‘I Love LA’ Ending Explained – And the Nightmare Continues

Watching I Love LA is like watching a car crash in which all the victims just happen to be provocatively dressed in designer brands. That multicar pileup vibe has felt really prevalent during the last few episodes, and reaches fever pitch here in the finale, which isn’t an ending so much as a big, tense inhale before everything inevitably gets even more chaotic and morally vacuous in the second season.

A few times in Episode 8, “I Love NY”, I said something aloud to the effect of “Oh, Maia,” or “Oh, Dylan”, or “Jesus Christ, Alani!”. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the intended experience. It’s supposed to be nauseating, and it is. The smart thing about the finale is that it allows things to get a lot more sinisterly sickening and then ends before there can be any resolution to it. Usually that’d annoy me, but Season 2 has already been greenlit, so it doesn’t feel as much like panhandling as these things sometimes can.

A Change Of Scenery

We’re in New York for this half-hour, which probably should have been obvious from the title “I Love NY”. Maia is still seething about having fallen out with Dylan and has decided that the best way to remedy the issue is to follow around her awful former boss, Ben, like a lost puppy. There is a professional ulterior motive, since she’s also trying to progress Tallulah’s Formé deal with equally-awful Antoine (the men in this show are not faring well), but the conversations very much revolve around Ben, the company credit card he leaves behind the bar for them, and the possible opportunities that might open up if Maia takes a job at his company having departed Alyssa180.

In Maia’s mind, she has framed the New York trip as if it’s some kind of stupendous personal reinvention, but honestly, things seem the same there as they did in LA. Tallulah is still her only client and still reticent to play ball with anything that she thinks compromises her anarchic personal brand. Maia still can’t juggle her professional ambitions with her relationship with Dylan. She still doesn’t know what – or who – she wants.

So, Maia does the only logical thing she can think of – she spends a fortune of Ben’s money on a crazy night out with Tallulah.

A Shoulder to Cry On

While this is going on, Dylan is back in L.A., angrily rearranging his pantry. Maia dispatches Charlie to see how he’s getting on, and the two of them end up having the most authentically positive evening of the season.

Charlie has been my favourite character all season, and I think you can see why here. For all his performative superficiality, he’s really a nice, quite lonely guy, who misses his ex Andrew and earnestly sympathises with Dylan’s predicament, since he, of all people, knows how difficult Maia can be. It says a lot about Jordan Firstman and Josh Hutcherson’s easy chemistry that I genuinely thought they were going to end up sleeping together, but that might have been the fact that Charlie was wearing a wig to cosplay as Maia during hypothetical reconciliation roleplay. They settle for watching Ken Burns’ Vietnam War docuseries instead, but it does, admittedly, take all night.

When Maia finally calls Charlie, both he and Dylan think it’ll be with good news about their relationship, but she turns out to be brainstorming solutions for the latest Tallulah-shaped crisis. She’s not thinking about Dylan at all, which manifests in more ways than one. And he can sense it, which informs the decision he makes at the very end of the episode, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Happy Families

Before we get to the Tallulah problem, let’s briefly check in on Alani, who takes some time out to visit her happily married parents and finds a strange woman showering in her father’s apartment. When she confronts her, she introduces herself as Alani’s dad’s paramour, “Denise”.

Denise seems pretty reasonable and helps to coach Alani through the Earth-shattering revelation that her parents apparently aren’t soulmates after all. You can buy that she’s a nice lady right up until Alani’s mum and dad get home, and Denise attacks him with a knife. It turns out she’s a stalker who has been following him around for years.

I know what you’re thinking: now is not the time for breaking news stories about beloved Hollywood figures – Alani’s dad, played by Keith David, is a famous producer – being stabbed in their homes. But you can’t blame I Love LA for inopportune timing, and besides, for Alani, this constitutes a positive outcome since her parents are still together after all.

Maia Commits… But Not to Dylan

Maia’s problems in the ending of I Love LA are twofold. One is that Tallulah stole a backless dress from Antoine’s collection instead of wearing the plain gown he picked out for her, but now she has gotten drunk and gotten a tattoo across her back reading “The Nightmare Before Business”. The other problem is Ben, who, as it happens, paid for the tattoo, albeit without his knowledge.

Ben is a creeper on a grandmaster level and clearly has a fetish for power. His leaving his card behind the bar was only a pretext to collect it from Maia’s hotel room the next day, and when he does, he proves that the only interest he has is in controlling her. Maia has built the whole thing up in her head as a hot rendezvous, which she justifies on the grounds that she and Dylan are on a break, but it’s really just her pleasuring herself at Ben’s request in exchange for vague promises of more fruitful future hookups if she takes a lucrative job at his company.

This is so flagrantly sinister that even Maia sees it, which puts her in a bit of a predicament. She now can’t work for Ben, even though that’d be best for her and Tallulah financially, but she can’t tell Tallulah why she’s refusing the position. And this is to say nothing about what it means for her relationship with Dylan. To Maia, Ben’s actions are proof that she’s with the right guy. But she’s so self-centred that she never stopped for a moment to consider that Dylan might not just be sitting at home pining for her. Given her sole attempt to reach out was to enlist Charlie to solve her fashion dilemma, Dylan decided to take matters into his own hands. When Maia finally tries to call him, he’s in bed with his colleague, Claire. Oops.