This one wasn't even fun.
I really, truly hated last week's episode of The Idol with a passion that I haven't felt for bad TV this year. After two decent episodes, I really wasn't expecting the show to get as bad as it has been, so to see such a crap episode pop up was both a surreal and weirdly delightful experience. (I didn't enjoy watching it, but I sure did enjoy writing about it.) It was bad, yeah, but it was also a delight to watch because of how ridiculously bad it was.
"Stars Belong to the World" is bad, but instead of having the decency to be fun-bad, it's ridiculously boring-bad. All of the things that make The Idol shocking and terrible already peaked with how insanely bad episode three was, so to see them repeated again here and only slightly better makes for a terribly boring time. Big surprise—the sex is weird! Abel Tesfaye's acting is still terrible! The original music Tesfaye has made for this series is also, you guessed it, still terrible! The Idol only has one episode to go (it was going to be two, but creator Sam Levinson cut it down for some reason), but it feels like it's exhausted everything that makes it interesting, whether those things be good or bad.
The biggest idea that recurs throughout "Stars Belong to the World" is the total corruption of Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp). With Tedros (Tesfaye) having broken down her defenses, Jocelyn allows him to do whatever he wants. When her managers come to try and kick Tedros out, he impresses them by...fucking her in front of them while she half sings, half moans into a mic, because this is The Idol. The sex scenes in this episode continue to be out of place, awkward, and just plain dumb. I know that at this point, saying the sex in The Idol is bad is like saying water is wet, but considering how the show insists on making its scenes simultaneously dull and uncomfortable, it bears repeating.
The big scene of this episode is Tedros discovering Jocelyn's friend and creative director Xander (Troye Sivan) has singing talent himself, and that Jocelyn's abusive mother outed and forced him to quit singing so Jocelyn wouldn't have any competition in her field. It's a reveal that lines up now that we know, thanks to last episode, that Jocelyn's mother was indeed a horrible woman. It could add a new layer to this rather underdeveloped character if done right.
But it wasn't done right. Tedros's response to this is to have his goons restrain Xander and torture him until he recants—but not without some encouragement from Jocelyn. She first watches and then joins in, accusing him of lying and shouting at him to take it back. It's not suspenseful or interesting or particularly well shot, it's just a tension-less scene that feels unearned. Am I saying I want there to be one more episode of this show? From a personal standpoint, absolutely not. But considering how quickly Jocelyn jumps from resistant to "you can torture my friend, it's fine, I don't care," the show could use more time to develop this transformation, even if that means I would have to watch more of it.
Jocelyn eventaully starts to care, but only after she finds out that her backup dancer Dyanne (Jennie Ruby Jane) is working with Tedros to get a record deal for herself. Affronted, Jocelyn invites her ex over (played by Karl Glusman, a great actor who has an odd fascination with picking the worst roles he can) so she can have sex with him in revenge. This goes about as well as you'd expect—Tedros is of course furious, so he has Xander and one of his women set the guy up to be suggestively photographed with her.
You'd think I'm leaving plot points out, but I'm really not. The three biggest events of this episode are the weird recording, Xander's ordeal, and the ending. "Stars Belong to the World" is around an hour long, and those scenes make up maybe twenty minutes of screen time, if I'm being generous, making this episode a pain to write about. The majority of the episode's scenes are just nothing, which is also how I'd classify the episode. For my sake, I hope the finale is at least really, really funny, because at this point, I can't convince myself it'll be good.
This episode of The Idol is now available on Max.