The 'Disclaimer' Finale is Eerily on Brand for this Week in America

What a week for the Disclaimer finale.

As the country laid bare its inherent sexism and misogyny, a series that had played on those two things all along reached its conclusion.

I’ve had my suspicions that we, the audience, were not being told the whole story. How did Nancy know what she put in her book with such specificity when she wasn’t there? Finally, we learn the truth as Catherine tells Stephen the entire horrid story. After getting a glass of wine at the hotel bar that night, Catherine went to her hotel room. She felt good, “joyous” even. She was okay being by herself with Nicholas. They had had a wonderful day at the beach. “I wonder if that was the last time I was ever truly happy,” she tells Stephen.

Jonathan was not a wide-eyed kid exploited by a hussy as he was portrayed in Nancy’s version. Instead, he was a rapist who repeatedly raped and terrorized Catherine after breaking into her hotel room and holding a knife to her throat. Those provocative pictures? Ones that Jonathan forced her to take while threatening her life. “I’d never been hit before, so I was stunned,” she tells Stephen of his son’s violence. 

Why did she fall asleep on the beach and let Nicholas wander into the ocean unattended? She was exhausted, beaten, and bruised from being repeatedly raped. “Your son raped me again and again for three and a half hours,” she says.

She confesses that she didn’t swim into the ocean and didn’t risk her life for her son. “That is something I have to live with.”  She also tells Stephen that she saw Jonathan struggling with the waves and didn’t do anything about it. “No one was looking at your son,” she tells him. “I thought, “Thank god he’s dead.’”

When she returned home from Italy, she learned she was pregnant. She and Robert wanted another child. “But not knowing if its father was the man who raped me, I terminated.” It’s the last thing Catherine tells Stephen before realizing Stephen has drugged her. Catherine collapses, and Stephen makes a break for it. He wants to get to the hospital and finish the job he started. He wants to kill Nicholas. He wants Catherine and Robert to suffer as he and Nancy did. 

The episode has a dramatic tonal shift. Catherine makes herself throw up and then makes the most horrific version of iced coffee I have ever seen. She calls an Uber and races after Stephen, calling and texting Robert, who does not respond. The streets are at a standstill because of the traffic. Catherine gets out of the car and begins to run. Stephen gets to the hospital first and storms right to Nicholas’s bedside. Even though Catherine pushed Stephen away from her son the last time he was there, the hospital staff let him go right to Nicholas. They remain more concerned about the disheveled old man than their patient’s mother.  

But, just as Stephen is about to inject Nicholas’s IV, Nicholas mumbles, “Mum, please. I want to go. Please.” Something about Nicholas’s innocence as he reaches for Stephen’s hand, makes Stephen come to his senses. He stumbles away from Nicholas’s bedside just as Robert enters the room. “I was wrong about everything,” he tells Robert. Catherine arrives and thinks she is too late. She thinks Stephen has killed her son and collapses to the floor.

Robert asks Stephen why he didn’t question what was in the book. “No, Mr. Ravenscroft, why didn’t you?” Stephen says. Stephen knew that Nancy “dressed Jonathan into something he was not.” Nancy must have known the truth about her son. Her book was a fan fiction version of events, perhaps spurred on by her grief. We never learn what Sasha’s mother told her or why Sasha left Italy early. Stephen burns all the books he had printed and all the photographs Nancy found. He burns his wedding ring and Nancy’s ratty pink cardigan. 

In one photograph, he sees Nicholas’s reflection in the mirror. So, even though Nicholas and Catherine never spoke about what happened that night, and even if Nicholas can’t remember anything, he saw some of the horrors his mother endured. 

Robert, who now suddenly believes Catherine, begs his wife’s forgiveness. That’s one thing Catherine can’t do as she says the most chilling line to her husband: 

“It’s almost like you are relieved that I was raped.” 

There it is - the truth of the whole series. Robert was so willing to believe his wife of more than two decades had cheated on him. He never even tried to listen to what she was trying to tell him. He would rather know she was raped than know some other man brought her pleasure. Only when he learns that his wife was repeatedly and violently attacked, does he pause to hear her story. Robert is the worst.

In the series’ final moments, we learn that Catherine and Robert have divorced (thank goodness!). Catherine and Nicholas sit on the couch, trying to reconnect after years of a fractured relationship.