The Girlfriend Episode 4 Recap: Did Cherry Find The Truth?

Till the third episode of The Girlfriend, the weighing down of perspectives between Laura and Cherry denied us a single, unified, objective reading of the plot. Each look, through each lens, looked at the same things but from a slightly different agency. In each of these agencies led by Cherry or Laura, their actions could be justified. However, this is the episode where the show finally takes a decisive step to side with one of the perspectives—and it is Cherry’s in here. While the differences in reading were in minute behavior till now, there are broad strokes of “each version of the story,” which turns the sympathy towards Cherry, positioning Laura as the villain. Let’s see what happens in this episode.

Spoiler Alert

The Girlfriend episode 4 makes it difficult to protect Laura anymore—and even Cherry’s version is on the whiter side if a black and white judgement is made. Laura has been sticking to her lie that Daniel is dead; she drops by Cherry’s apartment and catches Cherry just back from shopping. Cherry looks nonchalant and put together, and she finds a pair of boxers on her couch despite Daniel not living there. Laura tells her they are done with Daniel’s funeral, which sets Cherry off, and she asks Laura to leave. Laura leaves with Daniel’s laptop and figures out his passwords. Cherry tries to contact Laura to know about Daniel’s grave, but Laura blindsides her completely. Daniel has recovered, and Laura plans to take him to Spain for the rest of his healing journey.

When Daniel wakes up and asks for Cherry, Laura tells him that Cherry has abandoned him while he was in the hospital; she was a friend of a good time, Laura claims as she goes on to replace Cherry’s number with her own in Daniel’s phone. During the Spain retreat, Daniel tries to make contact with Cherry, but the messages, including explicit ones, get delivered to Laura instead. Meanwhile, Cherry is trying to get back up on her feet. Laura has given her one month’s notice to clear out Daniel’s apartment, and one day she finds her stuff on the street. Cherry is devastated and goes out clubbing, where Brigitte sees her making out with a man; Brigitte snubs her off with vile remarks and leaves her dumbfounded. However, on this same night after hearing that Cherry and Brigitte met, Laura hacks into Cherry’s professional account and posts stuff against her company and her boss to take her off the map of the city. Cherry is fired, and she ends up at home with her mother.

Laura’s post gets to Cherry’s reputation—almost all firms blacklist her. She takes up a job at her mother’s butcher shop, and although she tries to blend into her old life, she finds it difficult to settle. She visits her father at the hospital with her mother, and he gets aggressive and attacks her. It seems like there is quite a lot of blood between these two. However, this gives Cherry a realization; she wants to get back to her life. She calls on Max Kader—the investor Howard had suggested for her—and goes for a meeting. While Max is mildly interested in Cherry’s proposal, he is taken by shock when Cherry reveals Daniel is dead. Daniel is having lunch upstairs, he adds. Cherry rushes upstairs to find a fully alive Daniel having lunch with Laura.

The Girlfriend episode 4 takes Laura’s maternal “concern” into the territory of pathological obsession. With her obsession with her son’s health and how she feels “needed” in moments of his weakness, it reminds me of a “Sharp Objects”-level Munchausen by proxy. She is cherishing the fact that Daniel is again dependent on her—and there are beautiful visuals in Spain that underscore this theme. In one, Daniel is trying to float in the pool, and Laura holds his body on the surface of the water, as if he is a newborn child being cradled by their mother. However, things soon start looking quite pathological and disturbing; during moments of intimacy with Howard, Laura receives her son’s explicit photos, immediately putting her out of mood. However, even by denial of this, it is quite disturbing to make such associations. 

To keep her lies alive, Laura puts her son through elaborate lies. She gaslights him into believing that Cherry had left him down cold at the hospital. Laura brings her fangs and claws out. This is an act of deep malice. Laura is assured when Daniel seems to move on from Cherry and agrees to take her back to London, but she convinces Howard to ask Daniel to sell the house. There are intense, psychologically heavy moments between the mother and son—as the mother withholds lies to manipulate the son’s life. They share a joint together and reflect on life, yet the power in the dynamic is siding with Laura. While a child-and-mother relationship is seen on this side, another parental relationship is shown on Cherry’s side.

Okay, Cherry’s account of things as she sees and remembers them is a perfect example of how people view things and how things actually are. While Cherry tried to maintain composure the day Laura came to visit her, she was devastated inside. The boxers were Daniel’s, which she wore to deal with the grief, and then she went to shop for Daniel’s funeral. She wanted to put him in a blue suit, just as his mother likes, she says at the shop. However, when she gets to know that Laura has had a funeral without her, she feels excluded and wronged. Cherry deals with quite a handful in this episode. After losing her job, that too in a way that marks her, she has to adjust at her mother’s house.While Cherry’s mother looks supportive of her decisions, it looks like she is convinced that Cherry cannot be with men with “money”; she is always trying to minimize Cherry and fit her into a narrative of “good” that she is creating for her. For instance, she takes Cherry to visit her father, which seems like a sore spot for her; it looks like the father has been the cause of major trauma for the family, and Cherry took it upon herself to put him in his current condition. However, Cherry’s mother’s solution is to gulp it down and pretend everything’s fine. In one monologue, she also says how she is still in love with her father and that she is irreplaceable. While Cherry’s mother may look supportive from the onset, especially because her contrasting factor is Laura, it is important to notice that her account is not fully reliable either. However, Cherry is a fighter. She will not fit herself in a mold where she does not want to fit. Cherry goes on to meet Max Kader and eventually, as she would have, finds out that Daniel’s alive. This will be a big divider between Cherry and Laura, and Laura does not realize that she just handed over the biggest leverage to Cherry to turn Daniel on her. With the web of lies she has spun, Cherry will have no problem convincing Daniel that his mother was up to evil schemes to take these two apart. While The Girlfriend episode 4 was unfair to Cherry, it is also notable that Cherry has her own motivations. I am not saying the motivations are money—it is love, surely, but then again, I have seen how toxic love can turn into possessiveness with Laura.

With the narrative tilting to Cherry’s favor, Laura’s manipulative sides are revealed. Laura is presented not as a protective mother but as a manipulator caught in the illusion of her own control. The half-truths that once muddied perspectives for the audience now become full-fledged lies, designed to erase Cherry’s existence from Daniel’s life and preserve Laura’s role as the sole object of his dependence. The battleground is not limited to Daniel’s affection anymore; it is a full-blown war between two women who have hurt each other’s egos. With episode four laying the foundation for Cherry to weaponize sympathies, big changes await in episode five. I am intrigued to see, with the truths out on the table, how the story plays out. However, it is still difficult to tell if Cherry or Laura have shown their hands fully to the audience yet!