The depth and beauty of the Expats series have not been highlighted with deserved merit. It is a series that portrays, with sensitivity and great objectivity, common characters from every society, highlighted in an exotic setting where people from different cultures intersect. They are needy, codependent, lost, suffering, selfish, and kind people, in Hong Kong where social and cultural contrasts are experienced almost with indifference.

In the penultimate episode of the series, the three women who interfere in their destinies – Margaret (Nicole Kidman), Hillary, and Mercy – reach the crossroads of their lives. And solitude is what unites everyone around you (even if they are always accompanied). Unfortunately, we are no closer to understanding or discovering what happened to little Gus, but his disappearance will be a wound in the trajectory of everyone, including the audience.

And here comes the good taste of the production and the steady hand of director Lulu Wang, with an always precise soundtrack. From the scene where Hillary and Margaret dance to Blondie‘s Heart of Glass when we were still understanding and getting to know her to the opening of the episode with Kate Perry‘s Roar gently reassuring us that ‘everything’s going to be okay’, it caps off a suffocating, damp episode and harrowing with a 1970s country classic that breaks our hearts: We Are All Alone.

Boz Scaggs‘ song was recorded by him and Frank Valli, but became world famous in the velvety and beautiful voice of Rita Coolidge, with several re-recordings since then. The lyrics are obviously about loneliness, something that at some point everyone in Expats felt and expressed in the episode. Although it tells the story of a couple in love who are alone in the world, it is about finding comfort in each other, despite all of life’s challenges. A perfect choice by Lulu Wang for the episode.

Unsurprisingly, Boz Scaggs was inspired by the pain of his divorce that left him feeling lonely, using We’re All Alone as his way of dealing with the pain of separation, inserting the hope that love will be salvation.

In the series, the episode takes place on a night of severe storms in Hong Kong, which isolates the characters and at the same time unites them, something that the opening of the song – Outside the Rain begins – a metaphor for melancholy hitting, but at the same time, literal in what we are seeing, and in both cases, rain is also the symbol of all the difficulties and feelings of complex and challenged lives.

And, tying it all together, she sings at the end the paradoxical phrase We’re all alone together, which is exactly what a beautiful episode of Expatriates shows us is possible. We just need to understand whether we will have a realistic or edifying solution. Or both. Either way, we will be less alone in our universe.

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