The Romanoffs - "The One That Holds Everything" review

For the past seven episodes, The Romanoffs has mostly been a concept-first show.  That's not to say it didn't have interesting characters, but it always felt like they were secondary to the circumstances they were put in for the sake of the story.  What we learned about them were mostly reflections of the plot and theme of a given episode.  In the finale, the show offers up its first true character study.

"The One That Holds Everything" starts on a train station in France, as we get a quick little nod to the premiere episode with Greg (Aaron Eckhart) and Sophie (Louise Bourgoin) from "The Violet Hour" passing through the frame for a few seconds.  But the person of focus in this outing is Jack (JJ Feild), who was the writer of the Romanov miniseries from "The House of Special Purpose."  When he boards the train, he finds that a woman is sitting in his seat by the window.  The woman (Adele Anderson), who introduces herself as Candace, gets to chatting with Jack about the Romanovs, claiming she once knew someone who was a descendant.  Clearly, Jack has little interest in conversation, and would just like to get back to reading his book, but Candace's insistence eventually gets the better of him, particularly when she teases that the story of her Romanov friend involves murder.

The episode cuts into the middle of Candace's story, as we see a man named Simon (Hugh Skinner) visiting his dying father.  Evidently, their relationship has been strained for a while, as they don't exactly exchange friendly words, and he has even less friendly words for the woman taking care of his father.  The difficulty of those interactions prove to be too much for Simon, who decides to take a handful of pills and try to drink himself to death, though he fails and ends up in the hospital.  While telling his story to a support group, we flash back further in time to provide some more context about his life. After his mother died and his father married another woman, he traveled to Hong Kong to become a bond trader, where he fell in love with his male best friend.  But when his friend/lover announces he's getting married to a woman, Simon gets upset and tries to out him to the new fiance.

This episode functions like a Russian matryoshka doll, nesting flashback within flashback as it travels further into the past.  It moves just as we do when speculating about how a person came to be the way they are now, tracing back into their lineage to find clues that may make sense of things. That's what Simon's friend attempts in an effort to explain away his actions, jumping back to Simon's troubled upbringing.

Simon is a Romanov descendant through his mother, who we see has earrings that have been passed down through many generations of the family.  One night, he discovers his father is having an affair with his nanny Ondine (Hera Hilmar) when he spots the two of them canoodling outside of his bedroom window as his father is about to take her home.  A fire breaks out in the middle of a later night when Simon's father is away, killing Simon's mother and almost killing him in the process as well.  While the police and fire department gather outside, Simon sees Ondine among the bystanders and begins to suspect she was responsible for the fire.  Shortly after, Ondine moves in and assumes the role of Simon's mother figure, ultimately getting him sent away to boarding school.

In this chain of flashbacks, Simon's story is painted like some sort of dark fairy tale.  Throughout the series, the score has been quite restrained and unobtrusive, but it's very prevalent here, with the sweeping strings rising in grandiose fashion.  And the direction is different too, featuring brighter colors that pop out out of the otherwise muted filters to give it a vivid storybook aesthetic.  The grimness of Simon's plight is almost Dickensian in its tragedy.  There's even an evil stepmother, in case the tone this story is aiming for wasn't clear enough.

And of course, it's not a true fairy tale without a few twists of fate.  Many years later, after the death of his father, Simon (who has begun transitioning and now presents as a woman) visits Ondine to try to get his mother's Romanov family earrings back from her.  Despite pretending to understand Simon's transition, Ondine throws some cruel barbs at her when she refuses to let her have the earrings, saying that since Simon isn't a "real woman," then the earrings deserve to stay with her.  Eventually, Ondine's son shows up and we realize that it's Jack, the man who is being regaled with this whole tale, and that the woman telling him this story on the train is who he knew to be Simon.  That's when the true punchline arrives: Candace has poisoned Jack's drink as an act of familial revenge on Ondine.

It's an odd, over-the-top twist on its face, but it's in keeping with that dark, fantastical tone the episode is going for.  The reveal would be right at home near the end of an Edgar Allan Poe short story.  It also clarifies the theme that the episode and the show as a whole has been building towards.  Amazon's short description of "The One That Holds Everything" is: "In a story that circles the globe, a man tries to escape his family curse."  Candace comes from a family that was virtually wiped out in a fusillade of bullets.  And more immediately, she lived through the hardship of her mother dying, being terrorized by her stepmother, and getting sent off to boarding school.  In a way, this is her breaking that Romanov family curse, getting cosmic vengeance for all the wrongdoing that has been brought upon her head.  By obtaining this symbol of family and femininity, she gets to finally crystallize the identity she's been craving her whole life even if she didn't know it, both as a woman and someone who belongs to something greater than herself.  The series closes just as the opening credits do, with a Romanov living on, casually slipping away into the crowd.

So that's the end of The Romanoffs.  Was it a success?  Most people would have you believe that it wasn't, but I loved the show from start to finish (with the exception of "Panorama").  This series was an example of what happens when one of our greatest living television writers gets a blank check to do whatever he wants.  That resulted in some bloated storytelling and truly wild flights of ego, but it also gave us a bounty of rich writing and a show that existed in a space that no other series come close to living in.  What a joy it was to parse this series from week to week -- it's right up there with Twin Peaks: The Return as one of the great viewing experiences of this decade.  In an age where weekly watching is dying rapidly, that's something to cherish.

On a pure premise level, the show was united by the fact that each episode centered on someone who believed themselves to be a descendant of the Romanov family.  But what really holds the show together are the ideas that it plays with.  Almost every episode wrestles with notions of identity, truth, and impropriety, delivering variations on the theme of how to live and treat others.  It's like an A.I. consumed all of the discourse that society has been engaging in over the last year and spit out eight scripts, trying to make sense of these moral quandaries in the form of stories about people behaving badly.  And therein lies the fascinating tension of The Romanoffs: it's captivating on its own, but more so coming from a creator who is a Man Who Has Behaved Badly.  Perhaps we should let the text be text, but it's hard to do that when so much of that text feels like a creator's direct reckoning with himself and the world around him.  I get the sense that this is a turnoff to some people, but to me it made the show all the more hypnotizing.  Even in its failures, there was so much to unpack.

Here was a show that tapped into the dark hearts of its characters and let them engage in their worst impulses.  In that sense, it exists on the same continuum as Mad Men, Matt Weiner's previous work.  When taken together with that show, the affairs and betrayals and transgressions of The Romanoffs aren't the product of shared lineage between these specific people.  Weiner argues that it's just a common trait among humans no matter what the time period, geographic location, or family background.  So maybe The Romanoffs should be viewed not as a standalone miniseries but as a descendant of the great Mad Men -- more difficult and fussy, but you can still see the resemblance all the same.

Bonus Points

-"The One That Holds Everything" was written by Donald Joh and Matthew Weiner, and it was directed by Matthew Weiner.  I assumed Weiner would choose for the finale to have symmetry with the first episode and be solely written by him, but I was wrong.  He sure did direct the hell out of this episode though.  His use of color felt like one of the Jennifer Getzinger directed episodes of Mad Men.

-I never got to really dig into this in detail in any of my reviews, but I saw this show as Weiner's attempt to do actual literary short stories in the vein of an Alice Munro or J.D. Salinger.  Technically, other anthology shows like The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror are short stories as well, but those still have a televisual flair to their storytelling.  These Romanoffs episodes felt like they were often direct translations from a collection of short stories, which led to many of the issues people found with the show.  However, I often loved the unique vibe of them.

-Shout out to that excellent choice of "West End Girls" by Pet Shop Boys to close the episode.

-Here's how I'd rank the episodes: 1. "End of the Line" 2. "The Royal We" 3. "Expectation" 4. "Bright and High Circle" 5. "The Violet Hour" 6. "The One That Holds Everything" 7. "House of Special Purpose" 8. "Panorama."  I'd classify the top three as excellent, the next three as very good (or in the case of "Bright and High Circle," delightfully insane), the next one as pretty good, and the last one as fine.  A pretty high batting average for an anthology show if you ask me!

-I'm guessing this is the last Romanoffs review I'll ever write since this show most likely won't get another season, but this was so fun!  A part of me is relieved it's over because writing these reviews took alot out of me, but I think they also helped me enjoy the show more.  I hope its reputation slowly improves because I do believe it's doing alot of interesting things, but if not, then these reviews will always be here as a time capsule of me being the one crazy person who loved that show made by an egotistical sexual harasser.