‘The Idol’ Episode 5 Recap: Command Performance

I wanted to believe. You know? I wanted to believe that Jocelyn’s methodical destruction of Tedros in the first five minutes of The Idol’s season finale, calling him a con man and dismissing him simply as a muse who has served his purpose and is now just in the way, was the end of all that. Not the stake through the vampire’s heart, necessarily — if this had been a movie, rather than a hoped-for ongoing series, I might have expected the final act to show a deranged Tedros staging an assassination attempt or a slasher attack before Joss destroys him for good — but at the very least the end of Jocelyn’s interest in him as anything but a briefly useful time in her life.

Oh well!

There’s a lot to unpack about the curveball close-out to writer-director Sam Levinson’s Hollywood-vampire satire, though I’m guessing without looking that a lot of people would prefer to keep it packed, put it in a garbage bag, and leave it on the curb. Which I get, to an extent. Like I said, I really wanted Joss to punt this dork into next week! But that’s because the way she appeared to do so, i.e. punching through four episodes of apparent cult-like dominance like a wet paper bag as he sweats like a Hot Ones guest, was really funny, it was not out of any particular hunger for The Idol, of all shows, to provide straightforward moral instruction. I love a good crime doesn’t pay drama, they make up a good chunk of my all-time faves, but I can get them any day of the week. A series this prurient and gleefully mean-spirited, peppered with the occasional Kubrick zoom-out? I’m content to let it cook.

And before we take issue with Joss’s no good, very bad decision, it has to be said that at no point did The Idol go out of its way to make us think Jocelyn was a well woman, or for that matter a particularly nice one. On the latter point, watch how she treats Xander, for instance, even within this episode: allowing his career to remain dormant even after her abusive stage mother was out of the picture, encouraging Tedros to torture him to get him to recant his accusations about his treatment, embracing his career resurgence and making him her opening act only A) after seeing how her team reacted to him, and B) to pry him out of Tedros’s clutches, as a pointed glance in the svengali’s direction makes clear.

Joss’s friendships with Tedros’s “kids” seem equally contingent on their playing a supporting role in her own comeback. If she reacted at all to the departure of her horrified and exasperated assistant/“best friend” Leia, we don’t see it. As far as we know she never rebuts the libelous accusations that lead to the collapse of her ex-boyfriend Rob’s career either, with the heavy implication that doing so would screw up her comeback narrative. And Dyanne is hung out to dry simply because she had the misfortune of being the talented protégé Tedros selected for her particular mission when it could just as easily have been the warmly embraced Chloe or Izaak or Ramsey in that spot.

It’s true that Tedros’s hold on Joss was broken when she found out about his whole ploy with Dyanne, enabling her to crumple him up and throw him away as a guru and a dominant. In fact, it’s apparently true that she was more in control of things than it seemed all along, staging the whole hairbrush psychodrama with a brand new brush instead of the genuine article as a means of catharsis without cutting too close to the bone. But it’s also true that catharsis was real, and that Tedros played a key role in it. He played a key role in the creation of her new music too, as she acknowledges even when she boots him out. And he did have his hooks in her good for a while there, preying upon her as he did at such a psychologically vulnerable time in her life. All of that’s gonna be hard to shake.

So for all these pretty sturdily established reasons, she welcomes him back into her life. But this being Verhoevenland — her stage outfit evokes Sharon Stone’s white dress in Basic Instinct’s most famous scene, even — she does so on over-the-top erotic-thriller terms. Issuing him a backstage pass under his legal name to show him the spell of his manufactured persona is broken, she nonetheless admits she misses him and gets more out of life when he’s around. This time, however, she’s the boss. The student has become the master, the master has become the servant, the sub has become the dom, the real genius has revealed herself, and so on. In the end, Tedros is made to come and go on command. (It’s funny to watch the monkey’s paw curl behind his eyes as he realizes, on stage in front of thousands, what he’s now in for.)

All of this is both a horrible, unhealthy idea on Joss’s part and a sleazy, are they kidding? maneuver by the show, because horrible, unhealthy ideas and sleazy, are they kidding? maneuvers are exactly what you can count on The Idol, to its credit, to deliver. I wouldn’t want Rico’s Roughnecks to become pacifists at the end of Starship Troopers either.

If I have a criticism of the finale it basically takes the form of this review: Because the ending turns the rest of the episode into a fooled ya, suckers! fakeout, the rest of the episode gets overshadowed. It’s too bad, because that masks some really funny performances by Eli Roth and Jane Adams as slimeball industry bigwigs Finkelstein and Nikki, a lingerie musical revue by the supporting cast, and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye acting out the bleary-eyed hangover his music implies. For real, the biggest pop star in the world just spent five weeks being like “Doing all this stuff I sing about makes you look like a goof, actually;” it’s fun to watch this glamorous dude spend the last couple of episodes of the season willingly making a jackass of himself while constantly looking like he’s about to dry heave.

(De rigeur solidarity aside: There’s also a blackly funny throwaway bit about how it’s easy to cancel Joss’s ex- because his face appears in so little of his superhero movie that what’s left can be digitally replaced without missing the release date, which reminds me that the WGA is fighting so that the writers who make everything we watch possible won’t be treated as replaceable themselves.)

Anyway, does any of this resemble how the music industry works? I don’t have a clue, and I don’t really care. For one thing, I don’t think any of that matters much for visual fantasias about pop stardom. Velvet Goldmine changed my life and I don’t think it was a realistic look at how David Bowie’s management screwed him contractually. For another, realism in this kind of satirical erotic-thriller thing is beside the point: I don’t go to Body Double for a look at the adult film industry of the early ‘80s, which I’m reasonably sure involved fewer Frankie Goes to Hollywood performances IRL. I don’t think Basic Instinct is an accurate portrayal of homicide detectives or novelists, and I wouldn’t want it to be. Once it became clear what The Idol was doing — and that what it was doing was good shit, in the vein of much good shit from days of yore — all I wanted, and what I got, was for it to keep doing it, and doing it, and doing it well, as the song goes. It hit an unpleasant note there at the end, but that’s by design. If it were any more pleasant, they’d have been doing it wrong.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.