WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Season 2 of Netflix's The End of the F***ing World.
Fans were left anticipating the start to the second season of Netflix's The End of the F***ing World following the shocking Season 1 finale. It appeared James (Alex Lawther) was killed off in a move that certainly would have stunned folks who didn't read Charles Forsman's graphic novel or who expected the series to not take such a dark turn in its first outing.
The End of the F***ing World literally closed out in a way that felt eerily similar to Martin Scorsese's The Departed, which killed off Leonardo Dicaprio's Billy Costigan in a shocking final act after most of the film was spent building him up as an undercover cop about to turn in a mole working for Boston's biggest gangsters. Costigan got a bullet to the head as he exited an elevator with the movie's villain and left fans hopeless. However, The End of the F***ing World holds a few twists of its own as it comes close to pulling off a similar stunt, not once, but twice.
Firstly, it turns out that James wasn't killed at the end of last season. The first episode focuses on Bonnie (Naomi Ackie), a teenage psychopath who wants James and Alyssa (Jessica Barden) dead after they killed her lover, the rapist known as Professor Koch, in Season 1. But as the next episode explores Alyssa forcing closure of her own with a shotgun wedding, she catches James stalking her outside the diner where she works, as he too got a bullet engraved with his name on it from Bonnie and simply wanted to watch over and protect Alyssa.
Admittedly, it'd have been a ballsy move killing James in Season 1 because it'd mean he could only return in flashbacks or as a ghost moving forward, but showrunner Charlie Covell has shown the skill to make something like this work. Still, it's a total fakeout as we learn James was badly damaged after the cops shot him, thinking he abducted Alyssa, and he was left to rehabilitate over a couple of years. He learned to walk again, all while almost losing control of major organs like his kidneys, but nonetheless the power of love drove him on. Him living, though, is what makes the second set of murders feel like we're seeing The Departed all over again when Bonnie eventually corners the duo at Alyssa's diner.
As Alyssa and James explain to her in the final scene of the penultimate episode that Koch was a rapist who videotaped his victims, Bonnie, angered by them slandering his character, warns the reunited lovers to shut up. Alyssa insists they'll never apologize and the camera pans to James telling Bonnie she can get through this, but in true Scorsese fashion, a bullet flies through his skull and another through Alyssa's in the blink of an eye in a style that's shot-for-shot (no pun intended) from The Departed's elevator sequence. They're both slumped in the booth dead, with brains and blood splattered all over the wall behind them and the credits roll. At this point, it fits the dark nature of the story and also, you're anticipating the finale wrapping just like how the season began: with a self-contained Bonnie adventure as she escapes.
It feels like a tragic yet perfect wrap to James and Alyssa as they died protecting each other, stubborn and obscene as usual -- a twisted Romeo and Juliet of sorts as Bonnie couldn't stand the thought of them together. But as the finale begins, the camera out from Bonnie's face, only to reveal she hallucinated the double murder and the duo were never actually killed-- panicked but alive and kicking. Instead, not knowing how to handle the pain, Bonnie tries to blow her own brains out only for the lovers to save her, revealing she deserves better than death and is meant to recover from Koch's manipulation. That said, leaving James and Alyssa alive feels like a wasted opportunity because this show isn't about happy endings.
Using the protagonists to tell someone else's story would have been a major curve ball but still worthwhile as we're very much emotionally invested in Bonnie's story now. And as messed up as it would have seemed, with James lost after his dad died and Alyssa in an emotional tundra as she was married to a man she didn't love, this would have given them an escape from the world and a death next to each other that'd be fitting for their characters. Sure, it'd have been a poetic tragedy but one that really suits them at the end of the day rather than another stab at romance in the land of the living where they just can't seem to get it right.
Written by Charlie Covell, Season 2 of The End of the F***ing World is currently streaming on Netflix. It stars Alex Lawther, Jessica Barden and Naomi Ackie.