The penultimate episode of My Brilliant Friend brings with it the most shocking event in Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy. Lila, the eponymous friend to narrator Elena “Lenù” Greco, had always maintained a notorious, hard-scrabbling implacability alternately admired and despised by her more accomplished friend. But on an ordinary Sunday, as families loiter on a busy street, Lila’s cherished daughter Tina disappears as if she evaporated into thin air. It’s the moment that gives the final book the ominous title The Story of the Lost Child and leaves Lenù (played in the fourth season by Alba Rohrwacher) to reckon with Lila’s (Irene Maiorino) near-mythical breakdown.
Even as a child, Lila possessed a strange, quasi-supernatural inner force that emerged in moments of rebuke or fear. In the face of…
