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Well! We are doing this again! Today’s edition of Don't Threaten Me With a Good Lifetime covers CRADLE SWAPPING, a tale of swapped cradles and upper-middle-class people taking advantage of poor people. (Quick content warning: opiate abuse gets talked about here. I’m gonna tell you up front though: all the babies are gonna be okay.)

CRADLE SWAPPING opens with a shot of a ramshackle house in a windswept hellscape, but actually inside the house, it is fine. I think Lifetime movie creators generally do not know what shitty houses actually look like, this one has a lot of counter space and one of those wooden signs that’s like “live your life! Break the rules!” in the kitchen. Also in the kitchen is a blonde white woman in labor, who is pleading with a handsome but also very unsympathetic man named Tony to take her to the hospital. The man sneers at her that “that thing” isn’t hers, she’s just a surrogate, and they’ll have it at home. (He only gets like three lines but he Makes The Most of them.) She finally gets him to take her to the hospital to have her baby.

Look at that lamp! I want that lamp.

Then a nice pretty blonde lady is having a baby shower! How fun for her. This is our main character, Alicia. The baby shower was set up by her sister Daphne, and you know they’re sisters because Daphne calls Alicia “sis.” Alicia’s husband Ray comes in and I spend several seconds thinking, “is this Jake Johnson? No. But is it?” It is not. He asks the ladies if they want pizza and beer and they laugh at this absurd offer. Ha ha! No pizza and beer for us, we are women! Alicia and Ray have to go to birthing class now, but they’ll just be an hour, everyone just like, hang out at their house. Very normal.

Oh no but on the way to birthing class, Alicia goes into labor! She is rushed into the delivery room, where the woman from the first scene is also giving birth. The doctor immediately looks concerned when her baby pops out, and the newborn is rushed away. The sneering man uses up some of his last remaining lines to ask her if she was using heroin while she was pregnant and she swears she wasn’t, but he yells at her that the adoption agency doesn’t want a sick baby. Also, Alicia gives birth. It’s fine. It’s a miracle. Beautiful stuff. Everyone from the shower shows up at the hospital in a gaggle, because I guess Alicia’s labor was speedy enough that everyone was still just hanging out eating cupcakes at her house. While everyone is cooing and fawning over the baby through the glass, Ray runs into Tony, who is lurking in the hallway something fierce.

At home, Alicia struggles to feed her baby, Hannah. Alicia’s mom is there and she says some bossy grandma shit and then spends a while musing on how strange it is that the baby doesn’t look like either of them. This is her entire role in this movie. Alicia convinces Ray that they need to take Hannah to a doctor, since all she does is cry and refuse to eat. Good idea, Alicia.

When they go to the doctor, the baby is still crying, and Ray still sucks, telling the doctor, “I tried to explain to Alicia that this is something that happens to newborns, but she thinks it’s something cognitive.” Cool. The doctor looks concerned, tells Alicia not to be alarmed, and asks her a bunch of questions that add up to, hey what kind of drugs were you doing while you were pregnant? Alicia does indeed become alarmed and offended and says she wasn’t doing drugs while she was pregnant. She was addicted to painkillers for a while though! But she got clean over a year before getting pregnant. Maybe there were still some drugs in her system? I do not know if this is medically accurate and I did not do any research on this, but the doctor says, “just like a drug addict can recover, a baby can recover,” which truly could have been phrased better. Hannah, who appears to be suffering from NAS, is admitted to the hospital.

Now baby-less, Ray and Alicia argue about Hannah’s illness. Boy, Alicia seems awfully guilty about this, maybe that means she was using while she was pregnant??? Fuck off please Ray. She was not. You know her, she’s your wife. “But do I know you? You were addicted when I met you, so do I know you really?” Alicia pleads with him and he finally believes her. Ray is not good. This relationship is unhealthy.

After Hannah is discharged (with kind of a shrug from the doctor), Ray and Alicia go home, and there are so many people in their house! People and balloons! Are these balloons from the shower or are these new balloons? Just regular no-occasion balloons? Alicia’s mom is there and she continues to say that the baby doesn’t look like them, to the chagrin of literally everyone. I love this so much because in a normal life situation, this woman would be totally out of line at best or diagnosed with Capgras syndrome at worst, but here she is a voice of reason. Things are fuckin topsy and turvy in here.

This is the face of a woman who just KNOWS something’s up with this baby

That night, Alicia sings to Hannah in her nursery and then peers at this baby who, I cannot emphasize enough, she has been looking at basically constantly for days, and has a series of flashbacks to the day her baby was born that cause her to realize Hannah is not the baby she gave birth to. She wakes Ray and tells him that she is sure about this, and he says, “oh yeah sure, we’ll get a DNA test, just kidding,” and Alicia cries, and he relents, and of course this is the course of events.

Back to the doctor for the family! The doctor examines Hannah’s footprints and compares them to the ones from the baby Alicia gave birth to and declares that they need a DNA test. In the meantime, they look at the security footage from the nursery. Some hospital official says, “let’s not jump to conclusions,” and Alicia screams, “ARE YOU KIDDING ME,” at her, which is fair. Alicia is doing a great job. Sure enough, there’s the sketchy dude doing some CRADLE SWAPPING, including switching the bracelets that match baby to parent. “What’s the point of the matching bracelets if you can switch them?” yells Alicia. They never come back to this, it’s just a little opsec tip for you, the viewer or reader. “Where was security, where were the nurses?” I do not know, Alicia, I am sorry, you are right to be yelling.

A detective and administrator explain to Alicia and Ray that Hannah’s birth parents checked into the hospital while the mom was too far along for them to turn away (cool), and that they gave fake names, and also that the mom had track marks on her arms, oh and although they have security footage of the sketchy guy they have no real way of tracking him down so we’ll just have to wait and see!

Ray would rather not “wait” and “see.” Ray remembers running into the dude and seeing the words “Maru Auto Body” on his work shirt. Shouldn’t they tell the detective or something? wonders Alicia. Nah fuck that, ACAB, says Ray, do you want the cops to get involved and chase this guy down and let the baby get hurt in the process? This is the most reasonable Ray has been all movie. They decide to go to the auto body shop.

At the shop, Ray spins some bullshit story until the guy he’s talking to realizes he just wants information about Tony. Here is some information, bucko: he’s a drug addict and a thug (Tony is white, as is almost everyone here) and you should stay away from him, which will be easy because he skipped town a month ago. He gives Ray the address of the “ramshackle” house and they head over.

This man who is not Jake Johnson used to be married to Kirsten Storms, aka Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century.

The woman who gave birth to Hannah answers the door, and she looks like a Lifetime interpretation of a strung-out person. She does not have time for Ray and Alicia’s story about needing a phone, and tells them to go away. Finally, Alicia blurts out, “I don’t need a phone. I need to know if you want your baby,” because Alicia is the only person in this movie (besides maybe Tony??) who is capable of taking charge of a situation. Hannah’s birth mother invites them in, swipes her works off a very clean counter into a tidy junk drawer, and introduces herself as Michelle. Michelle does not have Ray and Alicia’s baby, that’s not how the cradle swapping worked. She didn’t even want to have a baby, but somehow Tony found out about an adoption agency in New York that would pay money for a healthy baby, forced her to get pregnant, and then took off with the money after selling them Alicia’s baby. Michelle clearly feels terrible but Alicia tells her, “I have very little compassion for you right now.” Pretty harsh, but also, as Michelle helpfully tells her when she hands over the contract with the agency’s information on it, Alicia’s baby could be literally anywhere, so I’ll let it slide. She is at least doing something. As Ray and Alicia drive away from the house, Tony walks up to it looking menacing. I guess he walked there? From somewhere? This is counter to my impression of California, but there he is.

The featured advertisement here is for a tablet called the GrandPad, and frankly this looks like an excellent product that I would enjoy using.

GrandPad, I am open to sponsorship opportunities

Alicia and Ray immediately go to New York to find their baby, leaving Hannah…… somewhere, I guess. Don’t worry about it. What baby. They both apologize for not trusting each other, while Ray wears a distractingly large watch. The detective they talked to earlier calls them to tell them they found Hannah’s mother (way ahead of you), but that she had been beaten to death (oh no). At the end of the call, the detective asks why Ray didn’t ask if his baby was there, and Ray says, “well I assume you would have led with that,” but he knows that the detective knows that something is up, and you know that I know that he knows that the detective knows.

That night, Alicia has a nightmare in which Michelle’s ghost appears at the foot of her hotel bed and screams at her to give her her baby back, and it is genuinely pretty horrifying! Alicia wakes up screaming and Ray comforts her. It has occurred to Alicia that nobody named the baby she gave birth to before it was sold, so they should name her Julia, after Ray’s mom. Her adoptive parents have definitely named her by now, but that’s fine.

In the morning, Alicia and Ray go to the verrrry fancy adoption agency and meet with a man named Mr. Valentini, who looks, just, amazing. I would sell my baby to Mr. Valentini. They tell him they would like to adopt, and he tells them that their agency offers a way to expedite the adoption process, for $100,000, $50,000 now please, money please, money thanks. After they promise a wire transfer and leave, Ray shows Alicia that he sneaked a pic of the door access codes on the receptionist’s desk. He uses that to sneak in after hours, opens somebody’s laptop on somebody’s desk, and immediately finds the information for “Tony and Michelle’s” baby, including the address and phone number of the adoptive parents. Easy peasy! Well, except that someone hits him with a blackjack when he comes out the front door and says, “Stay away! Next time I’ll kill you!” I have never been to New York, but it is my impression that this is just a thing that happens there, it might not have anything to do with baby sales.

Don’t you want to sell this man your baby, I know I do

Ray stumbles back to the W with his information and tells Alicia someone tried to kill him, which is false. Someone threatened to kill him. Don’t embellish, Ray. Alicia tells him he needs to go to a hospital and then gets on with Alicia business, calling the parents under the guise of working for the adoption agency and wanting to check in.

Alicia meets the adoptive mother in Central Park, because that is a place in New York that you would recognize. The mom is named Mrs. Burnett and the baby is named Elizabeth, because babies have names. Mrs. Burnett asks if Alicia wants to hold the colicky baby and yes, yes Alicia would very much like to hold her, thanks, she’ll just hang onto her while Mrs. Burnett takes a phone call and oh no Mrs. Burnett hears her saying things like, “Mommy’s here, you’re Mommy’s little girl,” to the baby. She is understandably alarmed by that, having been previously unaware she was in a film called CRADLE SWAPPING, and demands to know what’s going on. Alicia spills the whole story, horrifying this nice rich lady, who rushes the baby back over to the nanny (oh there’s a nanny) so she can yell things like, “you think you can just come here and take my baby!” at Alicia in peace. Alicia doesn’t know what she wants really. “She doesn’t even look like you,” Mrs. Burnett spits. Babies look like babies! What do these people expect! It’s a baby. Alicia runs over to the baby and picks her up, soothing her crying instantly. This is convincing enough for Mrs. Burnett, who would still like to see some proof but asks Alicia, “what kind of woman would I be to keep a mother from her child?” because she is just now realizing how adoption works. The babies, they come from people. Live births because they’re mammals.

Ray and Alicia gaze lovingly at each other sitting on the gigantic terrace of their hotel, and Mrs. Burnett shows up to bring them Elizabeth/Julia. You can rename babies. It’s fine. It’s not like dogs. She tells them that it’s not right what happened, and that babies are not a commodity to be shipped across the country, which, again, that is how adoption works. Does Mrs. Burnett think she gave birth to this child?

With Julia in tow, Alicia and Ray arrive back at their house, greeted by Alicia’s mom, who is holding Hannah. “Let’s go home,” Ray and Alicia say to each other before they step inside. I guess they just have two babies now? Maybe Michelle has relatives who would like to -- oh no the movie is over, that’s, that’s all the information I have about the situation.

That’s all the information I have about any situation! I cannot tell you if Tony was ever apprehended, or if Mr. Valentini’s agency was actually doing anything illegal or just being immoral, or why it was so easy to switch the hospital bracelets, or where Mrs. Burnett thinks babies come from. There’s just a lot we don’t know, friends, but that’s life, okay, that is life, I am done writing now, okay, goodbye!

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