We’re just past halfway through this series, and it’s killing me how much I want it to be great. I love rock and roll. I love Riley Keough. I love Laurel Canyon. I love this exact moment in L.A., from Eve Babitz to the Z-Boys, but for the love of all that is La La, could Daisy Jones & the Six please stop squandering the dramatic tension the moment any builds? What was it Teddy told Billy about “Honeycomb� He wrote a good song, not a great one. I guess art imitates art sometimes.
By the end of episode five, though, I nearly thought we had it. Daisy and Billy were on the same team, but that team felt like a threat to Billy and the sturdy family life we’ve watched him take so many jogs to rebuild. We were making thrilling music on the precipice; the lightning was in the bottle. And episode six, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,†has all the ingredients of great TV. It’s got charm, sex, and amusing repartee. It’s got make-outs and moonlight. It has secrets. Oh man, the secrets! But the fire gets extinguished almost as soon as it starts burning. The combative creative partnership between Billy and Daisy was barreling toward a destructive will-they, won’t-they, and the show’s big answer — way too swiftly delivered — was “Well, kinda — don’t ask.â€
Daisy and Billy are writing new songs as fast as the band can lay them down when the episode opens. They’re trading lyrics, matching her melodies to his guitar riffs, encouraging each other to dig into the ugly morass of their pain. Out with the boring wife shit, in with the suffering. It’s intimate but also grueling. If they didn’t seem so much like lovers, with their long, knowing stares and easy shorthand, you could mistake Billy and Daisy for rivals. No one in the band was saying anything, but everyone noticed the shift. Everybody was noticing, but no one was thinking too hard about lonely Camila raising Billy’s baby by herself while he’s outside on the phone with Daisy all hours of the night. Camila is family, but the Six is ruthlessly about the music.
Teddy’s so confident they’ve struck gold that he invites a Rolling Stone reporter, Jonah Berg, to sit in on the Aurora sessions. Was that a mistake? I guess it depends on whether Teddy measures success in album sales or the happiness of his own band. Because Jonah is blinded by the songs; he’s a Six stan with a notebook, really. He assumes Billy and Daisy are together just because he’s not afraid to push her buttons and she’s not afraid to tell him what she thinks. We see Billy try to fill in the nuance that he and Daisy exist in some charged in-between place. Their bond is no act, but it’s not his real life, either — he has a kid with someone else. This is likely what he tells himself, too, in the moments when the lines start to blur, when Billy finds himself more seduced by the make-believe of soul mates than the pull of home. If Daisy were real-life, she wouldn’t be Daisy anymore.
As fucked up as it may be, I think the risk Daisy poses to Billy, from the drinking and drugs to his attraction, is what’s making their partnership so fruitful. In her, he doesn’t see an alternative to Camila but an alternative to himself; she’s a vision of all the reckless fun he could be having if he weren’t trying to do the right thing all the time. And, incrementally, Billy is letting his guard down, letting Daisy take drugs in the same room and taking midnight drives with her — seeing how close he can get to the edge without collapsing into the deadbeat version of himself he swore off when he missed Julia’s birth.
For Daisy, though, it may be love. When she tells Billy her real name — Margaret — she’s trying to heal a wound, not poke at its sore edges. She has no parents, no Simone, and no other home to return to. I don’t know how long Daisy and Billy could have persisted this way with this electricity humming between them. Eventually, someone would have initiated a kiss, or maybe Camila would’ve put her foot down. Because of the meddling of Jonah Berg, we’ll never know.
Jonah and Daisy get (drug-fuelled) chatting by the Chateau Marmont pool one night, and he repeats what he says Billy told him about their showy fauxmance. But even if we didn’t witness Jonah and Billy’s entire conversation, it’s clear Jonah’s taking some liberties in his retelling, perhaps seeing what he can shake loose from the highly sensitive Daisy tree. For example, Jonah claims Billy said they were “acting,†but we hear Billy say explicitly that what he shares with Daisy is not an act. And I’m sure he did say at some point that it was all in service to the music, but what did Daisy expect a married man to tell the Enemy? Show me the receipts, Jonah Berg.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter how much of what Jonah claimed was true. What Daisy’s bruised ego does next is selfish, destructive, and cruel — not just to the rest of the band, whom she leaves waiting around all day at the studio as she parties, but to herself. When Billy comes to find her, she’s so high out of her mind she steps into broken glass without noticing.
But it’s a race to the bottom round these parts. Billy, feeling deceived in their bond, writes a mean revenge song (sample lyrics: “More fun to miss than to be withâ€), which Daisy can’t bring herself to sing. He berates her in front of the band. She storms out of the studio, and he chases her into the L.A. sun. When she asks Billy to say to her face that these feelings between them all belong to her, he grabs her with both hands and lays a big ol’ kiss on her. It should be a moment of revelation or catharsis between them, but on this rushed timeline — they stopped hating each other only 35 minutes ago — I’m plain confused. Is Billy saying he loves her? Or is this all so she’ll go back in and sing his song? Given the physical crescendo of their simmering attraction, the moment plays more romantic than sexy — and still not very romantic at all.
Alas, poor Camila. She’s, like, 25, I think? Spending her days on her own, waiting for Billy. There’s no room in the band for her anymore with Daisy on the mic. She used to be the first person to hear all of Billy’s new songs; now, she hears them for the first time when she crashes the band’s album-cover photo shoot. That shoot is a disaster in so many ways. Most crucially, the photographer sucks, and the shot they eventually use is a candid Camila takes of Billy and Daisy screaming in anger.
They’re fighting then because Daisy has revealed herself to be the much bigger dick between them. It turns out Daisy didn’t just party away her feelings with Jonah. She was telling secrets to the one guy you don’t tell secrets to! She spills all of Billy’s most shameful ones — how his addiction ended the Six’s last tour, how he missed Julia’s christening. When Billy and Daisy shared that kiss in the parking lot, she already knew how deeply she had betrayed him. Daisy has done some dumb shit before, but I’ve never felt so embarrassed for her. (I also feel embarrassed for Jonah, who looks idiotic in that XXL Lenny Kravitz scarf. You’re in Malibu, dude. It’s 70 degrees out.)
Somehow, though, it gets worse: The triangle becomes a square … I’m pretty sure. Camila, despairing at the passion she witnessed between Daisy and Billy on the mountain, runs into Eddie on her sad Girls’ Night Out, which was just a ruse to make Billy think she had somewhere to go in the first place. It’s definitely ambiguous, but based on the way she wipes her mascara from under her eyes before entering the house and how Eddie avoids Billy’s eyeline, I’d say our girl Camila fucked the bassist. Later on, Camila will tell her husband there’s a new threshold for the end of their marriage, and it (conveniently?) avoids cheating. If he ever loves Daisy, she’s out — “Everything else we can handle.†Uhhhh, speak for yourself. I cannot handle this. Eddie sucks.
As it happens, the Aurora sessions are wrapping up by now. The band records one last song, a scorcher written by Daisy called “Regret Me.†After their mountaintop blowout, it’s a naked revocation of the peace between the Six’s front men; Billy refuses to even sing on it. With the album in the bag, the band goes their separate ways. Warren charters a boat; Eddie hangs around hoping for more Camila scraps. And Karen and Graham just bask in their increasingly perfect secret romance.
Because of all the characters and all the secrets they share, this is the one worth keeping. Graham is enlightened enough to understand that. While at first he does the cliché thing and accuses Karen of keeping their relationship on the down-low out of shame, he also listens when she explains otherwise. All Karen has ever wanted was to be in a rock-and-roll band, and she doesn’t want her achievements discounted on account of her sex life. She didn’t fuck her way into the Six; she got into the Six and then started fucking. This is not the kind of nuance that Jonah Berg is equipped to handle. For his part, Graham doesn’t even contest how messed up the world is; he just says he understands. Graham, ladies and gentlemen. Graham!
Daisy, on the other hand, is as low as we’ve ever seen her. The drugs are no longer enough to blot out her hurt. And while “Regret Me†is a brutal song, it’s not nearly as cold as what Rolling Stone ends up publishing. To convince Jonah to bury the story about his daughter, Billy sells Daisy out. He tells the Scarf that she’s late to everything, that she’s an addict, that she’s messy as hell. It’s not that the romance between them is calculated for the fans; it’s that it doesn’t exist at all. When Daisy reads it, she does what only a messy person would do: She heads to Greece on a one-way ticket and forgets to let anyone know about it.