Its the End of the F**cking World Review

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Every bit is the standard with binge culture, the conversation around "The Cease of the Fucking World" Season 1 was virtually entirely dominated past its ending. Despite all viii episodes offer food for thought on corruption, violence, and honey, Netflix audiences' quick consumption habits set their sights on what is, after all, a shocking finale — 17-year-onetime James (Alex Lawther) is presumably gunned down past the constabulary while trying to salve the beloved of his young life, Alyssa (Jessica Barden), from being blamed for their recent criminal offense spree. I say "presumably gunned down" considering the last shot cuts to blackness before we tin really see James' decease, but his ugly fate could be safely assumed given a) information technology'due south the logical culmination of his tragic arc, and b) it'south the ending in Charles Forsman's original comic book.

But because of the series' added ambiguity, plenty of chatter focused not only on the ending, simply whether or not it was the ending. Netflix viewers wanted answers: Was this the cease of "The End of the Fucking World" or just the cease of the offset season? Were they supposed to find closure and make peace with these eight episodes, or could they concord out hope for James? Was this love story a modern day Romeo & Juliet, where the teen couple's abusive families and cruel world ruined their unblemished dearest, or could Romeo spit out the poison before it sends him to the other side?

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Enter Season ii. Charlie Covell, who wrote the entire first season, returns to expand on the original story, as does Jessica Barden, to further deepen Alyssa'due south difficult maturation. Crimes are committed, love is rekindled, damage is exacted and exhumed; there's too a new character, Bonnie, played by Naomi Ackie, who gets an episode all to herself at the top of Season 2 and thus sets the plot in move.

Sadly, that plot is largely redundant, reworking the story beats from Flavor 1 to make explicit everything that was implied. By the fourth dimension you lot get to the end of Season two, very little vital progress has been made, besides moving the characters away from that traumatic final moment on the embankment, and in doing so, upending the bite of Flavour 1's tragedy and replacing information technology with something much more palatable and much more commonplace. What happened before may have been ugly, sad, and atrocious, just all of those emotions were used to highlight the love these two messed up kids discovered — which was truly special.

[Editor'southward Note: The following portion of the review contains spoilers for "The End of the Fucking World" Season two, including the ending.]

Season 2 makes two big choices to set itself in motion, and neither proves worth the trip. The starting time is Bonnie'southward purpose: Given the total showtime episode to plant her backstory, Bonnie is shown as some other wayward youth who comes from a cleaved dwelling house where she learned misguided lessons well-nigh love. Her female parent'south strict tutelage — she makes Bonnie swallow her lipstick considering it's a lark from school — has an emotionally deadening event, making Bonnie believe she deserves to be punished as much as she believes extreme punishments go paw-in-hand with proving your love.

This is meant to explain her relationship with Dr. Clive Koch (Jonathan Aris), the same man who tried to rape Alyssa in Season 1 and James later killed. Bonnie becomes infatuated with the professor, even equally he uses her for sex and strikes up similar relationships with other young women; and so obsessed, she's manipulated into killing one of his other paramours when Koch claims she took advantage of him. While in prison, Bonnie learns of her betrothed's death, and sets her sights on her next victim: Alyssa.

Or is information technology victims? For the first episode-and-a-one-half, the audition is kept in the dark about what happened to James, but before long plenty you find he survived. That's right. James wasn't killed at the end of Season 1. "It was a fitting end," James says via voiceover. "A doomed dear story. A perfect tragedy. And and so I didn't die." He survived the gunshot, recovered in the hospital, then got probation after the judge ruled Dr. Koch's murder an act of self-defense.

Speaking literally, this is what "The Cease of the Fucking World" fans who didn't want to come across a Season ii were nearly worried about — rewriting a not bad, sad ending in guild to tell a longer, less effective story. And what happens next is both less effective and seemingly designed to keep going into Flavour 3. It's piece of cake to watch. It'due south well-acted, especially past Lawther. Information technology'southward even touching in small moments, when it's not being manipulative. While Covell keeps the episodes at tight, less-than-xxx-minute clips and lets his characters mature into the wiser rebels they were primed to become at the terminate of Flavor ane, everything that happens in Season 2 feels primarily focused to keep telling a story that refuses to engage with its original cocky.

In the starting time, what James and Alyssa fight to escape is reality itself; theirs were so horrid that illegal road trips with psychopathic boys intent on killing you lot (or rude, demanding girls who wanted to use you lot for your motorcar) seem similar enticing alternatives, and what they institute in each other was the same matter they establish in themselves. The dear saved them, even when it was as well belatedly to save them.

The same tin can't be said afterwards Flavor two, and worse still, there's fifty-fifty less to exist said besides bitching about the end of this "Fucking World." Continuing Alyssa and James' odyssey in friendlier pastures neutralizes the urgency and ability of their original endeavor. Forcing more drama onto them after they've left merely feels forced. Information technology's a lose-lose scenario, and while I'll always contend there'southward a expert mode to keep telling many stories, this isn't it. Season 2 is an empty vanquish of an epilogue that nevertheless usurps what it should be propping upwards.

Grade: C+

"The Terminate of the Fucking World" Season 2 is streaming now on Netflix.

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