Instead: Melodrama wins the day. The waves crash, but the flow has no ebb. Bonnie, who in the show’s second season has finally gotten the screen time she was deprived of in earlier episodes—but who is beset with an arc that finds her weighted down by depression and guilt—seems, finally, to get a moment of release: a confrontation with her mother, as the two are alone in Elizabeth’s hospital room. “I killed Celeste’s husband,” Bonnie tells her mother, “and he didn’t slip. I pushed him. I snapped, and when I lunged at him, I was pushing you. And that push was a long time coming.”

The confession has the contours of catharsis; Bonnie is making it, though, to a woman who is comatose. She will get no reply. Her rage hangs in that claustrophobic hospital room, unresolved and incomplete. It’s an elliptical ending made all the more frustrating by the fact that, throughout the second season, Big Little Lies has also treated Bonnie’s abuse as a tease: What did her mother do to her? What does drowning have to do with it? Tune in next week to find out.

There is a similar lack of nuance in Jane’s long-in-the-making face-off with Mary Louise. As Jane arrives at Mary Louise’s apartment door, begging her to call off her custody suit against Celeste, the older mother threatens the younger one: “Are you struggling, Jane?” she asks. “With your conscience, perhaps? Ziggy told me you purchased a gun. Did you plan to use it on my son? Did you move to Monterey to hunt him down?”

Mary Louise slams the door in Jane’s face. Jane screams in reply—“Do you know the difficulty that my son is gonna have to face, being a product of rape? Because of your fucking son?” Her words grow more difficult to hear, not only because she is pounding the door as she yells, but also because the background music that is so often a supporting character in the show’s scenes is swelling to an almost oppressively high volume. The strains of Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over” (Golden days before they end / Whisper secrets to the wind / Your baby won’t be near you anymore) take over the moment. Mary Louise is silent; the show’s production is what’s loud.

Meryl Streep can sell almost anything, but even she has trouble selling a scene that is such an abrupt departure for both participants. Jane has spent the show’s previous episodes reflexively internalizing her pain; Mary Louise has spent them being quietly manipulative. The sudden loudness between the two might make for drama, but it doesn’t make much sense. Their encounter reads not as a climax, long in the making, but rather as camp. Jane and Mary Louise are characters whose intersecting stories speak to the complicated cyclicalities of violence. Their clash might have explored that. Instead, the scene flattens them down to a woman who screams and another who slams the door.