What the Hell Is Going on With Gabriel in Emily in Paris?

One thing I don’t recommend you do while watching the penultimate episode of the fifth season of Emily in Paris is take an edible. Titled “La Belle Époque,” the half-hour is so deeply strange and hallucinatory I worried I was having some sort of psychotic break. Seemingly, the show uses it to write off Emily’s longtime love interest, Gabriel (played with supremely Gallic reluctance by Lucas Bravo). Except, maybe it doesn’t? If you haven’t kept up with the series, I do recommend you watch “La Belle Époque” on its own to see how weird this show has become.

If you would simply prefer not to open a Netflix tab, here’s what happens: After spending the first half of the season in Italy, where she overruns a picturesque rural village with tourists, Emily flees back across the Alps to Paris and continues to equivocate about her relationship with an Italian guy named Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini). It’s hard to keep up with the drama involving Marcello because he’s such a drip, but basically he’s trying to go solo from his family’s Loro Piana–esque quiet-luxury empire and spends most of the time worrying about putting together a fashion show when he should just be walking around showing off his butt. In episode nine, Agence Grateau gets hired by an absinthe company to put together a party themed around the “Belle Époque,” or turn-of-the-20th-century Paris. This precipitates a separately insane plotline where Ashley Park’s Mindy gets cast in an animated remake of Moulin Rouge! in which the characters are all rats; her “Ratine” has gigantic boobs. Emily goes out for drinks with Bruno Gouery’s Luc and has a long conversation about nostalgia and looking at the past through rose-tinted lenses. Then she gets a call from Gabriel. He’s taken up a gig as a private chef touring the world but left some of his knives behind in Paris. Could she bring them to the train station as he passes through?

Gabriel has been out of the picture for most of this season. In the Rome episodes, Emily received minor updates about the fate of his restaurant — after getting his coveted Michelin star, he somewhat randomly learns he needs to cut his budget, then makes an also random decision to focus on vegan cooking that does not go over well with his investor. Gabriel has a typically stubborn response and leaves the restaurant to take up a job as a private chef for a billionaire. From a distance, this arc looks like the show responding to Bravo’s increasingly pointed comments about how he doesn’t like filming the Netflix series and thinks his character has become unfun to play. (The vegan-restaurant thing seems to be his idea, too.) When Emily and Gabriel, who now has terrible blond highlights, meet up at the Paris train station to reminisce, the show seems primed to write off an actor who no longer wants to be there.

What transpires is even weirder than that. In a gorgeous restaurant inside the train station, Emily and Gabriel have a conversation that sounds very much like a conversation between Emily in Paris’s creative team and Bravo himself. They talk about how their lives used to be fun and got too serious, a barely subtextual nod to the show itself. Emily apologizes for pushing Gabriel too hard for a Michelin star. “Emily, all I can tell you is that you supported me,” Gabriel says in a line Bravo delivers as if at gunpoint. “We tend to romanticize the past. Things were pretty hard back then, too.” Even in the context of a conversation that suggests there’s a gas leak in the restaurant, Lily Collins and Lucas Bravo still have chemistry. There’s a spark between them that’s never there with Emily and Marcello.

Cut to Ashley Park’s Mindy in a recording studio belting “Come What May,” then back to Emily and Gabriel on the train platform. Gabriel reveals his big secret: He chased Emily to Rome when she left Paris, but she looked so happy when he saw her with Marcello that he decided not to pursue her. “It’s all I wanted for you,” Bravo says, again unconvincingly. At this point, Park is going all out on the soundtrack, while Bravo is giving 10 percent with dialogue that’s 33 percent how people really talk. Gabriel and Emily have a very on-the-nose conversation about how the French didn’t start calling it “La Belle Époque” until after the era had passed before Gabriel gets on the train. When Emily realizes she never actually gave him his knives, she runs to deliver them, handing off the set to Gabriel just as “Come What May” reaches its climax. The entire scene is overlit and blindingly bright, as if it takes place in the afterlife.

The 11 minutes left in the episode are taken up with the absinthe party and Marcello once again being a stick in the mud about his fashion plans. By the last few scenes, that’s all resolved — Marcello reveals he’s booked a show in Venice and he and Emily happily kiss. Has she chosen Italy over France for good? Maybe not! The season finale unfolds in a fashion that is almost as strange as its penultimate episode, except nothing could be weirder than that sequence set to “Come What May.” Everyone heads to Venice, the fashion show hits snags but eventually charms everyone, and Emily and Marcello look like they might be endgame. Then, through a mix-up, Emily suspects Marcello wants to marry her (it’s actually Mindy’s boyfriend who’s proposing) and freaks out. She and Marcello have a heart-to-heart along a canal and admit what was long obvious: They don’t have a future together. Emily returns to Paris newly single, and it looks like season six will have to introduce a new guy for Emily to date …

Until we cut to a shot of a yacht where Gabriel is cooking fish for that billionaire. He’s told he has a few weeks off in Greece just as he gets a text from Sylvie, a true Gabriel-Emily shipper, with the news that Emily is back in Paris and single again. “Do with that information what you will,” Sylvie writes. Here’s what Gabriel does with that information: He sends Emily a “you up?” note, inviting her to come hang out on his yacht via a postcard labeled “From Greece With Love.” The final shot of the season is Lucas Bravo posing on the side of the yacht before it cuts to credits. 

The sequence raises many questions: Did Bravo quit the show but decide to come back after filming episode nine? Will he spend another season reluctantly playing the only guy who has convincing chemistry with the star? How many euros will he receive for that labor? Will Emily in Paris disembark in Greece for a few episodes? (Mindy has threatened to have some wedding festivities in Mykonos.) Does this have anything to do with Greek filming incentives? Is this part of some extended negotiation with the French government about how much it’s willing to support the filming of Emily in Paris, and was Darren Star receiving the Légion d’Honneur from Emmanuel Macron himself another prong of that negotiation? Why is it so impossible to find another handsome European man who has chemistry with Lily Collins? I have no answers to these questions. All I can say is that Lucas Bravo has tried so hard to escape this TV series, and they keep writing him off then going psyche! May he spend whatever windfall he is getting from another season on better highlights.