The Idol season finale’s villain twist reveals the show’s major problem
The Idol spoilers follow.
With the final episode of The Idol, Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) decides to yell "female empowerment" and position herself as the puppeteer of everything, as opposed to the three-quarters-naked marionette on the end of a set of strings.
Jocelyn goes out in a blaze of "I'm the problem, it's me" glory, burning the burgeoning career of her backup dancer Dyanne (BLACKPINK's Jennie), hinting she concocted her child abuse and finally bringing the sentient statue that is Tedros (The Weeknd) back into the fold. And sadly, it wasn't just for a game of pin the rattail on the donkey.
Over the course of the first four episodes, Jocelyn has been a perpetually smoking enigma whose purpose seemed to be little more than as a cipher for Tedros to project his cringey pornographic dialogue at.
HBO's popstar princess would do things with little concrete explanation, like ordering Xander (Troye Sivan) to be shock-collared or constantly subjecting her long-suffering bestie/personal alarm clock Leia (Rachel Sennott) to a court-side view of her sex life.
In the finale alone, we go from Jocelyn screaming at Tedros that he's a "sweaty, drunken, f**king pathetic mess" and asking her manager Chaim (Hank Azaria) to pay him to vanish, to later declaring him "the love of her life" on stage in front of 70,000 people at her world tour.
So when we're told that Jocelyn had some plan all along and everything has cohered to it, you're left asking, "Really?"
In a HBO special segment on the finale, Depp described her character Jocelyn as a "very strategic" and "calculated" person, again stretching audience credulity.
"She knows exactly what she wants and she's going to stop at nothing to get it," Depp said. "By the end he realises that she knows exactly what he’s doing and she knows exactly what she’s doing."
Some precise episode time stamps regarding this go-getter mindset might help the argument, because the experience of watching Jocelyn's arc unfold over five episodes couldn't be further from that. Although, that might not be helped by the fact that we see generally her alone when she's lounging around exhaling smoke while serving some inscrutable Instagram face.
But even if we isolate Jocelyn's relationship with Tedros, the final machinations of that are so inexplicable as to feel random. While it's gloriously cathartic to see Jocelyn finally banish Tedros from what is The Weeknd's house, there's no explanation for why she and all his musician minions have disembarked the Tedros train.
Then on the other side of the coin, there's no discernible reason why she leaves an artist pass for him at SoFi Stadium, besides the fact that he introduced her to the human bong that is producer Mike Dean, who in turn coerced a banal-sounding album out of her – which we're constantly being told is just so, so, so good.
Depp can tell us Jocelyn was never really in Tedros's thrall, instead getting "exactly what she needed out of him", but it doesn't make it any more believable after we spent hours watching him call the shots.
The suspension of disbelief threshold is already being breached early in the finale, when we are treated to Jocelyn's musical showcase for industry execs, in which uninspired performances are hyped up for nigh-on half an hour, while Jocelyn keeps yelling "Imagine this on a stage!" The whole thing tips over into pure parody.
Ultimately The Idol can try to convince us that a middling boyfriend could pull some supposed masterpiece out of Jocelyn, but in waving the banner of girl power at the end of the season, all the twisted antics in service of this wretched album are sanitised.
Even if Jocelyn comes out on top, we still saw Tedros hit her with a hairbrush under the guise of care, we still saw them manufacture rape allegations against Rob and we still saw Tedros and Jocelyn play out a truly tasteless 10-minute sex scene.
Yet we're assured that all of that was fine and dandy because Jocelyn has been pulling the strings all along. She didn't seem particularly in control when she was weeping like a river and splitting her feet in half while filming that 'World Class Sinner' music video, but she really was in control.
The negative buzz ahead of the show's premiere was largely due to behind-the-scenes controversy, but now we live in a (potentially) post-The Idol world we can see its dramatic failings come down to fairly rudimentary reasons.
The show's tone lurches from one extreme to the other and the motivations of Jocelyn and those around her are real head-scratchers. Even the Bond villain-esque trilogy of Jocelyn's handlers cackling over the demise of Tedros, exclaiming "We ruined him!", leaves you wondering if this was really made by the same person behind Euphoria.
The Idol falls into the basket of shows shooting for prestige TV but trip-falling into the middle-of-the-road category instead. As a result, we get episodes that look and sound like they should be good – because if The Idol is one thing, it is immaculately shot – but the end product is just a mesmerising mess. It joins the ranks of attempts like The Morning Show or latter Ted Lasso.
If we had, to quote Tedros, "cart-ay blan-shay" over The Idol, perhaps Destiny (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) would have gone through with her proposed assassination of the least inspiring muse to have ever walked this hallowed Earth. It would have at least been interesting to see how Jocelyn fudged that as being part of her grand plan.
The Idol airs on HBO in the US, and is available on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK.
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