In Its Season 2 Finale, UnREAL Builds A House Of Cards And Then Drives An Ostentatious Car Through It

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about the rise of "Bonkers TV" -- shows that build buzz with increasingly shocking shocks that, almost without exception, they can't sustain. In its first season, UnREAL had lots of bonkers elements baked in: a couple of probable sociopaths for protagonists; a setting in which characters are encouraged to give voice to their very worst selves; the continual betrayals that arise from constantly shifting alliances and motivations. But what made it transcend those attributes for me was that it showed that a "women's space" can be a pit of vipers, far more vicious even than the one on Orange Is The New Black -- that women could be TV antiheroes just as terrifying and compelling as men. (Women, of course, have always known this, but we haven't seen this truth portrayed on TV much.) A certain kind of snooty viewer could love it twice as much much for being both a dark drama and a satire of the junky genre of reality dating shows, which I assume is how that first season won a Peabody Award. But at the end of UnREAL's second season, I wonder if it will have to give that Peabody back.

Looking back, it's so easy to see all the ways the drama was cranked up, but my love for that first season blinded me to them. Rachel had moved up the chain of command (for a while), with the potential for a mental breakdown. The Suitor was black, with the potential for racist treatment from producers and bachelorettes alike. Chet and Quinn were at war, with the potential to blow up the production (which occurred right away, in the season premiere). Rachel's ambition (and, on some level, her real love for Everlasting and desire to keep it on track) motivated her to overstep her bounds and tattle to the network; the consequence was that a hotshot new media guy was brought in above her, with the potential to derail the season due to his ignorance of what actually makes Everlasting so addictive to its fans. So much potential; so little of it realized.

The frustration of watching this season, for me, was that I could feel how much Rachel and Quinn kept straining to break out of the story cul-de-sacs they kept getting stuck in and find their way back to each other. No one thought Coleman and Rachel were endgame (and we certainly thought it even less after Adam came back). No one thought Quinn was going to start a new life with Booth. And any time Quinn or Rachel was part of a plot to try to destroy the other, I just didn't buy it! Is their relationship toxic? Yes! That's the point of the show! But no matter how they fight, each one's desire to remain at the center of the other's life is her greatest motivation. Quinn and Rachel are one another's best professional partners and closest friends. Quinn is the tiger mother Rachel actually needs, and Rachel the non-biological daughter Quinn has spent years raising in her own image (proving the case for nurture over nature). At least every man who's tried to divide them this season -- nearly, at least; Booth and his billions are probably fine -- has met a bad end. Jeremy beat up Rachel on Quinn's set...

...and got his testicles crushed. And so did Coleman! But we'll get to him.

A corollary to the muddle of Rachel and Quinn's relationship is Rachel's motivation to stay on Everlasting. In the first season, it was blackmail over the charges that resulted when she stole a car; I guess that's probably still in the mix, but it's been a long time since it was dangled over her head. All the lip service she paid to how important it is for the cause of representation to have a black Suitor was pretty much erased when she made trigger-happy cops part of her production. (And by the way, Romeo's suddenly back in the finale and totally fine? With no detail on what actually happened to him? I never thought he was actually dead, but I didn't think he'd return just to glare at Rachel -- which he's certainly entitled to do -- and to whisper venal advice to his supposed best friend about marrying strategically. If part of the point of doing what The Bachelor hasn't -- casting a black Bachelor -- was to give three dimensions to a non-white lead, UnREAL's treatment of Romeo is practically as offensive as any of the tokenism I've seen from Bachelor Nation.)

Belatedly, Rachel decides to do something kind and decent for Darius by bringing Ruby back and giving him the chance to choose her on live TV -- and I'm not even going to get into the preposterousness of the way this show portrays Everlasting's shooting and air schedule, but only because there's been so much else to complain about, not because I haven't noticed. It's one of a very few instances where Rachel has done something that's unequivocally the correct moral choice. But is it because she really wants the best for Darius, or because she wants the best for Ruby, or because she wants an exciting live TV moment, or because she doesn't want Darius to hate her, or because she thinks she's imminently going to be arrested for her part in Mary's death and wants to do one admirable thing before she goes to Orange Is The New Black? I don't know if I would have preferred it if Rachel had been given a monologue in which she stated that she's ride or die for Quinn, though I do think that's the case. But her motivations for staying on Everlasting are different from episode to episode. I'm sure that's literally true for someone, like UnREAL series creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who works on The Bachelor. But UnREAL needs to do a better job of dramatizing what Rachel ultimately wants. In the Season 2 premiere, I thought I knew; but other than "money. dick. power," what is driving her? She is an addict and the show her drug. She doesn't believe she deserves anything better. We get it. At what point does Rachel cross over from being a complex character to the embodiment of a snarled length of Christmas lights?

Because...you know, Rachel believes she is responsible for a woman's death. Mary's producer-assisted suicide was a primal event last season; arguably, Rachel's reaction in the immediate aftermath was moral if not ethical, under the circumstances. But her part in the cover-up continues to haunt her through this season, to the degree that the first thing she did when her mental defenses were pharmaceutically lowered was confess. Does she want to keep being part of the machine that killed Mary? Or does she want to pay the debt she thinks she owes society and let the truth come out?

And would the viewer be more inclined for the latter to come to pass if its instruments weren't Coleman and Yael? BECAUSE JESUS. I feel like we were all agreed that Coleman was irredeemable -- far worse than Rachel -- even before it came out in the finale that his big, fancy documentary filmmaking credit was a fraud. And even before we saw that he took Rachel's confidence about her childhood sexual assault and told it to his sidepiece. Maybe the way Coleman and Yael were both sneering about this extremely serious trauma in Rachel's preadolescence is because Jeremy -- the domestic abuser -- had to look more sympathetic than they did by comparison. But the way Rachel's rape has been cheapened as barely more than a plot point -- just more proof that she's "broken" -- is yet another way this second season has been a disappointment. (In "Fugitive," I got the impression from the way she talked to Olive that Quinn already knew about the rape, but the finale made it seem like she didn't, and now I wish even more that Quinn had been the one Rachel had told, because the Quinn we've come to know would have had Olive killed FOR SURE, if not actually done it herself, with her bare hands.)

But I digress: plot contrivance brings Jeremy back to the set, and plot contrivance makes him the least of three evils, as his learning about this pivotal moment in Rachel's life changes her in his eyes. No longer does he want to be on Coleman and Yael's side, and when Rachel says of them, "They're like this bomb that knows every single thing that we've ever done"...

...he figures out how to detonate it. The news report we see doesn't confirm that Coleman and Yael are dead, though, so -- this being Bonkers TV -- we should probably assume they're alive and will return with brand-new, different perfect faces.

I spent so much of this season disappointed by where it was going and what it was leaving out. But I actually thought last week's episode was setting up a redemptive finale. I know a lot of viewers were turned off by Yael's food poisoning punishment and felt it just made it explicitly clear that UnREAL had literally become a shitshow. But I felt like this was exactly what someone in Rachel's position -- someone with access to food, the suspicion that the person about to eat it had been cheating with her boyfriend, and the resources to humiliate her rival on national television -- would do. It's hardly a classy move, but -- again -- last season Rachel helped cover up a woman's death. And I was quietly gratified when the proof that a reality dating show pants-shitting was not an outlandish notion came in Bachelor In Paradise's Season 3 premiere the very next night. Poo aside, the episode closed with Rachel and Quinn setting aside the various attacks they'd made on one another throughout the season and resolving to work together against Coleman. (I was about to add "as they should have been doing all season," except that if they had, he would have been dispatched in twenty minutes.) So you can imagine my horror when the closing shot recalled last season's finale...

...except with these two other choads no one wanted -- including Shapiro herself, in the case of Jeremy -- LITERALLY getting between Rachel and Quinn. Who admits a Jeremy to the cone of silence? When Jeremy gets in there, the cone is burnt. He's ruined the cone. It's his cone now. Get a new cone and don't tell him where it is.

Mary's death was a crisis with far-reaching effects. Coleman and Yael's (probable) deaths are of no concern at all to Chet; Jeremy's body language doesn't exactly broadcast distress either. Mary had pre-existing problems that Everlasting made worse, but Coleman and Yael didn't bring their (likely) deaths upon themselves except with their willingness to risk their own credibility to tell Mary's story -- and by being shitty about Rachel's rape behind her back. And if they're dead, it's to preserve the people at the top of a corrupt institution -- which makes UnREAL essentially equivalent to the current worst offender in the Bonkers TV pantheon: House Of Cards. There is still a chance that UnREAL could course-correct: Friday Night Lights is a VERY different kind of show, but it came back from a really poorly conceived second season. If not, I'll probably keep watching UnREAL. I'll just watch it like it's House Of Cards: assuming literally anything could happen; rooting for no one.