FX
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Thursday’s “Love Story” finale.
We knew how FX’s “Love Story” would end, but that still didn’t prepare us for how devastating it would be.
Season 1 of the docudrama anthology wrapped up Thursday with an inevitable twist: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, who we watched fall in love and get married across nine episodes, were killed in a plane crash along with Carolyn’s sister Lauren. (We saw a foreshadowing of the fatal crash in the premiere, with an injured John preparing to fly his plane to his cousin Rory’s wedding with Carolyn and Lauren in tow.)
As the finale opens, John and Carolyn are still recovering from the nasty fight they had last week, where John packed up to stay at a hotel. They bicker at couples therapy, where Carolyn confesses that she’s having nightmares about being Jackie O. in a JFK-style assassination. But when the therapist suggests a trial separation, they recoil at the very idea. The frustrated therapist then tells them if they won’t come together or split up, they’re just “white-knuckling this marriage into a downward spiral.” (Ominous choice of words there.)
The spark is still there, but the problems remain
FX
John and Carolyn reclaim a bit of their old spark while sharing a cigarette at a dive bar, undressing for steamy make-up sex set to Air’s “All I Need.” But the next morning, John heads off to yet another meeting and invites her to yet another party, and Carolyn is left to wonder if anything’s really changed. She’s tired of “pretending like everything’s OK,” she says. John has a heart-to-heart with his sister Caroline, who reminds him that the very things he loves about Carolyn — the inner fire, the independence — are what he’s complaining about now. Meanwhile, Carolyn confides in her sister Lauren… who took John up on his offer to fly her to Martha’s Vineyard.
Carolyn does show up at that party, and she and John smile dutifully for the cameras, with her telling him, “I want to try.” They even reunite at that tiny Indian restaurant where they had dinner on their first date, and we start to hope that these two crazy kids might actually make it. Yeah, about that: John was planning to go to Rory’s wedding by himself, but Carolyn decides she wants to go, too. (“I miss dancing with you.”) Then we’re back to where we started, with Carolyn getting her nails done and John calling ahead to double-check the weather for their fateful flight.
The Kennedys suffer another tragic loss
FX
We see the three of them in the air, with John at the controls and everything going smoothly. He tells Carolyn, “I missed you,” and she kisses his hand. But then the visibility gets bad, and alarms start to ring on John’s controls. John tries to get Carolyn to go back to her seat, but she insists: “I want to sit with you.” The alarms keep blaring, the dials are spinning… and then everything goes black.
The Coast Guard gets an alert, and police tell Caroline her brother’s plane is missing. It’s billed as a “search and rescue” mission at first, but soon, they get the bad news, and Caroline dissolves into sobs: “I’m not doing this again, alright? I am not!” She later mourns the fact that John faced so much pressure from the day he was born: “All he’ll be remembered for is what he could have become.” The families discuss burial plots, with Carolyn’s mother Ann bitterly reminding Caroline’s husband that she lost two daughters in that crash, not just Carolyn.
Ann and Caroline have a tense sit-down, where Ann rants about Carolyn being blamed for the crash by the media and Lauren being reduced to “practically a footnote.” She breaks down in tears, asking: “How do you live in a world that doesn’t make sense?” But Caroline has been through this before, and she and Ann eventually reach an uneasy understanding: two wounded souls trying to find a way to keep going.
Caroline gets some words of encouragement from her aunt Ethel, who saw her husband RFK murdered: “We’re Kennedy women, and we’re still here.” They spread the ashes of John, Carolyn, and Lauren at sea, and the camera pans over the peaceful New England coast as we see John and Carolyn cuddling on the beach one last time.
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