‘Supersex’ Series Finale Overview: “The Final Climax Comes Last” (Episode 7)

“I love pussy…You have no idea of how many I want to fuck. You can’t be with me. No one can be with me.” —Rocco Siffredi, addressed to the woman he loves

“I can see your fear, your guilt, the trap that forces us men to feel free and strong when we’re violent, desperate people who call love a cage.” —Rocco Siffredi, addressed to the brother he loves

Which Rocco comes out on top in the end? The man who wants to be no more and no less than his insatiable desire for sex? Or the man who recognizes that his idea of masculinity has walled him off from a deeper, more fulfilling experience of life, just as it did his doomed older brother Tommaso?

I’m happy to say that Supersex doesn’t offer up an unambiguous happy ending on either side of that ledger. It’s true that, in the end, Rocco says “the only real superpower is what’s held in the eyes of someone else” — looking at someone and seeing them look back at you with love. “You just have to choose where to look,” he says, “and learn how to abandon yourself to that look.” With these thoughts, in 2004, he returns home to his wife Rosa (Nutsa Khubulava) and their young son, seemingly content.

But in the final shots of the show, he takes a piss test and grins at the camera, ready to cut short his retirement. Sure, he knows what love is now, and knows that it matters. “All the rest is porn,” he says, and this is a fact he seems perfectly happy with.

To reach this point of happiness, with a woman he recruited from the ranks of a bunch of random Hungarian models and turned into a porn star who works only with him, the living ghost that is Tommaso must first be exorcised. Much of this final episode, “The Cock Comes Last,” is spent following Rocco as he attempts to placate his long-lost brother on the day of Lucia’s wedding to his old frenemy Jean Claude. They fight, they drink, they carouse, they dance to “What Is Love?”, they piss in public, they share a moment with an aging sex worker who reminds Tommaso of his first fateful rejection by a woman, the whore who gave him up. Tommaso shows up at the church and pulls a gun on everyone, before he runs off ashamed. After that they trash her restaurant together for fun.

“This is love,” Rocco says at the time, referring to Tommaso’s torment over Lucia. “Something so powerful that you have to destroy it, refuse it, if you don’t want it to destroy you.” These are sentiments shared by the Rocco of 1994 — the episode whiplashes between the two time periods in a way no previous episode has done, to the point where the line between them blurs — who falls hard for Rosa, comforts her through their first scene of rough sex (“You can piss on my face if you want,” he offers lamely), is told by her that he may know how to fuck but he doesn’t know how to make love, and ultimately puts her back on a plane to Budapest, telling her “I love pussy” by way of an explanation. 

But it’s not long before that Rocco changes his tune, just as the Rocco of 2004 decides against retirement in the end. Inconstancy is the one constant for the Tano brothers — they hurl themselves from one end of the spectrum to the next, like the guy in the video for“Take On Me” careening from one side of the comic-book wall to the other.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with Tommaso. What a fascinating character. A man in pain, endless pain, who cannot make sense of his own life, who cannot control the emotional fire that burns inside him, who cannot admit to himself how he really feels about anyone. Here’s a guy who would sooner live in an almost literal hole in the wall than ask his family, especially his rich and famous brother, for anything — yet who also has an entire wall of posters of that same brother adorning the space right above his bed. The implication is that he kills himself, and this seems inevitable: There’s only so long a brain can burn that hot before it gives out. Adriano Giannini does incredible work making this difficult man worth caring about.

All that and more applies to leading man Alessandro Borghi. Borghi’s fearless, shameless performance as Rocco is one for the ages — an actor leaping naked into the deep end and swimming downward as far and as fast as he can. It’s not just the countless sex scenes, or the explicit dialogue. It’s the willingness to be seen as a sex idiot, a man whose dick does his thinking for him. This can make him seem incredibly sexy or incredibly vulgar, like a dog humping another dog in the park while everyone watches. Emma Stone just won an Oscar for this kind of genitals-first performance, and I think Supersex has more to say, more insightfully, about sex than Poor Things manages to muster, that’s for sure.

A seemingly endless font of sexual fantasy, fetish, and dysfunction, Supersex is one of the bravest shows I’v ever seen. It turned me on and fucked me up. I’m grateful to have watched it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.