Season 2, Episode 6: ‘The Bad Mother’

If you make a limited series television show and wrap its finale in a decent bow, but then rabid enthusiasm for the show leads you to make a second season — yet you feel pretty certain you absolutely will not make a third season — well, then the penultimate episode of the actual last season is the perfect place to drop a monster cliffhanger. And “Big Little Lies” brought it.

But let’s get to that in a minute.

The entirety of Season 2 has been under a hurricane warning, and that storm is Hurricane Mary Louise. In Episode 6, we’re hit with some realizations that feel like lightning strikes: Mary Louise has been combing interview footage of Celeste alongside Detective Quinlan. (Boom!) She’s been having Celeste followed. (Crash!) She knows about Jane’s gun. (Kapow!) And she correctly suspects her intentions with that gun. (Kablooie!)

The eye of the storm comes in the courtroom where the war for Max and Josh is being waged. Celeste is called to the stand. As predicted, she is questioned about the circumstances surrounding Perry’s death. She sticks to the script — he slipped — while Bonnie is left fantasizing about confessing right there in front of everyone.

But what happens before that is a scene that feels as if it will launch 1,000 feminist think pieces, which I’m voracious for. I’ll read every one. Ira Farber (Denis O’Hare), with a matter-of-fact ease, forces Celeste to answer to her entire recent sexual history. Perry’s abuse sort of flies away in the breeze. It becomes suddenly far less scandalous than Celeste’s “sickness.” The violence she inflicted, the pleasure she derived from being hit, her recent promiscuity, her pill popping: Farber paints it all into a picture he might title “A Deeply Sick Woman Who Should Be Nowhere Near Children.”