The leaves’ colors are changing, midterms are upon us, and beach days feel long gone, but I’m still stuck on summer.
On September 17th, Prime Video released the concluding episode of its hit series The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022-2025), adapted from author Jenny Han’s young-adult romance series of the same name. These past few months, it felt impossible to go online without seeing content inspired by the show. Opening any social media app meant being bombarded with episode reactions, scene reenactments, edits, memes, and brand marketing related to the show. Even Georgetown jumped in on the trend with a montage of clips captioned “The Fall I Fell for DC”.
Although the reactions were entertaining, the season itself lacked what made the show special. The writers seemed to draw from social media algorithms, straying from the original storyline to appease viewers. The third season wandered off from the nostalgic youthfulness of previous episodes as showwriters lost the plot, taking eleven painfully long episodes to get back on track.
The show’s third and final season follows Belly Conklin (Lola Tung) as she returns to Cousins Beach to marry Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno). However, after reuniting with her first love, Jeremiah’s brother Conrad (Christopher Briney), she can’t help but wonder if she made the right choice.
The season contained two similarly questionable storylines. After it is revealed that Jeremiah cheated on Belly while on Spring Break, he tries to repair their relationship with an all-too-early wedding proposal. To make matters worse, Jeremiah excuses his cheating with a very unfortunate “we were on a break” moment a lá Ross from Friends. On a separate note, Belly’s brother Steven (Sean Kaufman) and best friend Taylor (Rain Spencer) are having an affair and subsequently struggling to put a label on their extremely toxic relationship. Notice any common thread there? Yeah, me too.
These cheating storylines simply don’t align with the show’s past plot points. If you have seen the previous seasons, you would know that all the characters hate the Fisher father, Adam (Tom Everett Scott), who has an affair after his wife, Susannah (Rachel Blanchard), develops breast cancer. Han clearly wants the viewer to villainize this behavior from Adam, but since Jeremiah is hot and Stephen and Taylor are “soulmates,” suddenly their cheating is justified.
Speaking of Susannah, this season barely acknowledges her existence, which feels unexpected compared to previous seasons. Susannah and her relationship with the Conklins’ mother, Laurel Park (Jackie Chung), is the driving force of the whole show. Everyone loved Susannah. Everyone went to the summer house at Cousin’s to see Susannah. To Conrad and Jeremiah, she was a mother, and to Belly and Stephen an ‘aunt’. She brought these families together and created the relationship we see flourish on screen. Susannah passed away between Season 1 and Season 2, and her death is a huge motivation for many of the subsequent character developments.
Yet, in this season, Conrad initially refuses to attend Susannah’s memorial because it means facing his brother and his first love. Belly, whom Susannah called her “ special girl,” forgets the anniversary of her death. Han attempts to use this moment to demonstrate how Belly has used her time in Paris to avoid her real life. However, I was too focused on her terrible mistake to absorb the message.
To make matters worse, when Conrad reveals his feelings for Belly in the finale, she responds by essentially asking, “What if you only like me because your mom did?”, as if to blame the whole love triangle on Susannah. In the end, the only character left in the series that anyone can reasonably defend is Susannah.
In addition to this terrible neglect of Susannah’s passing, the plot was no better. The season has so many random, unnecessary storylines. From a two-episode arc about Taylor’s mom’s (Kristen Connolly) failing hair salon to a 61-minute episode, “Last Call”, about Belly losing her bag in Paris, it often seemed like the showwriters added in scenes just because they could. The abrupt time jumps, along with Belly and Conrad deciding that they love each other again in one day, also made the pacing feel all over the place. Han did not keep the promise she made in 2024 of “no filler episodes” in Season Three, and other editing choices made confusing plot lines even more out of place.
The show also throws the viewer around not only with time jumps, but with location jumps. jumps to a different country with a whole new set of characters, watching what feels like a completely new show. When Conrad and Belly finally got their happily ever after, I was transported out of their story entirely, only to be thrown back into it with an excessively raunchy scene that toed the line between young adult and mature.
Despite this, it somehow felt like nothing happened in this season other than the annoying squabbles between the Fisher brothers. I’m not sure what I expected, since the show is about a love triangle, but the conflict between the brothers after Belly leaves Jeremiah felt too long. If anything, these frequent arguments between the brother took away their likability. Forget #TeamJeremiah and #Team Conrad. By the end, I was just #TeamNobody.
Ultimately, I watched this season because it was a car crash I simply could not look away from. The plot was messy, did not align with the other seasons, but I was still extremely entertained. If you haven’t seen the series yet, I think it is still worth a watch. With the announcement of The Summer I Turned Pretty: The Movie, which is rumored to premiere at Christmastime next year, Belly and Conrad’s story is anything but over. Let’s just hope the next piece of this puzzle is more comprehensible.
