In the third episode of the second season of Big Little Lies, an eight-year-old girl named Amabella goes into a “coma” in her school classroom. It’s not really a coma—it’s more like a panic attack—but it is enough to send her mother, Renata Klein (Laura Dern) into a fit. Amabella was physically bullied throughout the first season, and Renata—the Sheryl Sandberg–esque CEO of a Silicon Valley company and the only mother among her cohort with a powerful day job—spent a lot of time screaming her head off at anyone she thought might be responsible. She fingered the wrong child as the bully, and proceeded to verbally torture that child’s mother (Jane, played by a soft-spoken Shailene Woodley) for months. When the true bully emerged—one of a pair of twins whose mother, Celeste (Nicole Kidman), received regular brutal beatings at home from her husband Perry and so began to mimic his father’s violent behaviors—Renata had to recant.

But in Big Little Lies, no one ever stays calm for too long. When Amabella passes out, Renata has another excuse to go ballistic in public. A children’s therapist dressed as Little Bo Peep—likely the sort of thousand-dollar-an-hour specialists that roam the moneyed enclaves of the California coast—has a session with Amabella and determines that she is not being bullied again; she is simply overwhelmed by the concept of climate change. “She is worried about the end of the world,” the therapist tells Renata and her husband, Gordon, who are already enmeshed into their own serious crisis. In the pilot, Renata learns that Gordon made some bad (read: deeply illegal) investments, and now the FBI is seizing everything they own, much of which came from Renata’s corporate hustling.

So it doesn’t take much to set Renata off. She stomps into Otter Bay Elementary school in a shiny snakeskin blazer with fury in her eyes and confronts her daughter’s teacher and the principal about teaching climate change in the classroom. “What possesses two idiots like yourselves to teach eight-year-olds that the planet is doomed?” she barks. She calls the principal “a smoker who hasn’t been laid in 15 fucking years.” She howls over their protestations. And then, in her final chilling blow as a human monsoon, she yells, “I will be rich again! I will rise up. I will buy a fucking polar bear for every kid in this school.”

Later, in the same episode, Reese Witherspoon’s character, the pert perfectionist Madeline Martha Mackenzie, gives a mostly incoherent speech at a parent assembly, arguing against teaching young children about what may happen to the planet. “That the whole world might go kapooey?” she says into the microphone, on the verge of tears. “They need to know that? I think part of the problem is, we lie to our kids. We fill their head with Santa Claus and happy endings when most of us know most endings to most stories fucking suck. There aren’t a lot of happy endings for a lot of people, you know? Be it climate change, be it guns in schools.”

When Big Little Lies finished its stunning first season, which ended with the murder of Perry at a school fundraiser, I wrote that it was the best show that we have about the blue ache at the edge of California, how it was really a western about loneliness and isolation disguised as soapy housewife noir. That BLL is about what happens when people push all the way to the foamy frontiers searching for fulfillment, and how when they still don’t find it there, they have to manufacture it elsewhere: in infidelity, in codependent, twisted, violent relationships, hubris, gossip, corruption, lies. The show was a perfect jewel box of wealth and secrets, gleaming with the lawlessness that comes with living in mansions up against big waves and thinking that consequences can’t apply to you.