As soon as we saw John’s ortho boot in last week’s episode, we knew little time would elapse between the fight that ends in John temporarily moving out of the loft and…well, the last private plane flight he, Carolyn, and Lauren would ever take. (Yes, there’s also a reference to an imminent Kennedy wedding in Hyannis to situate us in time, but that doesn’t mean much — John had about a million cousins so I assume there’s a Kennedy wedding in Hyannis EVERY summer weekend.) The point is: this episode has to acknowledge the true (or at least deeply reported) story that Rory Kennedy’s wedding was to have been John and Carolyn’s last public appearance as a couple before announcing their separation; it also has to affirm that the Love Story we’re all here for continued right to the last moments of the couple’s life. Series creator Connor Hines wrote the episode and he takes his time!
So: John and Carolyn are still living apart, but they’re also in marriage counseling. Their therapist, Colleen (Talia Shire), suggests that they get more intentional about their separation, suspending contact with each other for as much as a month or two. John and Carolyn both say they don’t think they could, but Colleen thinks the distance could be clarifying: “You won’t come together, you won’t let go, and instead you are just white-knuckling this marriage into a downward spiral,” she says, foreshadowingly. (Tacky, TACKY choice, Connor Hines!) Leaning over Carolyn to pay the check when they stop at their local dive bar after the session, the contact seems to startle them both. I think we can retire the euphemism “Come up and see my etchings” in favor of John’s request — to stop in and pick up his linen blazer — because…
…we then smash cut to them smashing. Afterward, they reminisce about the best kisses of their relationship. We watch Carolyn’s pick play out: on an apparently unremarkable morning when she was late for work, John asks her to come kiss him goodbye before she leaves. Carolyn races back to give him a perfunctory smooch, but John stops the elevator before it goes down, stepping in to give her a much more passionate kiss.
In the present, Carolyn’s worried brow tells us she might not believe they’ll ever have a kiss like that again, and the next morning, they backslide into the latest version of the same fight. Carolyn doesn’t want John to put work ahead of them, but is also too proud to ask him to bag his breakfast meeting to spend time with her instead. John wants Carolyn to come with him to a George gala and Rory’s wedding, but she says it’s harder for her to pretend everything’s fine than it seems to be for him. Separately, they reach out to their most trusted advisors: Caroline tells John that Carolyn’s expectations for their marriage only feel unreasonable to him because no one’s ever been so firm with him before; Lauren tells Carolyn she needs to stop projecting her old issues around their dad’s abandonment of the family on John.
And that is how Carolyn ends up at the George gala. We’ve seen John looking past everyone around him watching the door for Carolyn, and the elation on his face when she arrives is such a pleasure after all the misery of the past few episodes.
John parts the crowd of photographers as they make their way to each other. Over the din, he asks what made her change her mind. Carolyn says she knows how important it is to him, and that she wants to try. There are 47 shots from this event on Getty Images; not all of them are of Carolyn and John, but there are more of them than there are anyone else, and it feels like we watch each one of them get snapped as Connor Hines makes this joint appearance a load-bearing moment in their last days on earth, especially once you know that “the George gala” was actually the Newman’s Own/George Awards, which took place almost two months before they died.
After screwing up the moment after the post-counseling hookup, John tries harder to build on the gala appearance, sending a giant floral arrangement to the loft and inviting Carolyn to meet back at the Indian restaurant where they had their very first date. They recap (leave it to the professionals) what they said that night, John remembering that while he confessed to feeling like he was wearing a sign over his head reading “The Hunk Flunks,” Carolyn never shared what her sign said. If Carolyn had admitted that hers was “Please Handle With Care, Not As Tough As She Looks,” there would have been no mystery for him to solve, thus no reason to stay, but knowing him made her want to let him in. John is determined to re-examine his relationships with everyone else in his life, because Carolyn comes first. Carolyn wouldn’t fault John for wanting to meet the expectations he’s been burdened with, but the only thing he thinks he was destined for is her. Apparently he’s so convincing that she even agrees to go to Rory’s wedding…
…which is upon us almost immediately, as Carolyn tells Lauren on the phone that her peace with John may be too fragile to withstand the scrutiny of a Kennedy wedding. Lauren, who’s hitching a ride with them to Martha’s Vineyard, is sure John and Carolyn’s mindset will be different this time, and that Carolyn should go get her nails done…
…and after a few reminders of how tense everyone was on their way to the airstrip, the plane is in the air. Carolyn climbs into the co-pilot seat. John says he missed her. She kisses his hand…just before everything goes to hell. I don’t claim to be an aviation expert, but the alarms, red lights, and “FAIL” readouts all seem bad, as does the murky gray nothingness outside. Lauren closes her eyes, looking serene, and Carolyn, as we’ve seen her do so many times, tells John to breathe. Naturally, we can’t know what anyone’s mood was as John lost his bearings, so we might as well pretend Carolyn and Lauren were calm and confident than imagine their final moments were pure terror.
I personally could have done with a lot less of what follows: ghoulishly imagining how various family members learned, first, that John’s plane was missing, and then that it and its passengers were lost. I’m sure we all feel horrible for Caroline, the last living member of her family of origin, but a lot of her screen time was spent being annoyed, or worse, with her brother and his wife.
Far more effective is what we see of Ann, whose logistics meeting with representatives of the Kennedy family doesn’t give her any reason to revise the view about John and his family that she expressed before the wedding. For one thing, Ed attends in Caroline’s place. For another, he makes it clear that President Clinton’s offer to bury John with Jackie in Arlington National Cemetery doesn’t extend to Carolyn, and that otherwise the Kennedys would insist on interring Carolyn and John together at the family plot in Holyhood. Bristling with rage, Ann asks why her daughter would be buried in a state she has no ties to, and that if the Kennedys were actually that adamant about it, they wouldn’t have sent Ed. She also points out that he keeps talking about Carolyn: “May I remind you that I had not one but TWO daughters on board that plane that HE crashed.” There’s probably a more generous way to phrase it, but hers is the most accurate and concise.
Ann is walking around the loft, crying as she touches Carolyn’s various elegant, tasteful things, when suddenly Caroline appears. When the two women take up opposite ends of the dining table, Caroline offers a half-hearted apology for Ed about wires getting crossed and tries to excuse herself, but Ann won’t be dismissed a second time. Did Caroline know some media are blaming the crash on Carolyn’s late arrival because she stopped to get her nails done, and not on John flying at night without the skills to manage it? Caroline stopped reading the news, but Ann has nothing left to protect but her daughters’ legacies, and is disgusted that while John is on the covers of papers and magazines the world over, Carolyn is relegated to the inside, and Lauren is practically a footnote. Ann’s faith has always helped her make sense of the world, but now there’s just a deafening silence. Caroline replies with the story of a family friend in London who was an MP, and whose car was bombed by the IRA; it was only luck that spared Caroline from being in the car at the time. The incident taught her that there’s no reason some of us get to stay around longer than others; all we can know is that nothing is promised.
Ann softens as Caroline goes on: she only knew Lauren a little but could tell she was impressive. Caroline knew Carolyn a lot better, including that she was struggling, and Caroline will always regret her failure to reach out. Ann cries that Carolyn didn’t recognize who she had become, and now that version of her will be immortalized forever; Ann wishes Carolyn could have lived long enough to have been remembered for something else. Coming around to sit next to Ann and take her hand, Caroline remembers that John had wanted to be cremated, his remains scattered across the sea; Carolyn thought they could spread all their loved ones’ ashes together as one.
Soon enough, it’s the funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Though we get glimpses of the relatives, friends, and frenemies we’ve met over the course of the season — Ethel, Ted, Berman, Anthony, Calvin — the only one whose voice we hear is Ann’s, as she recites first Henry Scott Holland’s “Death Is Nothing At All,” then glides into “Immortality (Do Not Stand By My Grave And Weep)” by Clare Harner. “I am the diamond glints in snow,” we hear, as Caroline, Ann, and Carolyn and Lauren’s stepfather Richard stand on the deck of a Coast Guard boat and empty their urns into the water. “I am the day transcending night,” we hear, as the camera swoops over dunes and finds Carolyn folded in John’s arms.
gif 53:24: the camera sliding down to John and Carolyn
“Do not stand by my grave and cry. / I am not there, I did not die,” we hear, as the camera flies out over the waves. I hope I’m allowed to sit on my couch and cry, because I did.
Love Notes for Episode 9 (“Search And Recovery”)
- After I was wondering about him around last week’s episode, Friday’s back!
pic 08:54: John setting Friday’s food dish in front of him
The real Friday had already gone ahead to Hyannis, so even if he couldn’t understand why John and Carolyn never came to retrieve him, at least one may hope he was surrounded by cousins he knew and kept far from the animal abuser among them.
- On the (fated) flight, Carolyn is portrayed reading Brian Friel’s Lovers. Remember when John told Carolyn about getting cast in an Off Broadway play? That was the one.
- After the plane and bodies have been recovered, a Kennedy lawyer explains to Ed that John probably crashed due to spatial disorientation. “Statistics show that between 5 to 10% of all general aviation accidents can be attributed to spatial disorientation, and 90% of these accidents are fatal.”
- The last Love Story playlist additions of the season:
Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.