Diksha Sundriyal
Apple TV+’s ‘Imperfect Women’ begins with a murder. Eleanor narrates the perfect friendship she shared with Nancy and Mary, whom she’d known since college. They were each other’s soulmates, and their friendship was supposed to have survived against all odds, but of course, things weren’t meant to be that way. Going back to the previous day, we find Eleanor running a foundation called Relief and Rescue, where she is doing great. She is also having an affair with her junior, named Jordan, with whom she sleeps later that night. She spends the evening with Nancy and Mary, celebrating the latter’s birthday. All seems to have gone well until later that night, when she receives a call from Nancy’s husband, Robert, who tells her Nancy hasn’t come home. And soon, the cops come knocking at Robert’s door, telling him his wife has been murdered. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Nancy’s Death Opens a Pandora’s Box of Secrets
At Mary’s birthday party, Eleanor discovers that Nancy is seeing a guy named David. She and Robert are in an open marriage, but Nancy kept her liaison with David secret, which has complicated things. Eleanor advises her to break things off with the guy, and later, she wonders if that’s where Nancy went and if that’s what got her killed. The cops don’t tell her anything about what happened to her friend. The only thing she knows is that Nancy was hit in the back of her head. The next morning, Eleanor visits Mary and tells her about their friend. Mary, who lives with her husband, Howard, and their several children, is shocked by the death of her friend. But what irks her even more is that she didn’t know about David.
As Mary fixates on why Nancy shares this detail with her, Eleanor turns her attention towards Robert and his daughter, Cora. Apart from being Nancy’s husband, Robert has also been a close friend of Eleanor. From the way she comes running whenever he calls, it is clear that she has strong feelings for him, a fact not hidden from anyone around her. Later, Mary hints that Nancy knew about it, too. Apparently, Eleanor is not the only one their dead friend confided in. For now, Eleanor helps Cora grieve her mother. The girl asks to stay at their house for a bit because she doesn’t feel safe with her father around. When Eleanor talks about it with Robert, he understands why his daughter would be scared of him. He is the husband, and hence, the prime suspect in Nancy’s murder investigation.
Robert is also not in the best emotional place at the time. While he is grieving his wife, who he discovered was cheating on him a few minutes before he discovered she was murdered, he also has his overbearing family. His sister, Kit, advises him to consider a publicist, which isn’t something he wants to think about right now. Because Nancy’s body is still with the authorities, the family organizes a memorial which, as Eleanor and Mary note, is nothing like Nancy. Everything, including the speech Eleanor gave, was pre-approved by Kit, who instructed her not to include any jokes or anything that would make people cry. Notably, Nancy’s family is not at the memorial either. “They wouldn’t dare,” Mary says.
The Cops Find a Suspect in Nancy’s Murder
Soon after the memorial, the cops arrest a man named Davide Boyette. He is a painter who was under Nancy’s patronage through one of her many philanthropic endeavors. Eleanor notes that a painting by him hangs in the house’s common room. Believing that Davide was Nancy’s secret lover (especially since the painting he made of her shows her without any clothes), an angry Robert throws it out of the house. Later, as Mary and Eleanor talk, the former wonders whether Davide is really the secret lover or just a distraction, while the person who should really be under investigation is Robert. When Eleanor refuses to believe he had anything to do with the murder, Mary points out that Eleanor has always had a blind spot toward him.
Later that night, Robert shows up at Eleanor’s house all dressed up. The conversation between them is light and funny, revealing the greater depths of their friendship and more. He reveals that he is going to ballet. Though he never liked it, Nancy did, and he feels that doing something that she loved would help him feel closer to her. However, he doesn’t want to go alone. Eleanor doesn’t think it’ll be a good idea, so Robert leaves on his own. Eleanor gets a text from Jordan, who asks if he can come over because he doesn’t want her to be alone during this difficult time. Instead of texting him back, Eleanor puts on her best dress and heads to the opera. As they walk in together, two men are seen stalking them and taking photos.
One of those men turns out to be Eleanor’s brother, Donovan. Later, we discover that he doesn’t approve of Eleanor’s fixation on Robert, and that he had her followed because she is known to act out in times of crisis. Meanwhile, at the opera, Robert receives a picture of Nancy and Davide, with her lying in his lap. While it is her friend, Eleanor notes that it doesn’t really feel like Nancy, making her wonder if there is more to the picture. Robert, on the other hand, becomes angrier while confessing that even after all this, he still loves Nancy and would do anything to have her back. Eleanor arrives at her door to find Jordan waiting for her. He is upset she didn’t reply to him, and as he starts listing all the times she has done this to him, he mentions that on the night of Mary’s birthday, she told him to meet her at nine but didn’t come to him until ten.
Mary Starts Investigating Nancy’s Murder
Jordan talking about the missed one hour means there is a hole in Eleanor’s alibi, but she doesn’t want anyone to know about it. So later, when it becomes clear the cops will likely be looking at her, she tells Jordan that if anyone asks, he should say Eleanor was with him. This surprises him because just a day ago, she told him she wanted them to be casual so no one needed to know about them. Meanwhile, Mary embarks on her own investigation, digging into Davide’s public records. She is convinced that he is not the murderer, and the real David is someone else. While Eleanor tries to dissuade her from following the lead, there is no stopping Mary. Later, she is arrested for bothering the cops and taking out her frustration on them, and Eleanor has to step in to bail her out.
Eleanor also visits Nancy’s house, where Robert doesn’t know how or if at all he should plan Cora’s birthday party. The last one was planned to perfection by Nancy, and a flashback hints that something happened that day, though it’s not revealed just yet. Eleanor insists that they should throw a party, and she will help Robert plan it. Later, however, this plan fizzles out as Robert reveals that his family went behind his back and hired a publicist, and it was they who leaked Davide and Nancy’s photo. He also has Nancy’s things packed up because he can’t bear to look at them, but it hurts Cora, who thinks her mother is being erased one step at a time. Eleanor ensures her that’s not what’s happening and tells her to keep something of her mother to remember her by.
Speaking of dead parents, Eleanor wears a pendant of her father’s and has his fishing rod in her apartment. The next time she meets Robert, he talks about the time they all went fishing and mentions that Donovan told him that Eleanor was strictly off-limits. This realisation hits her hard because Donovan knows Eleanor has been in love with Robert all this time. Had Donovan not scared him off, perhaps Robert would have been with her instead of Nancy. But that’s just another what-if, like what if Eleanor had not introduced Nancy and Robert? Still, she confronts her brother for treating her like she’s under his control. He explains that one of the reasons he did it is that Robert’s family is old money, which means they would never have accepted Eleanor’s fantasy of being with Robert, and he wanted to shield her from all that.
Eleanor’s Dynamic With Robert Shifts
Donovan also warns his sister that Robert is not as pure-hearted as she thinks. He says his family is behind Davide’s arrest, and while she doesn’t believe it at the time, she later discovers they leaked the photo, proving Donovan’s point. In any case, Davide is let go, and the cops turn their attention to Robert, whose office is ransacked, and all his financial documents are taken for investigation. Elsewhere, Mary continues her investigation and reveals she has found an address for Davide. She and Eleanor pay the guy a visit, who confirms that he wasn’t having an affair with Nancy.
He did paint her, but it was most likely because Nancy wanted to be seen by someone. He notes that she felt responsible for an accident she had scars from, and her friends assure him the accident wasn’t her fault. He also pointedly asks the women where they were when their friend was suffering. All of this convinces Mary even more about Robert’s involvement, but Eleanor still doesn’t agree with her. At the end of the second episode, she accompanies him as he packs up Nancy’s things and takes them to another house. Alone together, they reminisce about how Nancy liked to scare people with a fake snake.
A surge of emotions leads Eleanor to cry, and when Robert offers her a shoulder to cry on, things escalate, and they end up sleeping together. The way it happened suggests this might not be the first time. Later that night, Eleanor goes through Nancy’s things and finds a letter from Robert, in which he apologizes for acting out after discovering that Nancy was having an affair. This shocks Eleanor because Robert had claimed he knew nothing about it, and it also supports Mary’s theory that he is the one who had Nancy killed.
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