The Expats Episode That’s Practically a Stand-Alone Film
Expats, Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Janice Y. K. Lee’s best-selling novel The Expatriates, is a slow-burn drama following the lives of three American women in Hong Kong in the aftermath of a tragedy. Each protagonist deals with complicated feelings of grief as their lives overlap, with the affluent Margaret (played by Nicole Kidman) serving as the story’s anchor.
Yet in the series’ splendid fifth and latest episode, titled “Central,” Margaret doesn’t appear until nearly 40 minutes in, and the women’s troubles fade into the background. Instead, the show brings into focus the people who have been hovering around the margins of the main characters’ lives: their live-in domestic helpers, non-expat friends, the church pastor. Taking a narrative departure several hours into a TV show’s run is not a new technique. But “Central” is unusually expansive in scope as well as in structure, conveying an inverted, impressionistic take on everything viewers have seen so far. By spending significant time away from its protagonists, the show reveals truths about them that they themselves never could.
I first watched the episode in September, when it screened as part of the Toronto International Film Festival. While introducing her work, Lulu Wang, the writer-director best known for the sensitive semi-autobiographical film The Farewell, explained that she wanted to “create two doors” into the show: One was, of course, the show’s pilot. The other was “Central,” which I have found hard to forget since my initial viewing, and even harder to shake after watching the gorgeous but often uneven Expats in order. Across its four previous episodes, the show has examined its protagonists’ confusion, self-destruction, and despair, creating an intimate portrait of how geographic rootlessness can yield paralyzing melancholy. Margaret is reeling from the disappearance of her youngest child, Gus; Hilary (Sarayu Blue) is struggling to repair her marriage amid fertility issues; and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), a wayward 20-something, is having an affair with a married man. “Central,” however, complicates the show’s core preoccupation: Set over the course of one evening as a typhoon hits Hong Kong, causing blackouts and stranding visitors, it’s a feature-length exploration of how the expat women’s misery is not so special.
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Perhaps that sounds cruel. For someone like Margaret—who now struggles to parent her other children—how could the world not seem to revolve around her loss? But Expats gently interrogates how private anguish can be blinding. The episode foregrounds figures who have spent most of their screen time so far providing support to the protagonists; here, they’re shown to have their own lives and worries. Essie (Ruby Ruiz), Margaret’s housekeeper and de facto nanny, contends with her guilt for not being there the night Gus went missing. At the same time, she yearns to return to her own family in the Philippines. Wang delicately shows how Essie pours herself into both her own family and her employer’s, caring for them all with the same devotion: In an early scene, she kisses her iPhone screen at the end of a FaceTime call with her son. Later in the episode, she does the same with her framed photo of Gus.
