Warning: This review of episode 5 of Disclaimer will contain spoilers.

Voiceover narration is a tricky artistic choice to pull off, even for the most astute director. I don’t know if it’s beginning to wear on me, or if the narration in “V” in particular has gotten lazier, but I found the writing within this week’s installment to be lackluster overall. It’s likely no coincidence that the best moments to be found are the stretches in the second half of the episode where the narration is absent entirely.

Desperation is the name of the game this week on Disclaimer, as Catherine (Cate Blanchett) and Stephen (Kevin Kline) go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. Now that Stephen’s master plan has (presumably) come to fruition, I can appreciate the three-dimensional chess approach he’s taken to ruining the Ravenscroft’s lives. That doesn’t mean he’s any less insane though, especially with the steps he takes in episode 5.

Stephen actually follows through his threats from last time to create a fake social media profile of Jonathan, complete with his old photos and Boomer-fied memes. His target is Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who’s just dumb enough to not only fall for it, but confide in Not Jonathan for friendship. It strains credulity ever so slightly that two young adult men would not only becomes friends so quickly but would stick to a fictionalized novel as a topic of conversation, but at least Alfonso Cuarón doesn’t stretch this out too long before Stephen twists the knife and essentially reveals the truth about his mother.

It’s a little surprising that the crux of the episode, and presumably the rest of Disclaimer, hinges on Nicholas, when he’s been such a low priority thus far. Smit-McPhee imbues the character with an added level of gravitas, but he’s been a little two-dimensional compared to everyone else. He’s essentially a strung-out fail son, whose life was saved thanks to her mother’s lover, but there hasn’t been much of substance to him in present day. (Although it says a lot about a person’s character when they hate peanut M&M’s so vehemently.) If anything, he’s more important through the eyes of Catherine and Robert, which makes him more interesting in the background than the foreground of the drama.

Speaking of straining credulity, I found the resolution to Catherine’s breakdown at the office to go a few steps too far into cartoonish melodrama. First, the office goes into a hush as soon as she steps into the office, and later, she’s further humiliated after one of her co-workers(!) posts her mental breakdown on the internet and it goes viral. For a show about the nature of truth versus fabrication, it’s probably a strain to say that this part of Disclaimer is a visualization of Catherine’s fraying reality. I do like the added characterization of Catherine’s mother’s dementia, further adding to the idea that the truth is what we make of it, but it remains to be seen how vital she’ll be in the short bit of time left in the show.

Which is why the show’s reliance on voiceover in “V” is so frustrating. It mostly arrives to describe what the character is in the process of doing on screen, or stating what the actor is competently conveying. At its worst, it’s adding nothing new that wasn’t already painfully obvious. What was once a creative subversion of Disclaimer‘s themes has become one of its least successful quirks. But, now that the bottom has fallen out, and now that each of our main characters is aware of Catherine’s indiscretions, and now that Stephen has played all his cards, we can spend the remaining two episodes in the wake of the fallout. And that’s at least an exciting prospect.