SPOILER ALERT: This recap contains key plot points from the sixth episode of “Lady in the Lake.” Read the recaps for Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

We pick up where we left off, with Maddie (Natalie Portman) lying bleeding on the floor at the home of Stephan Zawadzkie’s mother, who is also lying on the floor dead after attacking Maddie and then killing herself. As our intrepid-ish reporter fights for her life, we hear Peggy Lee singing “Is That All There Is?,” a song I thought I knew but have obviously never listened to because, whoa, is it dark.

We are apparently in Maddie’s mind, as she flashes back to a gaudily grand Halloween party early in her marriage, when a very drunk Allan Durst (David Corenswet) apologizes for his handsy and rude behavior when they dated in high school and says he knows what happened between Maddie and his creepy dad (Mark Feuerstein). And she wasn’t his father’s only girl.

Maddie, indignant, flees to a nearby shed, where Allan kisses her and apologizes for being just like his father. This isn’t a problem for Maddie, who kisses him back as they fall, drunken and regretful, into each other’s arms. The scene then switches to Maddie’s now-teenage son Seth (Noah Jupe). … Wait a minute! Is Seth actually Allan’s son and not his dad’s? Is that why she was so obsessed with the death of Allan’s daughter Tessie? SCANDAL!

Seth, who’s been consistently terrible to Maddie since he found out that Milton (Brett Gelman), the man who raised him, is not his father, is visiting a still alive but unconscious Maddie in the hospital. He gently tells her he realizes she’s always “looked at him funny” because he reminds her of “something you don’t want to be reminded of.” It’s heartbreaking this kid has had to navigate the roots of his mother’s neglect on his own.

As he explains he’s not “all those men who came before me,” one of those men, Allan, appears in the door with flowers and thanks to Maddie for finding Tessie’s killer. He apologizes to her and Seth. As a groggy Maddie watches, the wall behind Allan and Seth sprouts balloons and Allan tells her, “Your next child will know the truth.” What? Suddenly Maddie’s belly has grown to a gargantuan size and she gives birth to a baby wrapped in newsprint, delivered by a nurse in a gas mask. It’s Cleo (Moses Ingram), who tells Maddie she’s given birth to her own story. Cleo then flees with the newsbaby down the hall, and Maddie wanders into a now-flooded hallway to find her.

WHAT? This is all happening in Maddie’s fevered mind, as the focus of what she’s actually chasing changes. Is it Cleo? Is it her old self from the Halloween party? Is it Reggie (Josiah Cross), who was in the fish store the night Tessie went missing? The scene shifts from that ghost hospital to a library, where the IV that Fever Dream Maddie has been dragging becomes a coat stand that holds an oversize black hoodie with a Star of David.

She puts it on and descends into the floor of the George Peabody Library at the Peabody Institute. A sea of Black women dressed like Cleo in her Supremes wig and powder blue coat dance tauntingly around her to the sound of Louis Armstrong singing the Black spiritual “Go Down Moses.” The lyrics are about Jewish people trying to escape bondage, as Maddie, a Jewish woman, is trying to escape this stone-faced woman. But the song itself is a protest about Black liberation, and Cleo, a Black woman, has become tangled in Maddie’s need for a story. Who needs freedom from whom? Cleo struggles and falls from an upper floor, and as Maddie rushes to turn over her crumpled body, she sees her own ashen face.

We see the real Maddie, still unconscious, safe in the hospital with a worried Seth at her bedside as a reporter on TV stationed outside explains how she got there. (The obnoxious kids waving at the camera are a nice touch.) Across town, a nervous Reggie watches the same report that states that Stephan no longer seems to be the suspect in Cleo’s murder, which is bad for him.

But Reggie’s not the one being arrested. Cleo’s husband, Slappy (Byron Bowers), is still claiming that criminal mastermind Shell Gordon (Wood Harris) is responsible. Detective Ferdie Platt (Y’lan Noel) questions Reggie and Shell, who tries to spin these rumors as a case of white people pitting the Black community against each other. Platt’s not buying it and, when he leaves, an angry Shell asks Reggie why Maddie and now the cops are putting together the Christmas lottery he ran and Cleo’s disappearance. And did Reggie actually “take care” of Cleo as he asked?

Back in the hospital, previously surly reporter Bob Bauer (Pruitt Taylor Vince) brings Maddie flowers. It’s interesting how almost getting murdered makes people nicer to you. He tells her Stephan has confessed what really happened to Tessie: Stephan tried to rape her, couldn’t go through with it and stashed her in the basement of the fish store, where his mother found the little girl and killed her to cover it up. Maddie deliriously tells Bob that Slappy didn’t kill Cleo, but he quiets her before asking her about what happened when Stephan’s mother attacked her. Maddie realizes this isn’t a friendly visit. He’s trying to steal her story from her literal hospital bed! The reporters in this show do not come off well, and I’m tickled that they were originally created by Laura Lippmann, herself a real-life former reporter.

This exchange propels Maddie back into her fever dream, where she’s trapped in a morgue drawer. She fights her way out to find Tessie as the morgue becomes a wall of card catalog drawers Maddie struggles to open. She insists, if she can’t get the story, no one will know who killed Cleo, but Tessie retorts, “Or no one will ever know what a great writer you are?” Get her, Dream Ghost Tessie! Maddie dismisses the child as a suburban girl who had a nice life until she didn’t. Ouch. She then apologizes and promises to tell Tessie’s story once she finishes Cleo’s. Tessie hands her a key to open the card catalog drawers, except it’s more morgue drawers, containing the body of Allan and a dead baby, and a waxy mannequin of her teen son.

The hallucinations get weirder: Cleo, disembodied hands and a shirtless Platt swinging his illicit lover Maddie in a ghostly dance as visions of her past, including Allan from the Halloween party where Seth was likely conceived, surround them. Maddie’s suddenly in the outfit she wore to Tessie’s funeral, but she realizes she’s attending her own. Her mother is called to the front to speak about her daughter’s life, but she instead shares a memory of finding out her family was killed in the Holocaust.

Maddie, bitter that she can’t even be the focus of her own funeral, gives her own eulogy. She says she should be remembered as a freedom fighter, but the audience’s approving chants about her turn into “white power!” chants from Nazis who have encroached on Patterson Park. They surround Platt’s car and pelt it with rocks. Later, he’s told by a racist police superior that everyone knows he’s breaking the law by sleeping with Maddie and, if he resigns quietly, no one has to know.

Back in real life, Platt visits Maddie and tells her he likes how relentless she is, but she shoots back, “More than you liked Cleo Johnson?” Even feverish, she can’t help herself. As she drifts off again, she finds herself wandering into a crowd of Black people surrounding the Druid Hill Park fountain as Cleo, wearing an acrobatic version of the outfit Maddie wore that Halloween, dangles above it. Maddie leaps in to save Cleo and begs her to say who killed her, as a ghostly Reggie emerges menacingly.

Finally, Maddie’s back safe in a bed as a cleaning lady wanders into her room. Maddie wearily declares she can’t dream anymore. But the cleaning lady tells her she’s awake. Maddie asks who she is.

“I was Cleo Johnson,” says the single mother whose death Maddie’s been chasing. She’s very much alive. And it’s not a dream.