SPOILER ALERT: This recap contains major plot points from episode six of “Lady in the Lake.” Read episode recaps 1, 2, 3, 4 And 5.

We pick up where we left off. Maddie (Natalie Portman) lies bleeding on the floor in the house of Stephan Zawadzkie’s mother, who also lies dead on the floor after attacking Maddie and then killing herself. As our intrepid reporter fights for her life, we hear Peggy Lee singing “Is That All There Is?”, a song I thought I knew but had obviously never heard because, wow, is it dark.

We’re obviously in Maddie’s mind, as she recalls a colorful Halloween party early in her marriage, where a very drunk Allan Durst (David Corenswet) apologizes for his pushy and rude behavior during their high school relationship and says he knows what happened between Maddie and his creepy dad (Mark Feuerstein). And she wasn’t his dad’s only girlfriend.

Maddie, outraged, flees to a nearby shed, where Allan kisses her and apologizes for being just like his father. Maddie is fine with that, and kisses back as they fall into each other’s arms, drunk and full of remorse. The scene then switches to Maddie’s now teenage son Seth (Noah Jupe). … Wait a minute! Is Seth really Allan’s son and not his father’s? Was that why she was so obsessed with the death of Allan’s daughter Tessie? SCANDAL!

Seth, who has been horrible to Maddie ever since he found out that Milton (Brett Gelman), the man who raised him, is not his father, visits the still-alive but unconscious Maddie in the hospital. He gently tells her that he realizes she’s always “looked at him funny” because he reminds her of “something you don’t want to be reminded of.” It’s heartbreaking that this boy had to figure out the roots of his mother’s neglect on his own.

As he explains that he is not “all the men before me,” one of those men, Allan, appears in the doorway with flowers and thanks Maddie for finding Tessie’s killer. He apologizes to her and Seth. As a dazed Maddie watches, balloons sprout from the wall behind Allan and Seth and Allan tells her, “Your next child will know the truth.” What? Suddenly, Maddie’s belly has grown gigantic and she gives birth to a baby wrapped in newspaper, delivered by a nurse wearing a gas mask. It is Cleo (Moses Ingram), who tells Maddie that she gave birth to her own story. Cleo then flees down the hall with the newspaper baby and Maddie wanders into a now flooded hallway to find her.

WHAT? All of this is happening in Maddie’s fevered mind as the focus of what is actually haunting her changes. Is it Cleo? Is it her old self from the Halloween party? Is it Reggie (Josiah Cross), who was at the fish shop the night Tessie disappeared? The scene switches from that haunted hospital to a library, where the IV that Fever Dream has been lugging Maddie becomes a coat rack with an oversized black hoodie with a Star of David hanging from it.

She puts it on and sinks to the floor of the George Peabody Library at the Peabody Institute. A sea of ​​black women, dressed like Cleo in her Supremes wig and powder-blue coat, dance mockingly around her as Louis Armstrong sings the black spiritual “Go Down Moses.” The lyrics are about Jews trying to escape bondage, and Maddie, a Jewish woman, is trying to escape this stone-faced woman. Yet the song itself is a protest against black liberation, and Cleo, a black woman, has become entangled in Maddie’s need for a story. Who needs freedom from whom? Cleo struggles and falls from an upper floor, and as Maddie rushes to turn her crumpled body over, she sees her own ashen face.

We see the real Maddie, still unconscious, safe in the hospital with a worried Seth at her bedside, while a TV reporter outside explains how she got there. (The obnoxious kids waving at the camera are a nice touch.) Across town, a nervous Reggie sees the same report, which says Stephan no longer seems to be the suspect in Cleo’s murder, which bodes bad for him.

But it’s not Reggie who is arrested. Cleo’s husband Slappy (Byron Bowers) still claims that criminal mastermind Shell Gordon (Wood Harris) is responsible. Detective Ferdie Platt (Y’lan Noel) questions Reggie and Shell, who tries to portray these rumors as whites pitting the black community against each other. Platt doesn’t buy it and as he leaves, an angry Shell asks Reggie why Maddie and now the police are linking the Christmas lottery he ran and Cleo’s disappearance. And did Reggie actually “take care of Cleo” like he asked?

Back at the hospital, previously grumpy reporter Bob Bauer (Pruitt Taylor Vince) brings Maddie flowers. It’s interesting how people get nicer to you when you’re almost murdered. He tells her that Stephan confessed to what really happened to Tessie: Stephan tried to rape her, couldn’t go through with it, and hid her in the basement of the fish shop, where his mother found and killed the little girl to cover it up. Maddie tells Bob, delirious, that Slappy didn’t kill Cleo, but he calms her down before asking her what happened when Stephan’s mother attacked her. Maddie realizes this isn’t a friendly visit. He’s trying to literally steal her story from her hospital bed! The reporters on this show don’t come off well, and I’m amused that they were originally created by Laura Lippmann, a former reporter herself in real life.

This exchange sends Maddie back into her fever dream, where she’s trapped in a morgue drawer. She fights her way out to find Tessie, as the morgue becomes a wall of index card drawers that Maddie struggles to open. She insists that if she can’t figure out the story, no one will know who killed Cleo, but Tessie retorts, “Or no one will ever know what a great writer you are?” Get ’em, dream spirit Tessie! Maddie dismisses the kid as a suburban girl who had a good life until she didn’t. Ouch. Then she apologizes and promises to tell Tessie’s story once she’s done with Cleo’s. Tessie gives her a key to open the index card drawers, only they’re more morgue drawers, containing the body of Allan and a dead baby, as well as a waxy mannequin of her teenage son.

The hallucinations get stranger and stranger: Cleo, disembodied hands, and a shirtless Platt swinging his secret lover Maddie in a ghostly dance, while visions of her past surround her, including Allan from the Halloween party where Seth was probably conceived. Maddie suddenly wears the outfit she wore to Tessie’s funeral, but she realizes she’s going to her own. Her mother is called to the front to talk about her daughter’s life, but instead she recounts a memory of finding out her family was killed in the Holocaust.

Maddie, bitter that she can’t even be the center of attention at her own funeral, gives her own eulogy. She says she should be remembered as a freedom fighter, but the crowd’s cheers of approval turn into chants of “White Power!” from Nazis who have invaded Patterson Park. They surround Platt’s car and throw rocks at it. He is later told by a racist police supervisor that everyone knows he is breaking the law by sleeping with Maddie, and that if he quietly resigns, no one will have to know.

Back in real life, Platt visits Maddie and tells her he likes her relentlessness, but she counters, “More than you liked Cleo Johnson?” Even in a fever, she can’t help it. When she falls asleep again, she finds herself in a crowd of black people surrounding the fountain in Druid Hill Park while Cleo, an acrobatic version of the outfit Maddie wore that Halloween, dangles over it. Maddie jumps in to save Cleo, begging her to tell who killed her when a ghostly Reggie looms menacingly.

Maddie is finally safely back in bed when a cleaning lady comes into her room. Maddie wearily explains that she can’t dream anymore. But the cleaning lady tells her that she is awake. Maddie asks who she is.

“I was Cleo Johnson,” says the single mother whose death haunts Maddie. She is very much alive. And it is not a dream.