How the love story finale deals with the plane crash deaths of JFK Jr and Carolyn

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the finale of FX’s “Love Story.”

We catch a glimpse of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in the final moments of the “Love Story” finale. But it is only in memory. The pair are shown on a beach in Massachusetts, living the lives they could have had had fate not intervened.

Fans of the FX series that tells the story of the presidential heir and his fashion publicist bride have been wondering from the first moments of the premiere of “Love Story” how we would reach the inevitable end point. The show opens with a flash-forward to an argument on the tarmac prior to the real-life 1999 flight to Martha’s Vineyard that killed John, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister Lauren; It then loops back to show the blossoming of John and Carolyn’s relationship, their marriage, and their eventual disagreement over disputes over how much publicity their marriage could withstand.

Their deaths are treated with no small amount of sensitivity. We arrive on that asphalt again, but first we walk through their last month or so. We learn that their marriage counselor recommended a trial separation. They’d had a lot of arguments – Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon) had told John (Paul Anthony Kelly) that “I can’t be the third person in my marriage,” behind the specter of the media or the Kennedy mythos. But the idea of ​​parting ways for even a month came as a shock to the system: These two may have grown to dislike each other, but they could never be out of touch.

This surprising advice has short-term consequences (they slept together, as if to prove a point) and longer-term consequences: Carolyn, cooped up in the Tribeca loft for fear of paparazzi invasion, ends up going to a George Magazine party because she understands it’s important to her husband. After months in self-imposed exile, fearing the lenses of the camera and the criticism of the press, she decides to smile. Then John, longing for outside validation, takes Carolyn to a top-secret dinner at their little Indian spot, vowing to reexamine his life to make room for her. He is even willing to skip a cousin’s wedding, but she insists. “I miss dancing with you,” she says as she walks home.

That brings the audience to the asphalt. The fight in the first episode, over a perceived delay by Carolyn when she changed the color of her nails and John’s failure to enlist his flight instructor for the short trip, is omitted with a fade to white. When we enter, Carolyn is reading Irish playwright Brian Friel’s “Lovers” with her sister Lauren (Sydney Lemmon), while John flies solo. Carolyn is bored, excited, or has a premonition and asks her pilot, “Permission to enter the cockpit?” When she gets permission, she puts on headphones.

“I missed you,” John says. “I had a feeling,” Carolyn answers. It’s the full reconciliation the show has kept viewers waiting for — and it comes just as John, flying toward what he thinks is the horizon, suddenly loses his sense of it. He urges Carolyn to return to her seat, but she refuses and remains standing next to him as the dials turn and his face lights up red. “It’s okay, just breathe. John, just breathe. Just breathe.” While he looks bewildered at the moment his fate and choices have put him in the position, she looks serene.

The rest of the finale deals with the aftermath of John, Carolyn and Lauren’s deaths – specifically the grief of John’s sister Caroline Kennedy (Grace Gummer) and Carolyn and Lauren’s mother Ann Messina Freeman (Constance Zimmer). Freeman and the Kennedy family initially fight through Kennedy proxy, Caroline’s husband Ed Schlossberg (Ben Shenkman), over where the three can be buried; an impromptu meeting between Caroline and Ann, both of whom visit the star-crossed couple’s loft, provides a moment of relaxation, a release of tensions and an agreement that all three plane passengers can be buried at sea. We first hear Ann read Henry Scott-Holland’s ‘Death is nothing at all’ and then Clare Harner’s ‘Don’t stand at my grave and cry’ at a well-negotiated funeral service, then see the scattering of ashes, and then a moment of what might have been: John and Carolyn, all alone, embracing on a sand dune, happy in the company of no one, and no mediating force but each other.