‘Big Little Lies’ Season 2 Recap: Episode 3 — Amabella Horror Story: Apocalypse

This week, Big Little Lies brought back a few of the first season’s greatest hits in fresh new ways.

Amabella in distress! Celeste having an emotionally and psychologically complicated mazz!

Extremely pointed yet soft-voiced therapy!

Undergirding all of this were scenes of a rich seaside community contemplating the looming horrors of climate change and, ironically, a lot of conversations taking place in cars.

Titled “The End of the World”, this week’s episode allows the season’s overarching mystery — whether the lie surrounding Perry’s death will be uncovered — to take a back seat in favour of delving further into the characters’ psyches.

Let’s examine their downward spirals further as we recap Big Little Lies.

Rainbow Overcorrection

Madeline Martha Mackenzie goes back to high school and has a full meltdown onstage at a school assembly.

Granted, it’s a Golden Bell Award-winning assembly according to Principal Nippal, and she’s a parent, not a student. It’s unclear if that makes it more or less embarrassing. Either way, you hate (but actually kind of love) to see it — it hits the Big Little Lies trifecta of being hilarious, melancholy, and richly layered all at once.

But first, let’s back up a bit: Celeste has referred Madeline and Ed to Dr. Amanda Reisman, who proceeds to drag them for all they’re worth.

Seemingly as soon as they sat down, Dr. Reisman immediately connected Madeline’s self-sabotaging affair and obsession over her daughter’s college future to her feelings of inadequacy around her marriage and career.

So like, essentially her entire selfhood. Ed is momentarily smug about it but he gets shredded too, saying he committed the betrayal of “indifference”. No one leaves this office unscathed!

Later in the ep, Maddy happens upon the fabled coffee catch-up between Ed and Bonnie, who seem to share a special ‘second spouse’ connection.

Ed tells Madeline they were talking about Bonnie’s mum.

“Seems everyone has mother issues,” he underlines for the audience. Madeline, never lacking for an absence of self-awareness, seems wounded that he would spend time with Bonnie unbeknownst to her, perhaps assuming the worst, having treated them both kinda shittily all season.

When she asks Ed how long he’s going to punish her he says, “For as long as I need or want.” She calls him cold and mean, and says he’s being cruel. In some fairness, girl? He’s not the one who banged an unusually hot community theatre director.

Honestly, much as I love Madeline’s particular brand of wealthy suburban menace, I’m #TeamEd here. Using your wife’s affair as an opportunity to piss off both her and her posturing, bro-y ex-husband is the kind of petty we should all aspire to be.

But hoo boy, does it throw Madeline for a loop.

Principal Nippal sees an opening and invites her up to share her thoughts about teaching the kids about climate change — we’ll get to that in a moment — calling her “a beacon among us”.

Once on stage, you can see Reese gunning for another Emmy. Madeline rambles about “Rainbow Connection”, needing to tell kids the truth, and loss of innocence — essentially spilling her guts about how she’s messed up her life in front of a crowd.

It’s a full Asia O’Hara at the Drag Race Season 10 finale moment, with rhetorical butterflies landing dead on the stage around her. Appropriately, Renata and Celeste give us the perfect historical mirror to Vanjie and Monique Heart’s iconic reaction shot.

This season’s director, Andrea Arnold, has scattered some slightly more abstracted choices throughout this season, but none as impactful so far as the cut back to an empty auditorium with just Ed standing at the back, almost ashamed by her turmoil.

Honestly, I hope these two crazy kids can make it work — oddly, they’re the most stable couple of all of them.

Girl in a Coma

Renata and Gordon, however, are not faring as well.

Poor Amabella has an anxiety attack due to the mounting stress of her parents’ bankruptcy, on top of the overwhelming nature of the climate change discussions happening at school. She’s found passed out with her little silver shoes sticking out of a closet, like the Wicked Witch of the East crushed under the house in The Wizard of Oz.

She’s rushed to hospital, where Renata scolds Amabella’s (extremely hot) new teacher and demands that her daughter be transferred to Stanford. Why? “Because it’s Stanford!”

She and Gordon call in a child psychologist — played by Kerri Kenney-Silver, no less — who dresses as Little Bo Peep to coax Amabella’s issues out of her.

She sits down to tell them, but not before removing her false teeth — probably overkill to play Little Bo Peep, but you have to admire the method approach.

The psych — Dr. Belinda Shea — tells them that the problems are essentially thus: Renata, Gordon, and “mostly the end of the world”. Okay honestly? That’s a mood. Amabella has never been more relatable.

It’s almost a shame that everything that happens to and around Amabella is inherently funny just because of her name.

It’s Renata’s fury about this that prompts the assembly, storming into the principals’ office to berate him and the (extremely hot) new teacher.

It allows Renata to call a man pitiful for the second week in a row, which feels like a streak the show should keep going. It also gives us some primo ‘Laura Dern angrily pointing’ content, and Nippal calling her “The Medusa of Monterey”, which is iconic.

This episode also gives us a lot of men in these women’s lives calling them out on their shit, which runs dangerously close to being against the ethos of the show, but I’ll allow it. Gordon sits in the world’s saddest mancave and tells Renata her guard has gone way back up in the wake of the Perry cover-up, and that Amabella is suffering for it.

At the assembly, Principal Nippal alludes to Renata having come to him directly to share their thoughts, prompting her to loudly announce, “You’re welcome.”

We also get to briefly witness Renata properly meeting Mary Louise shortly after calling Nippal a “pussfuck”. Renata, blessedly, is the first person to react appropriately to Mary Louise’s brusque oddness.

Idling in Neutral

Jane finally goes on her date with the aquarium guy, who starts it off by haranguing the waitress about the origin of the restaurant’s fish, which she seemingly finds charming?

It all goes well — she’s attracted to his passion, and he likes her bangs, I guess, since someone has to — until he goes in for a kiss and Jane pulls away. She’s not ready and needs to “idle in neutral” for a while first.

Mary Louise, unhelpfully, stalks Jane and asks if she’ll subject Ziggy to a paternity test. She later tracks them down to see Ziggy for herself, and sees the resemblance to Perry.

They catch up over coffee and come to odds, with Jane revealing that she hasn’t been with any other men and that she can’t help Mary Louise see the humanity in her dead rapist son. Seems fair, all told.

Mary Louise continues her snooping, visiting the detective and prod her for information about the case. She doesn’t learn any new details, but she does force the detective to tacitly acknowledge that she doesn’t believe that Perry merely lost his balance.

After being at the centre of the previous two episodes, Celeste is a comparatively minor presence this week. Mary Louise snoops around her bathroom and finds her Vicodin and cautions her about opioid addiction; Celeste counters that she needed strong painkillers for when her dead husband would violently kick her.

Bonnie is largely absent in this episode too, but she has one moment that Zoe Kravitz absolutely slays. In a show full of big, BIG performances, Zoe Kravitz’s quiet work is so under-appreciated. Talking to Jane about how much to reveal about Ziggy’s dad to her new paramour, Bonnie muses, “I’m such a hypocrite. Nathan has no idea who I am.”

It’s one of those individual moments that perfectly capture the show’s themes. These women have carefully maintained facades for so long. What will happen when they crumble?

Next week: Celeste feels like everything is unravelling, Mary Louise meets Bonnie, and Detective Quinlan folds her arms in a hospital hallway. Shit’s about to go down.

This Week’s Biggest Little Liar:

Mary Louise outright says “okay I won’t lie” and then lies about why she’s snooping around Celeste’s “impressive array” of medications.

Monterey Death Pool:

Wouldn’t be shocked if Renata goes on a killing spree and takes out Principal Nippal, the (extremely hot) new teacher, and Amabella’s doctor who dared suggest she need counselling. And probably Gordon for good measure.

Notes On A Scandal:

• Jane is in an interesting position relative to the other women because she’s trying to move forward, relatively unburdened over Perry’s death. For her, it was a relief; but at the same time, she’s still a survivor trying to date again, and that’s immensely difficult territory to navigate.
• Celeste’s therapy scene this week is pretty major, and prompts her to push back on Mary Louise’s defences of Perry. Celeste is struggling to see how others’ experiences could relate to hers, with Dr. Reisman saying she may have felt a connection to her wounds and that she misses “the war”, as veterans do, because the abuse became so normalised in her life. We also see Celeste using make-up to cover a bruise as she did in season one.
• The episode nevertheless climaxes — pun very much intended — with Celeste watching old videos Perry had made for her, just as she and Mary Louise watched home videos of Perry earlier in the ep where he played a monster to entertain the kids. The video of Perry saying “me…greatest…monster” is a little on the nose but, in fairness, it’s not like Kevin Spacey ever shied away from playing a villain.
• Madeline believes she wouldn’t have walked out on Perry, and tells Celeste that she walked in on her dad cheating on her mother when she was a young child. Well that explains…a lot.

Big Little Lies is currently streaming on Foxtel Now.

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Laurence Barber is a freelance writer, editor and award-winning film and television critic based in Sydney. He is on Twitter @bortlb.