Manuel here, back from a week away to chat up last night’s season’s (series?) finale. Thank you Nathaniel for filling in, though I’m sorry you had the unlucky job of recapping my least favorite episode so far! We’re clearly of one mind of the way the show hit a low-point mostly by telegraphing rather than embodying its own story beats. Thankfully, the season finale worked wonderfully as an introspective examination of the fraught ride to successful gay intimacy.
By the second episode of what turned out to be a self-assured and all-out fantastic second season, when the illicit domesticity of Kevin and Patrick took center stage, I noted that the HBO show was great at asking the following question:
“What does intimacy look like within a community that is still encumbered by secrets and closets, even as it prides itself on openness and honesty?”
That question could just as easily work as preface for this episode...
Honesty, of course, was the operative word in this episode as Patrick’s moving in day slowly turned into a nightmarish bickering match where he’s forced to look, not for home as the title of the episode suggests, but to look inward during this nightmarish fairy tale set in a modern castle filled with enough trickster homos and magic potions that worked overtime to upend our hero’s seeming happy ending.
As if in a fairy tale, Patrick bumbles his way into a tower with no exit where he’s asked to face demons both imagined and real about who he is and who he’s with. The bliss of moving into what seems like an elitist gay enclave is dashed after he figures out Kevin is on Grindr and the latter admits he’d slipped up several times while dating John. Oh, and that he would like his relationship with Patrick to be more open and honest, ultimately making an odd if passionate argument about intimacy removed from sex (“it’s a handjob, it’s just a hand on someone else’s penis!”). Patrick, ever the buttoned-up good boy whose innocence frame him as our entry point into this alluring if dangerous territory doesn’t take this very well and so ensues a thrilling pseudo-one-take fight in this labyrinthian “torture chamber” of a building. Will our hero emerge unscathed from this fortress, especially after he’s made so many sacrifices to get what he thought he really wanted?
Shoutout to TFE fave Wes Taylor (guys, remember Smash?) and Whedon alum Sean Maher (guys, remember Firefly/Serenity?) who were pitch perfect as the hosts of that Gays White Shut party.
Props to Tovey and Groff (and the show’s D.P. Xavier Grobet) for making this scene so visually and dramatically interesting; it was like watching a gay Sorkin walk-and-talk where I half-hoped someone would scream “like you but sweeter!” (sorry, Julia’s on my mind). The fight, like the best Looking scenes this season (the PrEP convo at the Halloween party, for example) was effective in the ways it interlaced character-specific details (nut butters) with broader cultural conversations (open relationships).
Patrick says he’s looked in the mirror and only found his hair lacking (“I look like a middle-aged lesbian”), but it wouldn’t be stretch to say he didn’t really enjoy the young man looking staring right at him. Patrick’s family’s moral compass may have been broken (and somehow liberated him in the process?) but that doesn’t make Kevin’s accusations of his willful denial about the relationship he intruded in, the affair he embroiled himself in, and the life he’s about to build in this new Field of Dreams/peanut-butter loving apartment any less damning.
And so, if this was indeed a fairy tale, was "Looking for Home" basically a reveal of Kevin as the Big Bad of the season? Pardon me for borrowing Whedonspeak but Kevin’s seemingly reasonable arguments against monogamy (“have you ever wondered why that is so important to you?”) presented in decidedly emotionally manipulative ways (“well, your own mother doesn’t believe in monogamy so…”) begun to take darker undertones once you factor in the ways he’d been aligned with the Gays White Shut partiers downstairs. In many ways, he was the one pushing Patrick further and further away from his friends and the more diverse world of San Francisco the show was so lovingly portraying even as he clearly belongs more squarely in the world Patrick grew up in. There’s a fascinating argument to be made about the fact that Patrick and Kevin’s relationship takes place in these closed quarters while the world of Richie, Agustin, Dom, Eddie and Doris flourishes in the outdoors, in the streets and in the parks all over San Francisco.
That last scene, prompted by the return of a talisman of sorts (yes, I won’t let go of the ‘fairy tale’ angle given the fact that the season precisely begun with an actual flouncing fairy!), becomes all the more telling, but what to make of it? Is Patrick mimicking Kevin and becoming yet another white clone from the party who indulges in slip-ups and considers being honest about them doing the right thing, or is he willfully shedding it all and implicitly choosing Richie’s grounded sensibility over Kevin’s towering bravado? I have always found this romantic triangle to not be quite as gripping as perhaps Haigh & co. think it is, but the ambiguity of this final shot suggests that if the show does come back for a third season, it might be able to mine the Richie/Patrick friendship in interesting and surprising ways.
Elsewhere, we saw that Doris/Dom spat resolved while Agustin and Eddie are shown enjoying their newfound life choices (a wreathed-house and a Santa-ish boyfriend, respectively). Oh that we’d have spent more time with each. Who knew Doris and Agustin would emerge as the most level-headed characters of the season?
Best line of the episode I wish I could off-handedly use:
“Or do you want to go downstairs and join the KKK butt orgy?”
Best gif-worthy moment: Richie messing up Pato’s hair. Such a small gesture that echoed their “are you ready?” conversation from season 1.
Best Doris moment: “So we’re going on a walk? Is this gonna be like The Godfather or something?”
Previously: 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9
And so we bid goodbye to these boys. We began the season in the woods and ended it in a concrete building; we went from diverse queer outlaws to cookie-cutter gays and great props for the show for making that juxtaposition (or development?) necessarily a troubling one. Must we begin flooding HBO with escapularios (or juicy chicken?) to convince them this quietly briliant series deserves another season? Will you be satisfied if this is the last we see of Patrick & co?