Summary
Loot Season 3 tries to get a bit more thematically serious in Episode 3, but it leans on far too many played-out cliches to do it.
I don’t know if someone at Apple TV+ is trying to subtly tell us something, but it’s a bit of a coincidence that two very different shows are both releasing episodes revolving around AI on the same day. Needless to say, Loot isn’t quite as dramatic about it as The Morning Show is, but the point is taken all the same. This is where Season 3 is trying to get a bit more serious with its themes and ideas, but Episode 3 also feels like a notable step down from the two-part premiere. “Lady Molly” is a mess of played-out cliches that ultimately arrives at too-obvious conclusions.
In a nutshell, Molly has been deepfaked. Someone has used AI to create a video of her singing and dancing about how rich she is, and how deplorable she finds poor people, which has tanked some of the public goodwill swirling around the work of the Wells Foundation. Fortuitously — or not, depending on your perspective — Molly has been invited to receive the Silver Cross in reward for good works from Lady Olivia Tottenham, a snooty British aristocrat whose family fortune comes from African diamond mines. Molly thinks accepting the award at a big ceremony during a charity cricket match in England will help to repair her reputation.
Sofia is not so sure. She’s sceptical both of the long spectre of colonialism that looms over the whole thing and Molly’s motivations in indulging it, worrying that she’s perhaps more concerned about wearing a small hat and receiving a pretty bauble than she is about the very real issues that her foundation professes to care so deeply about. In other words, is the deepfake video perhaps not quite as inaccurate as Molly would like people to think?
What this essentially means for Loot Season 3, Episode 3 is a trip to England that is an absolutely woeful indulgence of every misguided idea Americans have about the country. We’re talking jibes about accents — some of the worst I’ve ever heard — and the weather, teeth, food, cricket, and our colonial history, which, to be fair, is a point of some valid concern. But everything else is so flippant and familiar that it’s genuinely aggravating. Sure, we must entertain the possibility that I’m just being a defensive little Englander, but even though the whole thing is deliberately exaggerated, it also just feels lazy and derivative.
Don’t get me wrong, there are funny bits. There’s a recurring gag about Molly misunderstanding a particular word that ends up yielding a couple of amusing moments and then a half-decent payoff, and Arthur, Nicholas, and Howard get a funny string of scenes where they all explore the various seating areas they’ve been assigned to — as “mistress”, “assistant”, and “extended family”, respectively — and what that says about their relationship with Molly. It’s designed to create parallels between Molly and Lady Olivia, who turns out to be a homophobic colonialist monster, but the men aren’t especially keen on what it says about them as loyal billionaire beneficiaries.
It’s fine. Naturally, Molly eventually realises that she’s violating her core principles by indulging the ceremony and gives Lady Olivia and the assembled aristocracy a verbal lashing that repairs her reputation just as she claims to have intended. But it also feels like one of those episodes you sometimes get in comedies that exist just for the sake of it, cobbled together out of overly obvious ideas and familiar jokes. Loot has historically been a lot better than this. I hope it’s just a blip rather than a sign of things to come.
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