'Pose' should not bring Evan Peters back for Season 2

In a lot of ways, the penultimate episode of FX’s Pose felt like a finale. Families broke apart, titans fell, new rivals rose, and several relationships between main characters were irrevocably changed in a multitude of ways.

Most saliently, the love story between Stan (Evan Peters) and Angel (Indya Moore) came to what could be a conclusive end, with Stan rejecting Angel’s world and taking back the apartment and furniture he gifted her.

With the actual finale of Pose still to come, and also with the delightful knowledge that Pose has already been renewed for a second season, it’s perhaps the right time to say: Pose shouldn’t bring Stan back, maybe ever.

There’s nothing wrong with Evan Peters’s performance as the anxious, ambitious New Jerseyian who longs to live an authentic life while chasing the '80s-era ideal of conspicuous consumption. He did an admirable job bringing layers and pathos to a character who by default of being straight, white, and male is out of place on a show that centers queer people of color.

It’s just that now Stan is out of Angel’s life, there’s nothing else that feels interesting or important about his story and to stretch out his ongoing identity issues would create pockets of dead time in a show that is single-handedly holding the flag for less represented identities.

Through Stan and Angel’s relationship, the power dynamic between Stan as a married, wealthy man and Angel as a trans sex worker with limited means fluctuated beautifully. Angel learned more about her worth as a person and the value of having her own life while Stan dug himself into a canyon of lies as he fell in love with the idea of someone who lives their life unapologetically.

Now that their relationship has waxed and waned, it would be poignant for the show to follow what Angel does with what she’s learned and leave Stan in the dust — a flip of the more hackneyed trope wherein a woman love interest changes a man’s life and disappears into the Season 1 sunset, never to be seen again.

Pose is a great show precisely because it turns the idea of what makes a “main character” or protagonist on its head — the gay, trans, and queer characters who would exist on the fringes of another show are given top billing in this groundbreaking program; it’s hard not to feel resentful of Stan’s storyline and issues literally taking airtime away from the series mainstays if he’s not directly impacting one of their lives.

For once, the straight white dude is a dispensable storyline, and it would benefit Pose greatly if it took this opportunity to fully dispense of him.