Love Story Finale Shocker: What Nobody Saw Coming in the Closing Chapter!
Ever wonder what it’s like when therapy sessions start to feel less like a safe space and more like a battleground—especially when the world seems glued to your every move? Carolyn’s finally in therapy, but instead of solo time with the shrink, it’s couples therapy with John, and let me tell you, things get raw real quick. They’re hashing out nightmares that hit too close to home, fights about divorce being “off the table,” and the exhausting dance of managing love under the unforgiving spotlight of legacy and media. It’s a mix of heartache, awkward bar laughs, and the kind of conversations you wish you could skip but somehow can’t. And just when you think they might find some peace, fate takes a turn that leaves you questioning—can love really survive when everything else seems stacked against it? Dive into this rollercoaster of emotions—where therapy isn’t just about healing, but survival. LEARN MORE
11 min readCarolyn is finally in therapy. She shares a recurring nightmare where John and her are in the motorcade in Texas, but she is the one that gets injured. The therapist asks her what she’s wearing in the dream and Carolyn reveals she’s wearing the same thing as Jackie, the pink suit and the pill box hat, at which point we learn that John is also in the room and this is couple’s therapy. “She hates hats,” he says.
The two start bickering. Carolyn is upset because he’s “moved out,” but he denies moving out and says he’s just staying elsewhere to avoid saying anything they may regret later. “I’m the one that said divorce is off the table!,” he screams, but it does not comfort Carolyn. “There is a difference between not wanting us to fail and not wanting us to succeed!” she responds. She then adds, “John views our marriage through the lens of the media. He’s more concerned with the optics of our issues than our actual issues.” Carolyn does not want to be the third person in their marriage, coming in behind everyone else in the world, his family’s legacy, and the magazine.
Naturally, the therapist suggests a trial separation. They’re not having it. “You’re white-knuckling this marriage into a downward spiral,” she says.
They go to a bar to unload their meeting with the therapist, laughing about their experience. They’re supposed to be going their separate ways but John asks to stop by the place to get “his linen blazer.” They obviously have sex. Afterwards, she asks him to remember their best kiss. They snuggle in bed—will everything be ok?
The next morning, she wants to talk about what happened the previous night, but John has a 9 AM breakfast. Carolyn says it’s better this way because they should discuss what happened at therapy, but John doesn’t want to. “Should we tell her we did exactly the opposite of what she told us to do?” and Carolyn is like, dude do you want an A in therapy or do you want to actually work on our problems? Will she join him at the George gala or Rory’s wedding? “You still don’t get it. It’s not as easy for me as it is for you… pretend like everything’s ok.” He denies that’s how he feels.
John and Caroline meet at the reservoir in Central Park named after their mom. “She won’t forgive me for ruining her life, destroying her anonymity, failing to protect her,” he says of Carolyn. He tells her about the time he sat on the same bench with his mom and she told him that he would end up with a woman who thought she was entering a partnership but in reality would be orbiting him just like everyone else. Caroline is like dude please, you are not the president and she is not the first lady. She’s telling him to put his big boy pants on and face reality, how he went out with all these women who were more than willing to have him be the center of their universe and he didn’t want any of them, and then he meets one that’s not willing to reshape her life around him and he falls in love and marries her and now he’s crying about how she won’t just fall into line? “What she’s asking of you feels unreasonable because no one’s ever asked that of you before,” she tells him. “Your whole life people have been willing to take whatever pieces of yourself you’re willing to give them, but she isn’t.”
Then she says, “I know you’ve been made to feel like your life is predestined, but that doesn’t mean you are powerless to change it. The question is—do you love her enough to do that?” Iconic bars from Caroline this episode! John doesn’t have an answer for her.
Later that day, over a couple of beers and a shared plate of french fries, Lauren tells Carolyn that John called her to see how she was doing. “I told him to pick up the phone and call you himself!” she says like older sister that she is. John offered her a ride to the Vineyard on his way to Rory’s wedding, which as we know, Carolyn is not planning to attend. “Did you say yes?” she asks and Lauren’s like, duh! You know traffic is crazy on summer Fridays!
Carolyn tells her about her post-coital morning, how John acted like it was any other normal day without all of their problems. “Did you ask him to cancel his meeting to talk?” she asks Carolyn who is like, I shouldn’t have to ask him! I’m not here to teach him how to be a man! And Lauren is like, well, it seems like you didn’t really need to talk to him that desperately then. (So far this is a great episode about sisters telling it how it is.) Carolyn shoots her an incredible side-eye, but Lauren is just getting started!
“You think because of our shit with Dad that him leaving is the ultimate betrayal, but this is also you projecting shit onto John that has nothing to do with him,” she says. “If you really wanted to work on this relationship, you would swallow your pride, jettison this compulsion to be right and do what’s in the best interest of your relationship.” Carolyn is dumbfounded, says she’s already compromised so much for the man. “It’s only compromise if it’s by your own volition, but you can’t cling to the past and work towards the future at the same time.” Hoooo boy!!!!
Dido’s “Here With Me,” (which real heads will recognize as the theme song from Roswell) plays and reporters ask John if he’s getting a divorce, since he showed up solo to his magazine’s gala. And then what’s this? It’s Carolyn in a two-tone ruffled Yohji Yamamoto jacket stepping in front of the paparazzi’s cameras as Dido sings “but IIIIIIIIII can’t hiiiiiiiiiiiide”! John looks up with his puppy dog eyes. “What made you change your mind?” he whisper-asks her. “I know how important this is to you. And I know I wanna to try,” she responds. Honestly this Dido moment might just be the best music moment in the whole series.
They meet at Panna II, the East Village Indian restaurant they went to for their first date, for a kind of do-over. She tells him the thing she remembers the most from their date was how he said he felt like he had a sign over his head that said THE HUNK FLUNKS and she finally reveals what her sign would say. “Please handle with care, not as tough as she looks.” (I feel like the writers could’ve workshopped this line a little bit more, but we’ll go with it.) “If I had told you that then, the jig would’ve been up,” she says. ‘There’d be no mystery for you to solve, no defense system to disarm, and therefore no reason to stay.” She is really taking what her sister Lauren told her at lunch earlier and laying all her cards on the table. She doesn’t want to be the tough guy anymore, she wants to be taken care of. She doesn’t want them to hurt each other, but she can’t just take him at his word that they won’t if they just try their best, it’s not enough for her. Then John shows what he learned from his park hang with his sister. “I have to re-examine my relationship with everything and everyone that isn’t you because you come first.” And she’s like but you’ve been burdened with so much, I can’t make you choose between those things and he’s like no, babe, you’re my destiny.
On the walk home, he proposes they go on a trip anywhere she wants for however long she wants after he comes back from Rory’s wedding. It turns out Carolyn has changed her mind, she now wants to go because she misses dancing with him.
The next day Carolyn’s on the phone with her sister, nervous about having agreed to go to a family wedding where everyone will be judging them, just as things are starting to work out between them. Lauren’s like you’ll be fine, go get your nails done and I’ll see you later.
In the backseat of the car arriving to Essex County Airport in New Jersey, Lauren tells John about Carolyn’s anxiety (which like… why?) and John is annoyed, he thought they were past this. Lauren’s like change doesn’t happen over night!
Carolyn arrives at the airport, and the three of them get in John’s little plane. The sun is setting behind them. She is reading a book called Lovers: Winners + Losers by Brian Friel, which a quick search reveals is a play in two parts—with the first part being about two young people in love full of hope for the future who will soon be in a fatal accident. (Is it too dark for her to be reading a book though?) It is now nighttime, she moves up front to sit next to him. He can see the lights of Martha’s Vineyard in the distance, until suddenly the plane is enveloped in fog. Alarms are beeping, and is clear things are not going hunky dory but no one is panicking. He tells her to go back to her passenger seat, but she decides to stay in the co-pilot seat, looks at him softly and tells him to breathe as everything malfunctions around them.
The air traffic controller receives a call about a “no-call, no-show” plane at the Vineyard.
At their place in the Vineyard, Caroline and her husband are snuggling on the couch when there is a loud bang on the door. The police are here to tell them John’s been reported missing. Caroline rushes to pack to get back home, while Ed is on the phone trying to find more information. He turns on the TV where the evening news has already gotten wind of the situation.
A phone call awakens Carolyn and Lauren’s mother Ann Marie Messina with the news.
Back in Manhattan, the news of John and Carolyn are on the cover of every newspaper, and Ted and Ethel gather at Caroline’s apartment. The president calls and seemingly tells the Senator that they have found the bodies.
In the kitchen, Caroline is crying. Ed walks towards her, she begs him to not say anything to her, to not make it real. “He’s not gone! That doesn’t make any fucking sense!” He hugs her. “It isn’t true! Please don’t do this to me! I can’t do it again!” This is when your crying as a viewer may ostensibly start (it will not stop for a while).
The next day at breakfast, Caroline is numb, while Ed is tactfully trying to go through the list of things that they still need to do. “He spent his life bound to that little boy, desperate to free himself from a tragedy he couldn’t even remember. All he wanted was to simply be. All he’ll be remembered for is what he could have become.”
Ed and what we later learn are lawyers(?) meet with Ann Marie Messina and her lawyers to talk about burial arrangements. She is instantly angry that Caroline is not there and has sent her husband instead. Ed says that given the circumstances, she thought it would be better if he were to deal with the arrangement for the bodies, but she doesn’t find that to be a satisfying answer. “I assure you she was trying to be mindful of your feelings,” he tells her to which she responds, “Oh, is that the pretext that her legal team concocted?”
Apparently President Clinton has suggested that John be buried at Arlington Cemetery, but if Ann would like to keep John and Carolyn together, then they could be buried in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts. This does not please Ann Marie, who does not feel that the family should get to dictate what happens next. “You keep mentioning Carolyn, but may I remind you that I had two daughters aboard the plane that he crashed!”
Afterwards, Ann Marie visits John and Carolyn’s Tribeca apartment, and finds the flowers with the card John had sent her daughter, inviting her to meet at their first date spot. Caroline walks in.
They both sit on opposite end of John and Carolyn’s dining table, and Ann Marie begins to air her grievances with Ed and his handling of the situation earlier that day. Ever the Kennedy, Caroline tries to politely and diplomatically handle the situation, and tries to extricate herself from it. “I’m not finished and I will not be dismissed a second time,” Ann Marie says.
“Some people are saying that they crashed because Carolyn was doing their nails and she delayed their takeoff, that they crashed because of her vanity. Are you aware of that?,” she asks Caroline, who shakes her head no, trying to hold back tears. She doesn’t read the news anymore. Ann Marie tells her her faith used to help her make sense of the world. “But now, there’s just a deafening silence. How do you live in a world that doesn’t make sense? How do you even get out of bed”
“As soon as you open your eyes,” Caroline answers, “One second longer and you realize the world you’re waking up to is… painfully incomplete.” She tells Ann Marie of the time she was 18 and staying in London with a family friend who was in Parliament, and how one day a bomb went off underneath his car—the only reason they bomb missed them is because they were running late. She explains that for years she tried to make sense of what happened, why so many bad things happen to people in her family, and all she gleaned from it is that “there’s no rhyme or reason” as to why some people get to live a little bit longer than others. “All we know is that time doesn’t belong to us. Nothing is promised.”
Ann Marie’s face softens.
Caroline continues. “I didn’t know Lauren but I know she was smart, funny, beautiful, dynamic. But I did know Carolyn. And I knew she was struggling, and instead of reaching out to her… I will regret what I didn’t do, and what I could’ve done for the rest of my life.”
“She said she didn’t recognize who she had become,” Ann Marie answers her. “And now that person will be immortalized forever. I only wish she had lived long enough to be remembered for something else.” There is something strange about seeing an actress play the role of Carolyn’s mother, saying words that very much could’ve been said in real life, in a TV show based around the Carolyn that didn’t recognize herself, didn’t like what she’d become, based on the Carolyn that her own mother wishes she wouldn’t be remembered by. The real Ann Marie died in 2007, before social media and the constant influx of slideshows and articles about Carolyn’s style— the content that aims to dissect and deconstruct the little of the real Carolyn that the public knew her by.
Caroline gets up and sits next to Ann Marie, holds her hand. “I’m remembering a conversation I had with John where he said he wanted to be cremated and wanted his ashes spread across the sea. I was wondering if maybe we could spread John, Carolyn, and Lauren’s ashes together. As one.” They do.
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