Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for the final episode of FX’s “Love Story.”
In the final moments of the “Love Story” finale, we get a glimpse of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. But that’s only in memory. The two are shown on a beach in Massachusetts, living a life that might not have happened had fate intervened.
From the first moments of “Love Story”‘s premiere, fans of the FX series, which tells the story of a presidential heir and his fashion publicist bride, have been wondering how it will reach its inevitable end point. The show begins with a flash-forward to the actual 1999 altercation on the tarmac preceding a flight to Martha’s Vineyard that killed John, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister Lauren. We then flash back to the blossoming of John and Carolyn’s relationship, their wedding, and how the two eventually come into conflict over a dispute over how much public attention their marriage can withstand.
Their deaths are treated with considerable sensitivity. We reach that tarmac again, but first we walk through their last month or so. It turns out that their marriage counselor had recommended a trial separation. They fought a lot — Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon) told John (Paul Anthony Kelly), behind the illusions of the media and the Kennedy myth, that “I can’t be number three in a marriage.” But the idea of being separated, even for a month, was a shock to the system. These two may have grown to hate each other, but they could never lose touch.
paul anthony kelly and sarah pigeon
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This surprising advice had both short-term consequences (they slept together as if to prove a point) and somewhat long-term consequences. Carolyn, who had been confined to her Tribeca loft for fear of paparazzi, ends up attending George magazine’s party because she understands it’s important to her husband. After months of self-imposed exile, fearing camera lenses and press criticism, she chooses to smile. Later, John, desperate for recognition, takes Carolyn to a super secret dinner at a small Indian restaurant and promises to reevaluate his life to make room for her. He is even willing to skip his cousin’s wedding, but she insists. “I miss dancing with you,” she said on the way home.
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That brings the audience to the tarmac. The fight in the first episode is omitted by fading to white over Carolyn’s perceived delay in changing her nail color and John’s failure to hire a flight instructor for the short trip. Fade in, and Carolyn is reading Irish playwright Brian Friel’s The Lovers with her sister Lauren (Sidney Lemmon) as John flies solo. Bored, excited, or having some kind of premonition, Carolyn asks the pilot, “Do you have permission to enter the cockpit?” With his permission, she puts on headphones.
“I missed you,” says John. “I had a hunch,” Carolyn answered. It’s the perfect reconciliation the show has been waiting for viewers to see. And it happens when John is maneuvering toward what he thinks is the horizon and suddenly loses that feeling. He urges Carolyn to return to her seat, but she refuses and remains at his side as the dial turns and blushes. “It’s okay, just breathe. John, just breathe. Just breathe.” She looks calm while he seems perplexed by the moment he is placed in his fate and choices.
The remainder of the finale depicts the aftermath of John, Carolyn, and Lauren’s deaths, particularly 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, through Kennedy’s attorney, Caroline’s husband Ed Schlossberg (Ben Shenkman), initially fight over where the three should be buried. An impromptu meeting between Caroline and Anne at the ill-fated couple’s loft temporarily eases tensions, and an agreement is reached that all three passengers on the plane may be buried at sea. At the highly negotiated funeral, we first heard Anne read Henry Scott-Holland’s Death is Nothing, then heard Claire Harner’s Don’t Stand and Weep at the Grave, then saw the scattering of the ashes, and then saw what might have been. John and Carolyn were completely alone, hugging each other on the dunes, happy with no one else, just with each other.
