I wasn’t sure I wanted to see them on the plane. Whether we would or not was, perhaps, the only real, big narrative question that remained ahead of the finale of Love Story. We mostly knew how everything else would go, after all. 

The prurient part of me (particularly a dark fascination with plane crashes) was curious to see how the last minutes of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren Besette might have played out. Were they scared? Was there screaming? Did they even know what was happening? (Later in the episode, writer Connor Hines offered some conveniently comforting answers—speculation, really—to those questions.)

But in my higher mind, it seemed that showing such things would be tacky and ghoulish, and might undo or undermine so much of the surprisingly delicate, affecting work the series had done up until that point. I knew the surviving Kennedys might be vocally upset, and the Bessettes ever quieter in their hurt, but it wasn’t really an angry statement from Jack Schlossberg or whoever that I was worried about. It was more that over the course of the series, I had, genuinely, come to care for the memory of these people. Better to not see them at what would be their last and worst. 

Hines and company did, in the end, choose to show them on the airplane, but I think they handled the scene with about as much grace and restraint as they could have. They gave these three doomed people a moment of something like peace, or at least the relative calm of believing that this, too, would work out all right. Maybe Hines could have cut a little sooner, before there was even a hint of trouble on the flight, but he clearly had some artistic idea about what exactly he wanted to show, and I’ll respect his license to follow through on that vision. 

The rest of the episode did enough good work to temper any uneasiness about the plane scene. As it has often been throughout the season, the writing in the finale was starchily elevated and presentational; characters patiently waited their turn to speak their mini-monologues in a manner perhaps better suited to the stage. But there was nonetheless an elegance, a bleary poetry, in the way those sentiments were expressed. The finale respectfully imagined intimate conversations that also stretched to encompass far bigger thoughts about a famous family, about fame itself, about what the sudden death of three people might have meant. 

Hey! While I’ve got you, I want to do another mailbag post soon, as we look ahead to Cannes, to spring TV and theater, and to a summer of uncertain blockbusters. Send me your questions!

Also! If you haven’t yet watched the inaugural video on my brand-new YouTube channel—an audiovisual version of my Oscars 20 Years Ago recap—you can do so by clicking the button below. There are more videos coming, so I’d love it if you subscribed over on YT (it’s free!) and thus helped me along on my dream of becoming a middle-aged Tyler Oakley.

That said, I wish they’d found the time to give Lauren Bessette her own episode, the way producer Ryan Murphy did for the individual victims of Andrew Cunanan on The Assassinationl of Gianni Versace. Sydney Lemmon certainly gave a strong enough performance to merit that, and it might have better illustrated one of the more unspoken tragedies of the story: that Lauren’s death did, in most senses, become a footnote. (That particular word was painfully uttered by Ann in the finale’s centerpiece scene, delivered so wrenchingly by the excellent Constance Zimmer.) I wish we knew more about Lauren beyond her concern for her sister and her role as private mediator between two sides of a struggling public marriage. 

While Lemmon, granddaughter of Jack, made the most with a little, Grace Gummer, daughter of Meryl Streep (some shrewd nepo casting happening here; these actors must know some version of familial expectation), was given a wealth of material to play as John’s shattered sister, Caroline. Gummer nailed it, I think, particularly her furious depiction of grief’s denial stage, Caroline spluttering and indignant in a kitchen, trying to hide away from a terribly changed and emptier world. Watching Caroline’s scenes, I couldn’t help but glumly think about another loss suffered by the real Caroline Kennedy recently, the death of her daughter, Tatiana. Just thin, I felt more than a little guilty for ever talking about the Kennedy Curse with hushed, grim excitement. 

And, of course, Sarah Pidgeon continued to deliver the sterling stuff she gave us all season. Her performance—so carefully modulated; so idiosyncratically cadenced; so, well, human—will no doubt be one of the acting highlights of the year. It’s been a relief, a happy counterbalance, to watch Pidgeon’s celebratory ascent into the public eye while she so shrewdly embodied Carolyn’s attempts to flee it. There’s a satisfying, if bittersweet symmetry in that. 

There certainly wouldn’t have been had the series not been so tactful in its storytelling. I know there have been omissions and inventions and all manner of things that distance Love Story from the actual truth. Some people might argue that that gap negates any justification for the show’s existence. But if a piece of fiction was going to be made about this event—which was probably inevitable—better it was this version and not some Page Six-y bit of leering. 

Maybe I am just helplessly transfixed by Kennedy lore, as it seems so many of us are despite what we know, and dislike, about dynastic wealth and influence. Maybe we are all slavering, nosy gawkers helping to fuel the mythology that keeps such frequently wretched people in their power. But, oh well. Despite all its larger implications, Love Story was a compelling, finely crafted, often quite poignant series. And it was a warming thrill to once again gather around the cultural water cooler, so neglected these days, to chat about how unexpectedly good the show was, how brightly Pidgeon was shining. 

The buzzy success of this series, coming so soon after that of Heated Rivalry and The Summer I Turned Pretty, might suggest that we’re arriving in an era of renewed interest in earnest romance, in the gauzy swoon and bitter heartbreak so supplely captured on Love Story, with its dreamy music gently lilting around its central pair as they let themselves want and reach past reason with abandon. Give us more, I say, if it’s as well executed as Love Story. It is nice, on occasion, to feel things without the familiar sting of irony, isn’t it? To let something so wholly carry us away, even when it’s leading us to sad places.