'Disclaimer' Begins with Twin Episodes About Desire, Secrets & Revenge

Disclaimer, the new AppleTV+ series written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, wastes no time letting viewers know exactly what they are in for with well, a disclaimer. There’s the warning that precedes every episode: “This series contains strong, sexual content and depictions of sexual, physical, and emotional violence.” Then, as if to prove the point, the premiere opens with a young couple having (very loud, very passionate) sex on a train. 

The action then moves to Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), an investigative journalist receiving an award from the Royal Television Society with her devoted husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) by her side. Then it jumps to Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline), an aging private school professor, deciding he would rather quit than retract any snarky comments he made on a student’s paper. How these three seemingly disparate storylines are connected is unclear.

Catherine and Robert have one son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is 25 and recently out of the house. Catherine thought he needed to be independent; Robert, who always had a closer relationship with their son, says he could have stayed. The couple also recently moved; returning home to share an expensive bottle of wine in celebration, Catherine says she'll go through the mail before bed. There's a package with a book called The Perfect Stranger, with an inscription “to my son Jonathan.” The disclaimer (there’s the title!): “Any resemblance to a person living or dead is not a coincidence.” 

Catherine reads late into the night. Whatever the book is about, it makes her throw up.

The young couple is enjoying Italy when the girl gets word that her aunt has died suddenly, and she must return home. This is where we get hints that the young couple’s storyline does not occur in the same period as Catherine’s and Stephen’s. The young man is using a real camera, not an iPhone. The young woman learns about her aunt when talking to her mom on a pay phone. Their scenes begin and end with the camera fading out like in an old-fashioned black-and-white movie.

Stephen donates all his wife Nancy’s (Lesley Manville) clothes. She died nine years ago, but Stephen has left everything as she left it. Their son, Jonathan, died years ago, and Nancy never fully recovered from the loss. Stephen, who shuffles around his house in his wife’s old pink cardigan, stumbles upon one of Nancy’s purses with a key and an envelope full of photos. The photos are of the man in the young couple on the Italy trip; there are shots of a blond woman in provocative poses. “I knew that woman. I had known her name for years. But until then, I thought she was just an innocent bystander in my life’s demise,” Stephen says in the voice-over narration. 

Stephen also finds the key to a desk in Jonathan’s bedroom. Inside the desk, Stephen finds a manuscript entitled “The Perfect Stranger,” written in September 2011. The disparate storylines begin to merge.

The following day, Catherine tries to burn the manuscript, only for Robert to stop her. “It was sent to me, and I think I’m being punished,” Catherine tells her husband. “Something in that book made me hate myself all over again. I’m a terrible mother.” Catherine then tells her husband that she wants to tell him everything. But he doesn’t listen and tells her, “I swear I will never, ever judge you.” Indira Varma, who narrates Catherine’s storyline, intones, “Now the act of keeping a secret a secret has almost become bigger than the secret itself.”

Stephen meets his friend Justin, who also happens to be the headmaster we met in Stephen’s opening scene, for drinks. Justin tells Stephen to publish the book online and to print 100 copies. Stephen passes the book off as his own and publishes it under a pseudonym. “I was the one who was going to destroy her in real life, but first, she had to suffer like Nancy and I did,” he says. Meanwhile, Catherine learns Nicholas has been sent the book as well. She wants to know what he thought of the book’s main character. “She dies. And it was pretty enjoyable, too. She deserved it. She was a selfish bitch,” he says.

For almost all of the first episode, the young couple don’t use each other’s names, referring to each other as “Slut” and “Wanker.” In Italy, the young man writes his mom a postcard and signs it, “Love Jonathan,” as the story’s pieces fall into place. We next see Jonathan on the beach watching a mom with her young son, whom she calls Nicholas. Jonathan is taking pictures of her. A younger Catherine (played by Leila George, the daughter of Vincent D’Onofrio and Greta Scacchi) turns to him and smiles, and the three storylines collide.

The second episode picks up back at the beach. A younger Catherine flirts with Jonathan. “These pictures, what are you going to do with them? Are you going to look at them?” Catherine’s flirting and Jonathan’s stammering are stopped by a young Nicholas, who is only four years old and wants fish sticks for dinner. In the present day, Stephen visits Nicholas at the store where he works under the guise of needing a new vacuum cleaner. “[Nicholas] was hopeless, a complete waste of space. He was going to be such an easy catch,” Stephen declares.

Catherine cannot sleep. “You were awake most of the night feeling strangled by freshly unburied memories,” the narrator intones. Catherine tells her husband she will make his favorite dish, sole meuniere, for dinner. At her work, Catherine tells her jealous colleague Simon that someone wants to turn her documentary into a feature film starring Jodie Foster. “Is it true?” her assistant Jisoo (Hoyeon) wonders. “No, I just wanted to see his face,” Catherine replies, giving us a sense of Catherine’s nastier side.

We flashback to when Catherine met Nancy sometime after Jonathan’s death. “Do you ever think of me? Because I think of you every day,” Nancy tells her. Catherine didn’t come to Jonathan’s funeral. Snippets of what happened all those years ago begin to be revealed. “If you want to do the decent thing, you better speak up now,” Nancy tells her. Catherine tries to explain that it’s complicated, but Nancy assures her that it is not. Nancy is dying of terminal cancer, and she wants to meet Nicholas. “Your son is running around above ground while mine is rotting beneath,” she tells Catherine. “Nicolas owes his life to my son. He should know that he wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for Jonathan.” 

Stephen drops off the book and a copy of all the pictures to Robert’s office. Robert is horrified by what he sees. “This Catherine in the photographs is not his wife. This is a young woman bursting with desire.” Robert doesn’t go home to have dinner with Catherine. Instead, he goes to see Nicolas to grill him on any memories he might have of the time they took a family trip to Italy, and he had to return early because of work. 

He confronts his wife. “No wonder you always have migraines whenever I want to have sex with you.” Catherine refuses to take responsibility for her actions. “I asked you not to go,” she says of her husband’s decision to leave them alone in Italy. Then she tells him that Jonathan is dead. “That’s why you didn’t tell me,” Robert says. “You thought you had gotten away with it.” 

Disclaimer continues with weekly episodes through November 2024, every Friday on Apple TV+.