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Expats
Episode 1
Season 1
Episode 1
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Prime Video
The first episode of Expats takes a while to clue you in to what’s going on, and its pieces still aren’t all in play by the time the credits roll. In most shows, this sort of obfuscation and beating around the bush could be frustrating, but in the hands of director and show creator Lulu Wang (The Farewell), they make for an alluring emotional mystery whose layers are peeled back intricately and one at a time. The premiere drops us smack-dab in the middle of a tragic ongoing story about three American women in Hong Kong. And while it holds its specifics close to its chest, it also provides enough by way of tense mood and character dynamics that every “reveal” makes perfect sense when it arrives — as though you’d known it all along, deep in your bones.
The episode’s prologue features static video portraits of people in tragic news stories — or perhaps anecdotes or urban legends à la Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia — as the voice of Mercy (Ji-young Yoo) narrates the injuries, deaths, and familial suffering each of them accidentally caused. Mercy’s voice-over, it turns out, is addressed to someone in particular, though we don’t know who. She claims to be drawn to these tales to answer the question of whether their inadvertent perpetrators can be forgiven for ruining people’s lives. She, too, is responsible for something similar and wonders it about herself.
We catch only a brief glimpse of Mercy before she’s lost in a busy Hong Kong crowd, and the frame cuts to a cold, sterile lunch meeting at a fancy restaurant. On one side sits a local, enthusiastic party planner, and on the other, a distracted middle-aged American woman, Margaret (Nicole Kidman), who’s putting together her husband’s lavish 50th-birthday celebration. The planner is friendly and inquisitive. She asks numerous questions, but what little we learn about Margaret’s life in this scene — and about her young, mixed-race Asian kids nearby, Philip (Bodhi del Rosario) and Daisy (Tiana Gowen) — comes not through what she says but how she responds to this small talk. In fact, what she doesn’t say is just as revealing as her hair-trigger reaction to seeing her son scribbling a crayon family portrait that includes their father and an additional figure, “Gus,” holding the hand of Jesus Christ.
For reasons yet unknown, this depiction of Christianity sets Margaret’s teeth on edge, and she cuts the meeting short, but each of these little clues provides a greater context for what may be going on in her life. Who and where is this “Gus”? A drawing of someone holding Jesus’s hand is hardly a subtle indicator of what might’ve happened to them — as is the case here, even a child’s understanding of religious imagery is geared toward euphemistic comfort — but could the answer to his whereabouts also be the root of why Margaret seems to resent religion?
Questions like these are floated, wordlessly and in the ether, before the episode transitions to something that further complicates them. This time, it’s the brief image of a middle-aged Asian man, Clarke (Brian Tee) — mustachioed, like the rudimentary drawing of Philip’s father — seated despondently in a crowded church, looking upward at a crucifix, as if in search of something just out of reach. Is this man Margaret’s husband? Well, of course. The narrative structure is simple and logical in this regard — these images are connected enough in story and concept that these factual clues become easy to intuit — but what remains uncertain is the thematic nature of this visual connection. Why does the image of Christ conjure such vitriol for one of them and such comfort for the other?
The idea of loss looms over all these characters in a multitude of ways, well before we’re given even semi-concrete answers about Gus. Margaret and Clarke seem to have lost some part of themselves; they float through the world, untethered, like restless spirits. Their son, Philip, is unusually quiet. Their daughter, Daisy, has a new fixation: TV news stories about a missing Malaysian Airlines plane (perhaps the story is set in 2014), accompanied by interviews with family members, giving statements like, “It’s the not knowing. It’s absolute torture” — as if to portend what we’ll eventually learn about this family and what troubles them so deeply.
By the episode’s end, there are enough implications and innuendos to be able to piece together that Gus was the name of Margaret’s third child, though whether he’s dead or missing — and how this came to be — remains to be seen. What’s more important, for now, is how this hole in the center of Margaret’s life hollows her out and strains her relationships.
Kidman’s frayed performance keeps Margaret and the audience alike on edge as other characters (and the show’s wider setting) are introduced and as sounds drown out while eerie music builds each time the mood shifts and she loses focus. Being a rich expat, she lives in a fancy building, where she’s waited on hand and foot by maids and drivers. Their entire community seems to be fellow expats, including Margaret’s neighbor Hillary (Sarayu Blue), with whom she appears to have lingering animosity that makes even their friendliest interactions feel stilted; when Margaret invites her to Clarke’s birthday, she politely declines. Whatever happened between them is yet to be explored, but the episode features a wonderfully uplifting (at least at first) subplot about Hillary running to Margaret’s aid when things go awry at the party, regardless of her initially rejecting the invite or their broken friendship.
Hillary has problems of her own. She’s grown distant from her husband, David (Jack Huston), who has a drinking problem and, likely unbeknownst to her, is having an affair with Mercy, a young Korean American woman who isn’t as well-off as the other characters and fits in awkwardly with her posh friends. To make ends meet, Mercy takes on a catering gig that turns out to be the very same party Margaret is throwing for Clarke, which initially introduces the possibility of Hillary running into the “other woman” in her marriage. However, it turns out that Mercy has a connection to Margaret’s family too. Seeing Philip at the party (and subsequently, seeing the words “Clarke’s 50th” sculpted in ice) sends her into a panic. She tries to leave, but her frenzy is soon matched by Margaret when she notices Mercy, calls her by name, and chases after her, albeit to no avail.
Mercy may be partially responsible for Hillary’s crumbling marriage, but by the end of the episode, it becomes clear that all three women are entwined in more troubling ways. Margaret wonders why Mercy won’t leave her family be — a misunderstanding no doubt, but the audience has access to information and perspectives that Margaret does not. She and Clarke thank their friends and family at the party for supporting them through tough times, and given how riled up she is by Mercy’s unwelcome presence, the possibility that Mercy had some hand in their troubles is all but clarified.
With Mercy’s opening voice-over in mind, the pieces begin to fit together after this party encounter and are partially confirmed during an intimate, seemingly reconciliatory conversation between Margaret and Hillary at a hole-in-the-wall noddle joint they used to frequent together. “I’m a mother of two children instead of three,” Margaret says. Up until this point, Wang’s filmmaking has been so precise and emotionally charged that this information is all but obvious, but hearing Margaret admit it in words feels like a burden has lifted. The withholding of information during the premiere episode isn’t a cutesy tactic aimed at surprise but rather a narrative embodiment of the silence and repression with which the characters have been living. And finally verbalizing that she’s lost a child allows Margaret, along with Hillary, to find a temporary moment of respite; they dance along to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” on the radio as poor restaurant workers clean up after them and Hillary’s driver naps in the car.
These brief inserts of other characters go hand in hand with numerous shots of other household help. They’re out of focus and in shadow despite being prominent and sizable in the frame, as though the episode’s POV characters can’t fully see them — or rather, they won’t. Along with its central tragedy, the series’ larger social tapestry seems rife for exploration. Its title, after all, has distinct economic implications. “Expats” is short for “expatriates” (as in the title of the book on which the show is based, The Expatriates, by Janice Y.K. Lee), and it refers to a generally affluent class of western immigrants in the Global South.
Any portrait of these characters’ lives would be incomplete without exploring this class dimension of their identity, though for now, the premiere episode is focused on slowly unraveling their misfortunes. Clarke’s parents keep telling him and Margaret they should return “home”; they mean Philadelphia, but to Margaret and her children, Hong Kong has become where they belong. She speaks bits of Cantonese, and she even has her own apartment in Kowloon (albeit an empty one she uses to get away). What it means for her to adopt Hong Kong as her home, especially in a time of tragedy, is perhaps the show’s most interesting larger question, though it certainly isn’t the only one.
By the end of the episode, Margaret and Hillary’s camaraderie is short-lived, thanks in part to them returning home to find ambulances parked outside their building. A neighbor has been found dead, and for a moment, Margaret is sent into a tailspin by the flashing red-and-blue lights, as if she’s been in this position before. As they part ways, they do so coldly once again, as Margaret offers Hillary marriage advice, which she soundly rejects. No matter what progress they’ve made, they don’t seem to fully understand each other’s predicaments. And though we don’t yet know the full picture of what those are, the fact that this uncomfortable hostility continues to linger, after what feels like monumental catharsis, hints that something more devastating could be yet to come. The thought is practically anxiety inducing.
The episode ends with a shot of Philip’s drawing from the introductory scene. When we see it this time, we have many more answers but perhaps even more intriguing questions than we did before.
• After her voice-over introduction, Mercy turns to the camera and stares straight down the lens before disappearing, which is as curious as it is unsettling.
• The slow-burn introduction to Margaret, in which the camera creeps around her slowly so that we’re first acquainted with her dress, her hairstyle, and her posture, before eventually seeing her face, turns her into an object of mystery.
• When Margaret bathes alone in her Kowloon flat, a shot of her feet peeking out of her tiny plastic tub gives the appearance of a child submerged underwater, hiding from the world.
• “Take me to the market,” Margaret begs Hillary in the middle of the night before we’re treated to a gorgeous, moving portrait: Margaret standing in total isolation in a vibrant, empty city whose gaslights shimmer off every surface. A captivating image straight out of a Wong Kar-wai film.
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