Summary
It’s hard to tell what’s happening and why in this penultimate episode, which one supposes isn’t anything especially new for The Idol.
This recap of The Idol Season 1 Episode 4, “Stars Belong to the World”, contains spoilers.
Throughout most of “Stars Belong to the World”, which is improbably the penultimate episode of The Idol, I was thinking about the finale. How on earth is this going to end in something even resembling a satisfying way?
Odds are it won’t – little about it has been especially satisfying thus far, and nobody involved seems to mind. For a show about excess and chaos and manipulation and trauma to end with sudden and probably calamitous pain will feel… just about right, I suspect.
Anyway, here’s what happened in Episode 4.
The Idol Season 1 Episode 4 Recap
In my recap of Episode 3, I suggested that Tedros was probably lying about the Mike Dean thing, but I was wrong. He emerges from a car with a giant bong and roams the halls of Jocelyn’s house checking acoustics like some kind of poltergeist.
Why does Destiny move into Jocelyn’s house?
Jocelyn’s crib is getting fuller by the week. Tedros and his entire entourage are there at all times, and in “Stars Belong to the World”, Destiny decides to move in on an undercover basis so she can get a better sense of Tedros, whose background includes stints in prison for torturing his ex-girlfriend.
Destiny’s presence is the best formal quirk of the episode, since her outside-looking-in perspective – she reports her findings to Chaim – is very funny and punctures that insular feeling Tedros thrives in, where everyone is on-side, and nobody dares speak up against him.
To be fair, though, Destiny’s influence is limited. She bonds a little with Chloe, and she has a chat with Jocelyn about Tedros’s criminal past, but everyone has already bought what he’s selling. Chloe reiterates that familiar sentiment of Tedros having “saved” her. Jocelyn has heard about Tedros’s incarceration and thinks he was simply defending himself; that his conviction for being a pimp was a plot to exploit him.
Why does Tedros torture Xander?
This episode is more inscrutable than usual, and various things happen in it that defy explanation, but I think there’s an implication that Jocelyn is less of a victim than a wilful, self-destructive participant in her own ruin.
For instance, Xander. Tedros decides, quite suddenly, that he’s a habitual liar when he hears him singing. From what we can gather, Jocelyn’s mother outed Xander when he was young, and then forced him to sign a contract stating he’d never sing, presumably so as not to become a threat to Jocelyn’s career. He feigned a vocal cord injury and remained behind the scenes.
Tedros decides to take Xander hostage and torture him with that shock collar into “telling the truth”, which ends up being that Jocelyn has controlled his entire life. However, she claims this is a lie and implores Tedros to shock him further. Personally, I believe Xander, so this scene implies a lot of uncomfortable things about Jocelyn’s appetites.
The Idol Season 1 Episode 4 Ending Explained
You can kind of see this in what happens later. After being convinced by Tedros to go public about her mother’s abuse, Jocelyn learns from Chloe that it was Tedros who told Dyanne to introduce her to him. She also learns from Dyanne that she has been given “World Class Sinner” by the label.
At some point after learning this, Jocelyn texts her ex, Rob, a famous movie star, and tells him to come over. Tedros is so thoroughly emasculated by this development that he tries to out-drink and then fight Rob in the kitchen. Rob, utterly nonplussed, goes upstairs and has sex with Jocelyn while Tedros listens outside the room, trying futilely to break in and eventually crying.
His revenge – or what we presume is his revenge, anyway – is to get a newly subservient Xander to take a “compromising” photograph of Rob with some half-naked girl on his lap, even though the photo isn’t all that compromising and we have no idea how this would get Rob into trouble. It’ll have to do for a cliffhanger, though, since that’s where the episode ends.
You can stream The Idol Season 1 Episode 4, “Stars Belong to the World” exclusively on HBO and Max.
Additional reading:
- The Idol Season 1 Ending Explained
- Will there be a Season 2 of The Idol on HBO?
