Rocco Siffredi, the Italian Stallion, future icon of the porn industry, is kind of a goofball. Have you noticed this? The floppy hair with its tips bleached blond. The goofy smile he gets when he’s amused, eyes squinted and teeth bared by his retracted upper lip. The constant sense that he doesn’t quite know what’s going on, or what to do next, or who to do it with. He’s like an overgrown kid who has found his candy store at last.

Supersex Episode 4, “The Dream,” sees Rocco take the last few steps required to live out the dream of his own. It culminates in a sort of baptism-by-orgy, as he steps nude, his penis exposed to the viewer for the first time, into a pool full of revelers who welcome him into their arms. He’s already barked at Riccardo, his dismayed (former?) producer, that he won’t obey any of the company’s rules about not fucking the talent off camera. He’ll fuck whoever and whatever he wants, wherever and whenever he wants.

That’s Rocco Siffredi speaking, not the lowly Rocco Tano. “I gave myself one rule,” Rocco says in his voiceover. “Rocco Tano didn’t exist anymore. I was, at all times and forever, Rocco Siffredi.” 

The black magician Aleister Crowley lived by the tenet Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, but it’s an easily misinterpreted phrase. To Crowley, this didn’t mean “Do whatever you want,” it meant “Do what you were meant to do,” squaring with his concept of the “will” as one’s destiny. Every man and every woman is a star, he elaborated, meaning that if we all do what we will, what we’re truly meant to do, we’ll all shine in the firmament, never harming one another. Love is the law, love under Will: For all that Crowley was a weird jerk, he saw being your true self as a route to a better world. So does Rocco.

Will it work out that way? Hard to say. It’s going fine for Sylvie, his brief fling back in Paris. At Rocco’s encouragement she auditions for and gets into a prestigious music academy. She also begins attending porn theaters to watch his films, and finally going to the sex club and actually participating. “I don’t know if I like what’s happening to me,” she tells him. “You can choose,” he responds. It’s meant to be reassuring, and it is, but I can’t help hear an addendum of “…in a way I could not.” Rocco has no choice but to be Rocco. He has no choice but to live a life defined by sex. (The fact that John Holmes, the world’s most famous male porn star, just died of AIDS leaves him and others around him wondering how safe such a life would be, of course.)

For his family, Rocco’s new life a mixed bag. One of his brothers insists he’s brought shame and pain to his mother, but his mom seems happy to hear from him on the phone, and uses him as a conduit of information on Tommaso and his baby, not knowing the two brothers are on the outs. His cousin Gabriele is so desperate to follow in his footsteps that he exposes himself to prove he has a big dick after grabbing Rocco’s to confirm his bonafides in that department. His dad attends one of his movies! There’s so much weird incestuous energy flowing through the veins of the Tano family that’s it’s a wonder any of them didn’t become monomaniacal about sex. It’s the air these guys breathe.

I haven’t written much about Tommaso and Lucia’s relationship, but it’s quietly one of the high points of the show. I say “quietly” mostly because they’re not fucking onscreen, but it’s a relationship full of both fireworks and real tenderness. I keep thinking of this shot from the previous episode where the two of them recline in bed together, staged with genuine intimacy and care — thinking of it even when Tommaso rants and raves and rages and insults and attacks everyone close to him, Lucia included. Yet Lucia hangs on, because his is the only love she’s known, and as faulty as it is, it’s real. That’s a hard thing to give up.

And what of Tommaso himself? He’s a nasty drunk, that much is for sure — think of the way he welcomes Rocco back into the fold only to reject him minutes later over an old bogus claim of infidelity that it’s hard to believe he’s still clinging to after all this time — but I think it goes deeper than that. The rapid rate at which Tommaso alternately idealizes and denigrates the people who care about him would indicate some form of borderline personality disorder to the armchair psychologists in the audience. Again, think of how he praises Rocco’s dick, then attacks him for showing it off minutes later. Whatever it is, it makes him a mercurial and unpleasant man most of the time. This makes his moments of constancy and kindness all the more precious to the people who love him.

“Life is porn,” Rocco says to conclude the episode. This raises what may be the big question of the series. In the present day material, Rocco has announced his retirement from porn, though he’s unable to stop himself from fucking a stranger a few minutes later. Let’s say he does manage to disentangle himself from all his paying commitments. You can take the man out of the porn, but can you take the porn out of the man?

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.