“I don’t want you to leave. Personally and professionally, I want you to stay. You’ll never know how pissed off I was when the network insisted on not one, but two white men as leads.”
Since Lian makes sure to tell Simon this at least five times per calendar year, he very much does know exactly how pissed off she was, not that he blames her.
“But youarethe show,” she says. “For better or worse. You and Charlie. There isn’t a show without you.”
“Alex has as many lines as me or Charlie.”
“Alex is leaving.”
Simon is taken aback until he remembers the green makeup on Alex’s face, the way her character spent the last few episodes of the season in a hospital bed. This must have been in the works for a while. “Does Charlie know?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
Simon’s going to miss Alex. It doesn’t make sense—he’s known for months that he was leaving the show. The idea of missing her shouldn’t feel new.
“You told Alex I was thinking of leaving,” Simon says, piecing it together. “When she didn’t sign, you let her know that I wasn’t signing either. Did you make her the same offer? Producer credit? A seat at the table?”
“I don’t think the show can survive losing both you and Alex at the same time,” Lian says, which is its own kind of answer. “Listen. This show is going to be my legacy. And it’s probably going to be yours too. You might want to think about what that means.”
Simon knows she doesn’t mean it to come off as vaguely menacing, but it does anyway. It’s possible—probable—thatOut Therewill always be what he’s best known for, that it will haunt the rest of his career.
Still, there’s something about the wordlegacythat shifts his perspective. This show matters to people. He always feels a little letdown when a show he likes ends abruptly, or when a character leaves without a satisfying resolution. Maybe, if he’s leaving, the least he can do is give the writers time to give his character a good send-off.
“Can I tell the network you’ll do next season?” Lian asks. It’s a testament to how well she knows Simon that she isn’t fazed that he hasn’t said anything in about five minutes.
“I need to think about it.”
“You have a week.”
After ending the call, Simon has to pace the apartment for a little while. Doing half a season feels manageable. He isn’t sure he’llenjoyit, but he can get behind the idea of finishing things right. Closure, maybe. Narrative closure for his role on the show, professional closure for Simon.
It occurs to him that this is another conversation he should be having with his agent, and the fact that he hasn’t even talked to Ken about the entire play debacle is—well, Jamie may be onto something when he says Ken is useless, or at least useless for Simon. But right now, Simon is still mentally awarding himself star stickers for eating three meals a day. He’s counting binge reading romance novels as radical self-care. Firing his agent—and, oh God, finding a new one—does not feel possible.
Instead he emails Ken and asks him to see what they can get from the production company. Seeing it in writing, he feels... not great, but optimistic. That’s enough, for now.
The idea that Charlie might not know about Alex leaving is bothering Simon more than he knows what to do with. He can’t just tell Charlie—at least, he doesn’t think he can. It’s too messy to throw a bomb into somebody else’s friendship.
Instead he goes right to Alex, texts her what Lian told him, and then sends what might be the most incriminating message he’s ever written: “Does Charlie know?” He feels like his intentions are in flashing letters all over his phone screen. Only “give Charlie a hug for me” would be worse, and maybe not even that, because if anybody got that message from Simon, they’d assume his phone was hacked.
A few minutes later, he gets an answer from Alex: “yeah, told him as soon as I started thinking about it.”
So, back when Charlie was carjacking Simon to deliver a lecture about the importance of giving people a chance to say goodbye, he already knew Alex was leaving. He wonders if Alex got the same lecture and doubts it. Their friendship is so light, so... breezy. Simon’s never had a light and breezy friendship in his life.
His phone buzzes with another message: “so are you two talking?”
In order to answer that, Simon would need to define some terms. Does forwarding Charlie the pictures of Edie that Jamie sends him constitute talking?
But of course it does. Just because nothing’s being said doesn’t mean they aren’t talking. It makes the fact of their talking more significant—they’re finding things to say, pulling them out of thin air, just so a day doesn’t go by without some kind of contact. He texts back “yes.” He doesn’t qualify it, doesn’t explain.
“You’re both really dumb and I hope you know that,” Alex writes.
Simon has nothing at all to do other than eat expensive salads and occasionally replenish his supply of face serums. So he takes out his laptop and starts watchingOut Therefrom the first episode of the first season.
He’d forgotten that right from the beginning, he and Charlie were in nearly every scene together. At the time, he assumed this was Lian putting them in the narrative equivalent of a get-along shirt. Now, though, he can see how well he and Charlie played off one another. These days, when a scene comes together, Simon assumes it’s due to the kind of chemistry you earn after putting in thousands of hours.
But it was like this from the start. They never had to do dozens of takes. It just worked, even when Charlie was drunk and Simon was irate, even when production was so behind schedule, they only had time for a single take.
Right now he’s watching his character learn that the mysterious passenger who altered the ship’s landing gear to avoid a fatal crash is a teenage escapee from a prison colony, not a trained engineer. They’re both shouting, their dialogue overlapping, but mingled in with the anger and frustration is a grudging mutual respect. Something crackles between them.
