static shot. Imagine actually being able to get a sense of the Malaga townhouse, with all its twisty corners. Imagine what we might learn from Daniel if we ever saw the whole of him in frame.