With its third episode, American Gigolo settles into the rhythm of a proper crime show — a little sleeker but not yet any sexier. While the last episode offered some movement in the plot, with Julian getting an apartment and a job and the murder of the Queen and whoever Guy is, it still ultimately felt like a rehashing of the first. Even with his progress, Julian could seemingly do little but contemplate his past. And given his circumstances fresh out of prison for a murder he didn’t commit, that’s perfectly fair but not all that entertaining. In “Rapture,” however, we finally get something new to grasp beyond the superficial navel-gazing.
In this third episode, we delve a little deeper into an issue that, on its face, wouldn’t seem to involve Julian: the relationship between Michelle’s son, Colin, and his teacher. Of course, this somehow is connected to Julian, too. Before stepping out of the motel room to grab some food, Colin looks at a photobooth strip in his hands of his mother and Julian, smiling and smooching some years ago. “Staring at that photo won’t make him magically appear,” the teacher says. This development that Colin knows something of his mother’s affair with Julian unearths many questions. Does he know that they were seeing each other while she was still married? Is he angry? If their affair was fifteen years ago and Colin is now fifteen, does he think Julian is his dad? Is Julian his dad?
How these questions will be answered is complicated because one of Michelle’s husband’s minions accidentally kills the teacher while Colin is out getting them some food. Her body is discovered with the photo in her hands. Detective Sunday hears about this, and now things are even messier for Julian again. But before this, Colin returns to the hotel to find the teacher dead and flees to … another motel’s storage room. The next day, having tracked down the teacher’s location, Michelle turns up at the motel room to find the body and does a shitty job trying to clean up a murder mess she assumes her son will be blamed for. So far, the show has done little to make Michelle all that sympathetic or likable, which, as with Julian, is fair. She’s entirely been consumed by the fact that her teenage son is actively being abused by his teacher (even if he thinks otherwise) and her husband is kind of a dick about the whole thing. She seems to lean on pills and alcohol to cope, as is reasonable in this sort of crisis. But on top of the murder clean-up, when Detective Sunday asks about her role in the photo found at the crime scene, she simply says that Julian is just a “prostitute” she hired for laughs. Girl, your husband isn’t even around to hear you.
While we wait to figure out what the hell will happen with Colin, there are plenty of other issues to concern ourselves with. In the previous episode, Julian receives a copy of the student file of Lisa, a girl he dated while in high school, from Guy. Through flashbacks and a phone call with the school’s principal, we learn that Lisa allegedly committed suicide while still a teenager. It’s also suggested that this suicide occurred at the Queen’s house, meaning it may not have been a suicide at all. As Julian is further haunted by this, he struggles further to settle into the normalcy of everyday life. Though he gets a little promotion at work (from dishwasher to prep cook, utilizing the skills he learned in the prison kitchen), he’s unsure how to be outside this more rigid environment. He wants to avoid drinking and drugs, but Lorenzo and Isabelle push it upon him. Lorenzo wants to have a big night out with the three of them, do some good coke — the “Balenciaga of coke,” as Lorenzo says — and get Julian to turn to his old sharp-dressed suit jacket self. This whole identity, but namely the coke part, is a piece of Julian he no longer wants to embody. Julian protests, but by the end of the episode, Lorenzo or Julian’s inner monologue has worn down on him, and he’s back on the slopes and in purple dress shirts.
While surely unhealthy, this is ultimately an exciting development in American Gigolo. Finally, maybe the show will loosen up a bit. As Lorenzo jokingly yet accurately tells him, Julian has been too much of a tight-laced, just-got-out-of-prison, sad and tough guy, and this itself feels like it’s just a persona for him to embody, too. It’s time to explore the messiness of Julian Kay, how the trauma of being pimped out as a child informed his ability to play out this high-end male escort schtick and end up framed for murder. At the very least, the coke ought to make him a bit chattier. The episode also gives us a bit of a further glimpse into Isabelle, who so far has been nothing but a villain. Why Julian would even agree to hang out with her remains a mystery, but at the funeral for the Queen, she mentions how even she, essentially a daughter to the Queen, was forced to sleep with much older men for money as a young teen. As horrible as that sex scene of the last episode was, perhaps there is much more to Isabelle and Julian’s relationship that we’ve yet to unfurl. This funeral scene also tells about how all three, including Lorenzo, interpret their past with the Queen. Lorenzo and Isabelle want to drink to her while still resenting her status as a pimp and what she’s done to them. They’re glad she’s dead but struggle to place themselves in the world without her. This ultimately places Julian, Lorenzo, and Isabelle in a similar state of flux — and without any true healing of their pasts, they’re all poised for a shared downward spiral.
Hustling
• Given the shift in trajectory this episode delivered, I feel optimistic that some more salaciousness is on its way. Maybe some male nudity, but at least some actually sexy sex scenes should be forthcoming. It’s disappointing that American Gigolo continues on with its conservative streak, but I feel a change is imminent.
• Detective Sunday continues to quietly offer some levity. In the scene where she’s in a meeting with her fellow cops to debrief about the dead teacher, she snaps a photo of the crime scene evidence slideshow using an iPad. It is the perfect Boomer detail.
• In the episode’s last few seconds, we see someone watching Julian as he leaves for his Big Night Out. Is this a new player in the plot, or someone we have seen before? It’s not clear.
• I genuinely cannot tell if the actor who plays young Julian, a.k.a. Johnny, is the same one who plays Colin. Neither the credits nor IMDb says. I think it’s one actor.
