WARNING: Spoilers about Netflix’s The Four Seasons ahead!
Just when you think The Four Seasons is going one way, the show throws a huge curveball for the finale. Throughout the eight-part miniseries, we watch as three couple friends navigate the changing seasons of their lives—and a big divorce that affects the entire group—through the literal four seasons. The last two episodes are dedicated to the crew’s winter weekend getaway, with all of them hitting the slopes for a nice ski vacation. A little sad, but not too surprising, is the fact that Nick (Steve Carell) has gone on a separate ski vacation with his new girlfriend Ginny (Erika Henningsen) and her group of friends.
In the second to the last episode, it appears to be clear where things are headed with the couples’ individual relationships, the new terms of their relationship with Nick, and how they’re all going to have to make some adjustments in order to settle into this new chapter. But then a sudden death changes everything again.
Here’s the ultimate breakdown of The Four Seasons finale.
Nick dies.
Episode 7 ended with a huge shocker, which is that Nick dies in a car accident. After a fight with Ginny, he drives off to a grocery store, but never makes it back. And we begin the final episode with everyone mourning his loss, and his ex-wife Anne (Keri Kenney-Silver) is trying to pick up the pieces to arrange a funeral. Of course, everyone in their college friend group is trying to pitch in, with Kate (Tina Fey) trying to deal with a lot of the logistics. Ginny also tries to pitch in, but it’s clear that Anne doesn’t want her involved or contributing in any way.
Kate tried to accommodate Ginny by looking over her photos of Nick, for possible inclusion in the slideshow. But because she thought they were too risqué, she turned them down. To try and make up for this, Jack (Will Forte) suggests that maybe Ginny could speak for a few minutes at the funeral—which is, of course, ends up being a bad idea because this goes against Anne’s wishes.
The funeral goes terribly.
As well-organized and on top of things Kate likes to think she is, she messed up big time with the funeral arrangements. Instead of listening to her husband Jack (Will Forte) about the necessary costs for the funeral, she insisted to do things her way, thinking that he would just get swindled by the funeral director’s sales talk and ultimately screw things up—as per usual. She cut corners to lower costs, and this got them a sad, small room for the ceremony, and Nick put in an urn shaped like a red “stripper shoe,” as Anne calls it.
While Anne delivers the eulogy, she stops mid-sentence realizing that—although they’d been married for 25 years—she didn’t actually know Nick anymore, and might not have even known him all that well to begin with. She decides to give someone else the mic, but instead of giving it to Ginny she hands it over to Claude (Marco Calvani) to talk about a dream he had about Nick being a butterfly—much to his husband Danny’s (Colman Domingo) disdain.
After the ceremony, the whole friend group goes back to Nick and Anne’s place along with Ginny. And the 30-year-old blatantly calls them out for the first time for preferring to go on with an awful funeral rather than allow her to go up and speak. She then storms out of the house.
Are Kate and Jack getting a divorce?
Trouble has been brewing in paradise for these college sweethearts, and in the final episode we see them continue to bicker even after a dear friend has just passed. They seem resigned to the fact that they’re going to have to work really hard to keep their relationship together, that is until they find themselves in a deadly predicament.
When Ginny didn’t return to the house even after sundown, the gang decided to go out and search for her. And without realizing it, Kate and Jack ended up on top of a frozen lake. The ice under Kate cracks and she ends up stuck. Though Danny and Claude see the two struggle, they can’t help because this might only end in disaster for all four of them. And so Kate has no choice but to trust and rely on her husband.
Jack is able to pull her out of the icy water, and uses a history lesson to get them off the lake. The nerd that he is, he references something he learned from reading about Napoleon’s Battle of Austerlitz, and tells Kate not to stand and instead roll off the lake. This works, and leads to a major reconciliation between the two. When they get back to the safety of their room, when Jack promises that all they need to save their marriage is to buckle down and work through it, Kate shuts him up and says, “You’re my soulmate.” This is a huge deal, because she didn’t used to believe in soulmates.
What about Danny and Claude?
No couple is perfect. And that’s something that the show makes clear, as each of the pairs have their own marital issues. Danny and Claude finally kissed and made up at the end of the autumn chapter of the show, but Nick’s death stirred something up again. While Danny mourned, Claude was trying to cheer him up and clearly had a much more sunshine-and-rainbows take on their friend’s death, saying that he had turned into a butterfly. When the two went off on their own during the search for Ginny, Danny tells Claude that he just wants his husband to allow him to be sad instead of trying to say that everything’s okay—because it’s not.
The two come to an understanding, and it seems that they’re miles better at communicating with each other than they were when the show first started, in the spring. When they get back to Anne’s house, going through the kitchen cabinets and cupboards, Danny sees a childhood drawing by Nick and Anne’s daughter Lila (Julia Lester) of butterfly, labeled “Daddy.” A nice little optimistic sign that maybe things are okay, and that Nick is still watching over them as a butterfly, like Claude says.
Anne and Ginny become friends.
The whole search party turns out to be useless, because Anne finds Ginny sitting outside the house, alone in the cold. She comes out, puts a blanket on her, and apologizes for how things went down at the funeral, and for how she’s been treating her in general. She admits that she didn’t want Ginny speaking at the ceremony because if she had better things to say about Nick, then it would mean their eight-month relationship was worth more than their 25-year marriage. She realizes that this was wrong.
Ginny then tells Anne that the reason why she wanted to be actively involved in the funeral, aside from loving Nick, was that she wanted to try and make up for the fight they had before he passed away. The two hash things out, and all is well. Ginny sits with the group of friends for dinner, toasting to Nick, and already planning their next trip in honor of his memory.
Oh yeah, and Ginny is pregnant.
But just as they’re all about to take a shot of whiskey, everyone sees that Ginny puts hers down. That’s when Anne casually drops the big bombshell line that ends the entire show, “Yeah, she’s pregnant.”
With many questions, and much more drama yet to unfold, should we be expecting a second season of The Four Seasons? There have been no official announcements, but the show’s creators seem hopeful. We’ll just have to wait and see!
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