Summary
Loot has utterly lost its way in Season 3, and “Mr. Maro Gold” exemplifies that perhaps better than any other episode so far.
Just what is going on here? Loot has been way off the rails in Season 3, and if I’m not mistaken, it seems like its covert objective is to make us despise every single character. I’ve disliked some of these chapters for various reasons, some of them personal, but last week’s outing set a bad precedent, and Episode 8, “Mr. Maro Gold”, perhaps dooms the whole thing. The characterisation is nonsensical and vacuous, and the most revelatory the subplots get is exposing certain characters as capable of basic communication and others as utterly incapable of the same.
I wondered last week if perhaps we had seen the end of Molly and Arthur’s relationship difficulties. I thought that would have been lazy storytelling, but it turns out I’d have preferred it to this, which simply reiterates the same basic issue – Arthur is uncomfortable with Molly’s billionaire lifestyle; she can’t let it go – in even more ridiculous terms.
Thanks to something involving the Wells Foundation that I didn’t properly catch – all of the foundation’s charity work is happening off-screen, and its effects in terms of social media virality and so forth are being hand-wavily explained at the top of episodes for context – Molly has to attend a swanky themed gala and would like Arthur to go with her. He’d rather not, since it’s not really his scene and the outfit he’d have to wear is preposterous, but he tells Molly to enjoy herself. That should be that, really, but for some reason I can’t explain, Loot keeps continuously implying that Arthur is in the wrong and Molly is somehow being victimised by this.
Is it just me? Arthur is absolutely well within his rights to resist this, and he’s completely and totally right that he and Molly have profound communication issues that need to be addressed by being open and honest with each other. But Nicholas, who is now back from Korea and boasting a new position in the foundation that is, as far as I can tell, the exact same position as before, pushes Molly to feel like Arthur is being unreasonable, and then, when the titular Mr. Maro Gold is introduced, pushes her to flirt with him.
Mr. Maro Gold is Arthur’s polar opposite in all things. He’s a superficial moron who indulges her worst tendencies, and yet not only can Molly not stop ogling him, she can barely restrain herself from cheating on Arthur with him. Then, when Arthur makes the nice gesture of saying he’ll come to the gala anyway, despite not wanting to just to support her, he decides to instead wear a normal suit instead of the ridiculous themed piece that makes him deeply uncomfortable, and in response, Molly goes to the gala with Maro instead.
I just can’t believe we’re supposed to be invested in this. It’s ludicrous. Molly has been coming off as deeply unlikeable for several episodes in a row now, and that seems to be the direction we’re permanently heading in. Arthur is merely a casualty. But she’s dragging Nicholas down with her, and the potentially interesting idea of seeing how a billionaire might actually navigate a relationship with a relatively normal person is taken completely off the table.
Our only hope in Loot Season 3, Episode 8 is Sofia, Howard, and Destiny. But this subplot is burdened by predictability and – you guessed it – a complete inability to communicate. Destiny decides she’s sick of being cooped up in the office and wants to travel the country in a van with Howard. He goes along with it for a while, but eventually confesses that it’s really not his thing, and he was just pretending because he’s scared of losing her. She reassures him that she would never leave him just because their interests were slightly different, and then completely abandons him during the night.
I hope you didn’t like Destiny’s character, since why would anyone want her to return after this move? Sure, it gives Howard and Sofia a nice moment together where they discuss their mutual broken hearts, and it makes sense for Sofia, especially, to have realised that people can change by the fact that she accepted Destiny for who she was despite her past misgivings. But it’s significantly less interesting than keeping Destiny around so we can see her grapple with the difficulties of trying to change. This cowardly way out is reflective of Loot’s storytelling overall, which would rather leave problems in the rear-view mirror than attempt to deal with them. It’s disappointingly shallow.
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