Roadies: Season 1, Episode 10 – “The Load Out”

Cameron Crowe can sure write an ending. When everything comes together and problems are resolved and speeches are given and lesson are learned and heroes leap off airplanes and run and run and run to show the sincerity, the gasping hope, the peak, the climax, the- the FEELS.

So what if this finale had been the pilot? Or, what if this whole story had been a movie? Say we started with the funeral of the roadie of all roadies, and as we saw his relationship with every other character play out, we got to know him and this world as intimately as possible. This would allow for the best episode — the Lynyrd Skynyrd flashback — to still exist while allowing themes like family life, love on the road, the love of music to still shine through the eyes of the perhaps omniscient Phil Valentine (Ron White)?

If that were the case, though, we wouldn’t get all the neatly tied up bits that add to the flavor of the whole piece like Reg (Rafe Spall) reuniting with his brown leather Fendi suitcase or Kelly Ann (Imogen Poots) finally getting her own nickname. As a movie, we already have this masterful ending and instead of ten chapters, we’d have the timeline of the tour to get us from beginning to end. Cut out all the extraneous plot points that wasted time and never amounted to anything, like Milo’s (Peter Cambor) crush on Kelly Ann or Donna’s (Keisha Castle-Hughes) wife finally giving birth. That particular story was used as just another high emotional moment where we can see the breathtaking ways human vulnerability can charm in the finale. Donna’s not home with her wife but at the funeral, worrying about her premature son as Shelli (Carla Gugino) tells her to go, just go. It helps reach that crescendo of goosebumps and fireworks, but ultimately, we could live without it. (Although it bears mentioning that in a show about roadies, that was among the few about the high points of long-distance relationships. Big moments don’t always have to be missed.)

On the topic of drudgery and Shelli, her love story comes to a head as well. The cuckolded but oblivious husband Sean (Matt Passmore) finally shows up, and it’s evident from his all-American clean cut looks that he’s not long for this world, because freaks over normies any day. Shelli breaks his heart as he declares his love for her and need for a spawn; he stomps off so that Bill (Luke Wilson) can finally get what he’s always wanted.

We started this whole journey with Bill (from his bed, actually), but by the end, he’s not the focus at all. He’s a loose end that needs to not so much be tied off but burned and finished with so that it has no chance of unraveling. He had his demons and faults and dreams, but they kind of got shunted off to the side. There was no huge drama or moment of breakdown, because Christopher House (Tanc Sade) did that for him when Janine (Joy Williams) came back. He did, however, (quietly) embark on his own journey of self-discovery and while his arc may not be a giant rainbow, he really isn’t the sleazy guy we first met. Bill’s story is it, and the future doesn’t lie with him because his story’s been resolved. If Roadies does win the sophomore season lottery, it’s all Kelly Ann.

Kelly Ann was the vessel in which the holy Phil delivered his last words. Bill convinces her to speak at the star-studded funeral, where she reveals that all Phil said to her was, “Pistachio”. It’s a bewildering yet sweetly nothing revelation that just adds to the heartache of the reality in which they have to say good-bye to the man who inspired, led, and supported them all. When Phil’s son explains that Pistachio is the name of the horse Phil always bet on, we, along with Kelly Ann, get that he’s had her back from the start. Her existential journey of self-discovery starts and ends with Phil and this world, and thus, it becomes her nickname. It’s a perfect moment of closure, and among Crowe’s best. In comparison to Bill, she now has to start seeing herself as others do. It’s time for Kelly Ann to step up and be Kelly Ann, while Bill had to step up and stop being Bill. Well, stop being a terrible Bill.

In other scenes of closure, Rick (Christopher Bayless) the idiot bassist, because it’s so fun to pick on bassists, marries the damn groupie Natalie (Jacqueline Byers). Dreams really do come true. And on perfect cue, Natalie asks Kelly Ann if people blame her for the band’s break-up. Never mind that Natalie never even registered on any of the eponymous band members’ radars and can’t even claim a smidge of Yoko Ono glory — though on a side-note, we should give poor Yoko a break because John was the true disruptive dick in all that — but this is the first anyone from the crew that’s not management learns that the band is over.

Kelly Ann’s world comes crashing down, as does Reg’s, because it’s all in the open now and he’s powerless to save anyone. But, as we the audience never gave one fig about the Staton-House Band, should we come back in season two, there’ll definitely be another band with which we can hitch a ride. That’s Phil’s bigger message anyway; there’s the band that makes you, that saves you and gives you your identity, but then there are the others that you start influencing and making your own.

That’s why so many musicians showed up to pay tribute to the man. From Eddie Vedder to Jackson Browne, it was soul music and inner chord-hitting moments of musical expression. Although on the subject of throwaway plot lines, it was a little disappointing to see Wes (Colson Baker) sign off with a dumb thing about being summoned to court over his law-breaking plants, rather than having a moment with Mike McCready, his original “band guy”. I mean, Vedder was right there!

In unresolved love stories part two, the spotlight is back on Reg and Kelly Ann and he urges her to come with him back to England. His work there’s done, the band’s over, and the band’s actual manager Preston (Brian Benben) finally shows up to tell him he’s worthless. She can’t, of course, but it’s what propels him to visually go through all his experiences on this tour as he waits for the plane to take off. Echoing Kelly Ann’s snark about running scenes in movies, and her subsequent eschewing of film school and run back to the tour in the pilot, it’s Reg that bookends the episode with his own all-or-nothing sprint back. We end with him pounding on the door (which looks eerily similar to the door Patrick Fugit was pounding on to see Black Sabbath in Almost Famous, but I do believe both moments take place at the L.A. Forum) and the answer is unclear whether it will open and take him back in.

Everything is resolved enough to say that’s it, but with enough cues to pick up should we come back for another tour/season. Even Christopher House and Tom Staton (Catero Colbert) deign to make appearances in the episode. They start talking, which is what sets Preston off on Reg because of all that work invested in splitting them up, and now they’re talking! Oh, Preston and your Scooby-Doo villainy.

Meanwhile, the classic Crowe move of adding a macabre element to play down the high emotional drama of a situation is gloriously executed, as we see Phil’s final wishes: to be made into human taxidermy with his arms wide open, ready to receive his people. Adding to the “if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry”, of it all, is Phil’s wife screaming at an auditorium of musicians for not making sure her husband ate right and got exercise. Realistic yet completely unbelievable moments that truly show how people can feel about each other.

The layering of comedy over raw emotion is what Crowe does best and all of Bill’s speech, the last of the speakers, is just pull-quote-worthy. Not only does he highlight the life of Phil, the truest embodiment of road life and the show itself, but he pulls the focus back to the heart of it all; music. “[Phil] wanted to save people, the way music saved him”, but really, Mr. Crowe wants to thank music for doing just that for him and pay it forward. It’s a strong and beautiful sentiment, but should he get the chance to take it — the show — further, perhaps now we can focus on the stories, rather than how we’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment.