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'You're The Worst' Finale: Love Is OK

By Emily Cutler | TV | April 4, 2019 |

By Emily Cutler | TV | April 4, 2019 |


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Spoilers. But you should now that by now.

Stephen Falk is a bastard. A goddamn beautiful, genius bastard. See, all I asked for was that You’re the Worst not ruin itself in its last season. What I got was a finale that quickly rocketed to my all-time favorite show ending ever (sorry, Six Feet Under). In order to not steal that experience from any of you lovely people, I will warn you one last time that there are lots and lots of spoilers just over the horizon. We’ll take a musical break while you resolve any unseen episodes.

So Jimmy and Gretchen did not get married. But in the what-wasn’t-really-a-plot-twist plot twist, they’re still together and as happy as you’d expect from them. Which is to say mostly. I’d like to point out now, this means part of my existential freak out a few episodes ago was mostly right. They were fine. They just weren’t married.

As it turns out, all of the misdirections in the flashforwards had completely benign explanations. Edgar was actually playing with Jimmy and Gretchen’s daughter Felicity. They were selling the house because, as a mom now, Gretchen had decided their forever-house was a death trap. The florist was accompanying Jimmy to the wedding because after she S’ed his D, all sexual tension was off the table, and she’s now the perfect nanny. Gretchen was not drinking because of a bet she had with Jimmy. Which she quickly lost, but still got some digits. Jimmy was good with all of that.

Also, the “he” that Gretchen had won against wasn’t Jimmy, but Edgar who was outed as trying to sabotage Jimmy and Gretchen’s wedding. Maybe. He might have also been trying to sabotage his own relationship with Jimmy in order to give himself the push he needed to leave Jimmy’s nest, so to speak. Gretchen had forgiven Edgar, and decided that Linsday and Paul’s second wedding was the place to bury the hatchet. Jimmy and Edgar maybe reconciled once Edgar admitted he was being selfish, and Jimmy admitted maybe Edgar was right.

Not that Edgar was right about them destroying each other, but that he was wrong that destroying each other is necessarily a bad thing. In last week’s episode, he presented Jimmy and Gretchen’s destruction as a binary. They either stay together and destroy each other, or they split up and survive. I don’t buy that. Edgar seems to be insisting that despite the small amounts of progress they’d both made, their underlying natures would make them ruin the other. More specifically, they will make the other worse in ways that someone else wouldn’t. He’s perpetuating the idea that love fixes things when, and I cannot stress this enough, love at best makes all of the terrible things that the world has to offer only slightly more bearable. Maybe. It maybe makes things worse. Sometimes love is terrible is my point.

Now, I’m not #TeamIntimatePartnerAbuse or anything, but I share Gretchen and Jimmy’s distaste for vows that people can’t possibly keep even when they actually mean them. I don’t want anyone to tell me that they’ll love me forever, not because I enjoy being mistreated, but because telling me something they can’t possibly control feels like nonsense, and I don’t want to be insulted by someone I love. I’m not saying love should be painful, but given the choice between cheerful lies about being in love forever and honest pragmatism about how much a lot of this is going to suck, I’ll take the sucking, thanks. I don’t want someone to tell me they picked me because I’ll make everything better, I want them to pick me because a bunch of terrible stuff will happen and they still want to do this anyway. Love is staring down the barrel of uncountable instances of hurt and slights and pure boredom, and saying, “OK.” You’re The Worst understood that at a molecular level, and made it glorious. Thanks for understanding all of the romantic-phobic romantics, You’re The Worst. I hope you die. I hope we both die.

Additional Notes

— This is the moment I started crying during the episode. I stopped crying about thirty minutes ago.

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— It’s always nice to see Ben Folds reprise his role as the nicest alcoholic you’ll ever meet.

— Lindsay’s song for Gretchen should go multi-platinum at least.

— @SludgeVohaul WE DID IT. WE GOT OUR MEDICAL TRUCK

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— The beautiful bastard himself made an appearance during the final wedding scenes.

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Header Image Source: FXX