Everybody hang on to your feelings because the summer after the summer Belly first turned pretty is getting off to a bummer start. “I wasn’t in Cousins. Conrad and I weren’t together. And Susannah was dead,†narrates Belly’s internal monologue at the top of the episode. And thus begins season two of The Summer I Turned Pretty. The good news is that things can only go up from here. Hopefully.
So what happened? Everybody seemed mostly in a good place by the end of season one. After getting stuck in a love triangle between two brothers, both alike in hunkiness, Belly had definitively settled on Kidz Bop Jacob Elordi, a.k.a. Conrad, by the final episode. And yes, Susannah still had cancer, but her sons had, at last, convinced her to go forward with the experimental treatment she’d been resisting, giving everyone plenty of reason for hope. And, of course, they would always have Cousins Beach, right?
Alas.
“Love Lost†is mostly a litany of how Belly’s life has fallen apart since then. For starters, she was demoted from captain of the volleyball team and her grades are in the trash. Plus, her guidance counselor chooses the last day of school to warn her that getting into any decent college will be a reach now. Meanwhile, brother Steven is giving the commencement speech and headed to Princeton in the fall, which is frankly unforgivable under the circumstances.
Then there are Belly’s real problems. We don’t yet know how her romance with Conrad played out, only that she is now no longer in contact with either brother, making her and Steven’s usual summer trip to Susannah’s beach house in Cousins Beach out of the question. At the root of all of Belly’s problems is that she is still mourning hard for Susannah. Sorry to Belly’s fortune cookie — which cheerily asserts that happiness is an activity — but this isn’t the kind of sadness a person can just will themselves out of. Not that Belly doesn’t give it a go.
Maybe what Belly really needs is to get out of the house, she thinks. Maybe Belly should actually go to this big graduation party with her best friend, Taylor. Could looking super-hot, flirting with that cute guy from class, and watching Taylor’s Machine Gun Kelly wannabe boyfriend make his debut performance be the thing to finally snap her out of her grief?
Alas.
Taylor thinks her boyfriend wrote “Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing,†the cute guy from class only wants her friend’s number, and Steven loudly calls her out for deciding to bail early and blames her for ruining his relationships with Conrad and Jeremiah. All Belly’s got going for her at this point is her ability to read The Hunger Games in French.
Interspersed with all of this bleakness are flashbacks to what happened after Belly and Conrad got together at the end of season one. The first thing that happens is that Jeremiah takes the news that Belly and Conrad are “already a ‘we’†terribly. Like “it’s not like my mom has cancer or anything†terribly. Belly, a person so in touch with her emotions she was moved by her brother’s middling commencement speech, feels incredibly guilty about this and so immediately calls things off with Conrad. Unfortunately for Jeremiah, Belly is also way too emotional a human being to allow this break to stick. Soon, Conrad is calling Belly from Brown for long talks about the minutiae and petty dramas of their respective daily lives, and we all know where that leads.
It’s morally acceptable to be an armchair psychiatrist if you’re only talking about fictional characters, right? Okay, great. So, remember when Belly told us in season one that Susannah always said Belly would end up with one of her boys? Well, that makes me wonder how much that prediction actually contributed to Belly’s lifelong crush on Conrad. And when it looked like Conrad wasn’t going to work out, was that part of the reason Belly was so ready to accept Jeremiah? And is that why Conrad and Jeremiah both have such an all-consuming focus on this one girl? And if any of that is at all true, you’d have to imagine that those feelings would be intensified after Susannah died, right? Like, Belly owes it to Susannah to marry one of her sons, and her sons both feel like they owe it to their mom to marry Belly. That would be kind of fucked, right? Luckily, I don’t think this is that kind of show.
While we all ponder that, let’s check in on the other people on this show. Steven seems fine, which is good. His relationship with what’s-her-face from last year has disappeared into the ether, so until he ships off to New Jersey in September, all he has by way of conflict is some truly pathetic pining over Taylor. So that’s one supporting character sorted. Laurel, mom to Belly and Steven and bestie to newly departed Susannah, is less fine. Our primary cipher for Laurel’s degree of fineness is her reluctance to promote her latest book, titled It’s Not Summer Without You. It’s a memoir about her friendship with Susannah and Susannah’s death, but Laurel is shirking book-tour duties because she doesn’t want to reduce her grief to a few blurb-worthy sound bites. To which I say, Lady, you are a writer of books. That’s the whole gig.
Anyway, for the past hour, we’ve been hearing Belly say that when Susannah died she didn’t just lose Susannah, she also lost Conrad and Jeremiah. It doesn’t occur to her until the final moments of “Love Lost†that, unlike their mom, Conrad and Jeremiah are not dead. They don’t have to be lost to her forever. So she calls …
Jeremiah. Who picks up! Yay!
Because Conrad is missing. Oh no.
Belly’s coming to help look for him! Yay!(?)
Emotional Gut Punches
• Never has a pop song been used in a film or TV show to better effect than Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License†here.
• Lola Tung’s delivery of the line, “I was in love, Steven! Like out of my mind in love!â€
• Laurel reading Susannah’s congratulations card for Steven.