NOS4A2 Review: The Lake House (Season 2 Episode 4)
NOS4A2 Season 2 Episode 4, “The Lake House,” delves more into Vic’s failures both as a mother and a partner with minimal success.
One of NOS4A2‘s biggest problems is the way that it depicts motherhood. It’s deeply cynical, bordering on misogynistic, and it doesn’t really have anything functional to say on the matter. On one side of things, you have Charlie, who is implied to have had an abusive mother and that trauma has corrupted him from the inside out.
From his point-of-view, all mothers, regardless of the size of their infractions, are bad. It’s a very binary and moralistic stance steeped in sexism that allows for no other interpretation. He takes a complicated and nuanced dynamic and makes it simply black and white.
On the other hand, there is Vic, who the episode points out time and time again, almost with a nihilistic glee, that she is dropping the ball in a big way as far as being a mother goes. She’s a drunk, she set her house on fire, and things that happened to her in the past are keeping her son from having a normal life.
“The Lake House” is using all of these things to paint a picture that she is, if not a bad mother, one that is not deserving to have her son. This is a show that sits in judgment on her and criticizes all of the various ways that she is not doing a good job.
That might be fine as something that is subtextual, implied but not have the full focus on, but that is all there really is to this episode. It doesn’t have another level to go. It just has this condemnation to ruminate on and there are multiple scenes of Vic just taking her verbal lashings from Lou, Chris, and Wayne.
It’s this cacophony of men in her life pointing out her flaws continuously and the biggest issue with that is there’s no real counterpoint. There’s no female perspective outside of Vic to tell her that she’s not doing that bad. True, Maggie is there but she doesn’t have anything of consequence to contribute.
She only exists within this episode to worry about Tabitha and be a Chekov’s Gun, but she has the emotional support of a salamander. She doesn’t have anything to offer to set off everything being spewed at Vic because, quite frankly, she isn’t a mother and doesn’t have any experience in the matter.
What would’ve really helped these scenes would be to move the conversation Vic had with her mom on the previous episode and have it here instead. This episode is missing that other viewpoint that can tell her job as a mother is hard and impossible and you’re just naturally going to screw up.
There’s a larger conversation that can be had here for the way that shows and movies engage with mothers but we’ll have to leave that for another time.
Beyond even all of the troubling conversations this episode has about motherhood, it’s also not a terribly necessary one. It all revolves around hashing Vic as a mother and that’s pretty much all there is to it. Granted, an episode of characters hiding out can only be so interesting but this tests even that.
What did you think of this episode of NOS4A2? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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NOS4A2 airs Sundays at 10/9c on AMC.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.