Why can’t Maddie Morgenstern be forgiven? Because of her, Tessie Durst’s body was found, her attempted rapist Stephan Zawadzkie was caught, and her murderer Kasha Zawadzkie died by her own hand. Maddie is also the reason Shell Gordon, the most powerful gangster in black Baltimore, is behind bars instead of continuing his noble reign of terror. It’s far too much to give her all The recognition she gets for all of these things—Cleo risking her life yet again by disguising herself as a man to break into Shell’s archives, for example—has a lot to do with it, but she deserves a lot, that’s for sure.

But her son Seth cannot forgive her for this and tells her that she does not belong in the black neighborhood she moved into. Ferdie Platt cannot forgive her, not for the loss of his job, but for refusing to give up her own to settle down with him in a future position.Loving vs Virginia world and become a housewife again. Her offer to continue her illegal rendezvous is heartless; she has just turned down a marriage proposal and now invites him to continue risking her life with a secret love affair. But it is her vocation that’s what she’s calling for here, not comfort, or at least not primarily. She doesn’t want to be anyone’s wife anymore.

And Cleo Johnson, who ends up living the life of a Parisian nightclub singer under the name of her best friend, whose body she and Reggie swapped for her own, with her husband and children by her side: what can she not forgive Maddie for? It is not Maddie’s ambition – she says it in so many words – nor her dogged determination to tell Cleo’s supposed story even when it would be better forgotten. Ultimately, it is the way of the world that separates the two. When Maddie suggests that “we could have been friends under different circumstances,” an exhausted Cleo sighs, “What circumstances could those be?”

I cannot really explain to you the right-wing criticism of liberalism; you can simply look at the actions of the Nazis and racist police in Lady in the LakeI think. What I may we only explain the leftCritique of liberalism that liberals do not actually alleviate suffering, but merely witness it. They are right to denounce racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, poverty, etc. – liberals are not conservatives – but they offer little concrete action to combat these ills at a systemic level. The focus is on acknowledging one’s own complicity in these systems where applicable and voting Democrat every election day.

So if Lady in the Lake Although the show seems to be more lenient toward the actual killer, Reggie Robinson, than Maddie, I don’t question its approach to Reggie. Reggie is actually a great character, complex and compelling, and additional facets emerge almost every time actor Josiah Cross is on screen. These reviews have rightly focused on leads Moses Ingram and Natalie Portman, but Cross – and Byron Bowers, whose Slappy Johnson is an equally fascinating web of competing demons and urges – prove that the men can convince on this show, too.

What I question is why Reggie, an honest killer (as Cleo puts it, he falsely confesses to her murder to “atone for the things he did do”) is treated with more leniency by characters and filmmakers alike than Maddie Morgenstern. No one – not even Shell! – tells Reggie to fuck off, the way Seth, Ferdie, and Cleo essentially do to Maddie.

Likewise, I’m glad that Cleo gets to have it all: a life, a great family, a glamorous and creatively fulfilling career, a great city to live in, a way to escape death while honoring her late best friend. So it’s odd that, as far as we can tell, Maddie ends up alone with her book about the case – a book that she and we both know must be full of nonsense.

As with the kindness the show shows towards Reggie, I don’t begrudge Cleo her relatively happy fate. For God’s sake, if anyone on this show deserves a break today, it’s Cleo freaking Johnson. This woman hasn’t had a break since she was a teenager: In a flashback, we learn that young Cleo was too upset about the deal she had just made to work for Shell, the man who ruined her father, to go on stage at his nightclub and sing her anticipated duet with Dora. She is overdue for a break! (Just like us in the audience, to hear Moses Ingram sing.)

Lady in the Lake ends in part with a news montage of the chaos that erupted after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when blacks took to the streets and white authorities brutally cracked down on them, which is the classic recipe for “race riots.” It ends with The picture – and not the earlier picture of a Nazi rally that was violently suppressed by blacks, the only citizens of Baltimore willing to confront the fascist threat.

“If only these people were as strategic as they are brave,” says a remorseful yet somehow still racist Milton Schwartz as he drives Maddie home from the hospital. “They just don’t get it.” Someone doesn’t get it! But it’s strange: By showing mercy to virtually everyone except Maddie, who condemns black and Jewish characters alike for their naivety and whose attempt to bridge the gap between them is riddled with personal and professional lies, Lady in the Lake makes this gap as insurmountable as Milton believes it to be.

Not that Lady in the Lakelike Milton, believes that the problems facing black people are at least in large part of their own making. In contrast, he repeatedly goes to great lengths to properly show how white racism – both the active, violent kind and the subtle, privileged kind – is the killer app that has ruined the lives of so many black people. Not for nothing is it also made clear that Milton is a raging asshole.

But who is ultimately responsible for speaking the words that destroy the solidarity between a white woman and the black people she is closest to? Maddie is a jerk, but Ferdie is the one who ends the relationship for good. Maddie is clueless, but Cleo is the one who says they could never have been friends. This feels like liberal guilt put into other people’s mouths to be directed at a liberal – a kind of self-flagellation on television. The suffering is acknowledged, but attempts to make amends are portrayed as clumsy and doomed to failure. Isn’t that right, Maddie Morgenstern?

One only has to look out the window or watch the news to see how monstrous racism in America continues to plague many people – and here, too, there is a long tradition of criticism of the left’s inaction on this issue. The problem is not being addressed nearly as quickly or seriously as it should be.

But the beauty of racism is that it has no basis in fact. It is completely made-up nonsense. It is rubbish, nonsense, an invention, a myth. That is why all the groups that that terrible officer Bosko listed in the previous episode – the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, presumably Poles like himself – were able to “overcome” racism and become “white”. Race is sociopolitical Calvinball: those in charge decide who counts, and it has nothing to do with any innate characteristics. They make up the rules as they go along!

In other words, people are treated different, and their different experiences make them different in many ways, but people are the same. The family you see on the news crying over their child killed in a pile of rubble on the other side of the world feels the same grief and pain as the family you see on the news crying over their child killed in a school shooting in suburban America feels the same grief and pain as the family you see on the news crying over their murdered daughter/sister/mother, killed by cops for not committing any crime at all. Lionel, Cleo’s son with sickle cell anemia, and Anne Frank, seen in a photograph hanging on the wall next to Maddie’s desk, have much, much more in common than what separates them. But you don’t have to take my word for it: Ask the Nazis in this episode.

I don’t expect every TV miniseries that advocates social justice to suddenly examine and tear down every axis of oppression that exists. That would not only be impossible, it would be a shitty show, and Lady in the Lake it certainly isn’t. Portman, Ingram, Cross, Y’lan Noel, Reed Harris, Jennifer Mogbock: The characters played by each of these talented actors have the charisma and complexity to carry a show of their own, and creator/showrunner/director Alma Har’el makes them all look like stars. That makes their constant peril, explored through some truly compelling mystery storylines, all the more thrilling: You don’t want these stars to be wiped out. It’s important to remember that this is a show, not a think piece.

Nor do I expect every TV miniseries to be optimistic or to offer a concrete plan of action to solve the problems presented. I am no longer a child and I do not need false encouragement. In any case, the almost 60 years that have passed since the events of history prove that progress, if it progresses at all, is a sluggish one and that enormous efforts are required on our part to move it forward.

But to make an entire series about the racism that divided Maddie and Cleo, only to end up having all the relevant characters – including Maddie, who moves back to a white neighborhood just as Seth wanted – reinforce that racism? To witness all the suffering of blacks and Jews, only to end up with the message – consciously or unconsciously – that the divide that causes much of that suffering is unbridgeable? Lady in the Lake has told his story with great skill, but to have hope for the future, I cannot believe that this story is true.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, vulture, The New York TimesAnd everywhere he goesreally. He and his family live on Long Island.