Summary
Loot Season 3 wasn’t working without Nicholas, so it makes sense to bring him back, but Episode 7 suffers from major communication issues.
Well, Nicholas’s exile didn’t last long, did it? Ever since Loot confirmed his exit with what was by far Season 3’s best episode, it felt obvious that he’d return sooner rather than later. Left to their own devices, Molly and Arthur managed to ruin their relationship, and it was obvious that the show’s dynamic was completely off without Nicholas. Episode 7 predictably brings him back, but it uses the joy of his return to essentially skip over a couple of other subplots and resolve them mostly off-camera.
This is putting aside the fact that, again, Nicholas’s time in Korea has occurred without our knowledge, too. Understanding his circumstances there gives us a clue about his headspace, but it’s a weird lurch to go from “this is my dream” to “been there, done that” in the span of two episodes. It seems like whenever Loot ventures abroad, it becomes terrible, or at least significantly worse than usual.
The contrivance to weave Nicholas back into the show is that Molly is struggling in her relationship with Arthur, and she needs Nicholas’s support. Ainsley is a less-than-adequate personal assistant – although the recurring gag of her just pretending reality doesn’t exist is pretty funny – and Howard is too busy with Destiny to offer any kind of meaningful support. Going to see Nicholas – a ruse organised by Howard – is kind of a cheat code to take Molly off everyone else’s hands.
This makes it a bit too convenient that Nicholas’s career is proving to be deeply unsatisfying for him. Of course, initially, he beats around the bush and pretends it’s all gravy, as does Molly, who doesn’t want to saddle him with her issues in the event that he really has moved on and doesn’t need her anymore. But Nicholas’s show is a simulacrum of the office dynamic at the Wells Foundation. He has essentially uprooted his life and then created a Korean TV version of it to prevent him from being lonely.
Again, this works in theory, but not in such a collapsed form. I do think there’s some validity in Nicholas’s realising that his dreams aren’t all they were cracked up to be, since that’s quite consistent for a character who has learned over three seasons that what he really values is love and connection (however much he might try to deny it). But the fact that we’re only discovering this because Molly turned up makes it feel inauthentic, just another way to placate her neediness, which is, in a roundabout way, what Arthur correctly identified as the problem in their relationship.
Loot Season 3, Episode 7 does try to address this relationship, just without any backbone. It instead uses Sofia’s ongoing problems with Destiny as a way to kind of force a reconciliation behind everyone’s backs. I was actually quite pleased with an early attempt Molly made to reconcile with Arthur by just pretending their argument had never happened, because it’s exactly the kind of thing a really rich and emotionally stunted person would do, and Arthur rejecting it gave him some real agency. He spends the rest of “Billionaire, Beautiful and True” playing board games with “the guys”, and this ends up roping Sofia in since they’re playing in the office and she’s hiding out there to avoid having to attend a party Destiny is throwing at her house.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the insight we get into Sofia’s backstory here, and Michaela Jaé Rodriguez is the most dramatically convincing performer in the entire show. I also like that it’s Arthur whom she most connects with here, since he’s similarly human-seeming. But the personal revelations summoned by game night essentially allow her to square her feelings about Destiny without actually having to have a conversation with Destiny. And to make matters worse, an inspired Arthur texts Molly when she’s on her way back home to say he misses her and would like to have the conversation they’ve been putting off. I’d like them to actually have that conversation, but it has the tone of something that’ll be skipped over to put everything right again by the time Nicholas gets back to the office.
Just like all of its characters, the biggest problem Loot has is basic communication.
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