Yahoo News The Bogus ‘Cruel Summer’ Season 2 Finale Was Beyond Disappointing
Cruel Summer’s first season was a hit for Freeform, the Disney-owned cable channel known for its teen-centric fare. And its record-setting viewership was well-deserved: The show’s central mystery, about several high school friendships gone wayward and leading to one girl’s kidnapping, was thrilling. Season 1 also boasted strong performances that anchored its high-concept storytelling—which followed the same set of characters at three different points of a mystery, slowly revealing key pieces of information—which could have easily flown off the rails.
Unfortunately, Season 2 was a runaway train car almost from the start, one that ultimately careened right off a cliff. Its tenth and final episode aired Monday night, wrapping up a mind-numbingly dull storyline with a disappointingly obvious “twist ending.” Season 2’s failure to capitalize on the show’s early goodwill—bolstered by Season 1’s own finale, which was legitimately shocking—wasn’t just disappointing. It was, at worst, embarrassing.
[Spoilers for Cruel Summer Season 2 follow.]
The conceit of Cruel Summer as an anthology series is admittedly convoluted. The show unravels a mystery non-linearly, with each episode showing parts of the story from a different point of time. Season 2 follows the doomed love triangle of Megan (Sadie Stanley), her best friend Isabella (Lexi Underwood), and Megan’s boyfriend Luke (Griffin Gluck). One third of each episode tells what happened in August 1999, another third recounts December 1999, and another third is set in August 2000. (These are demarcated with some garish cinematography, washing scenes set at different time periods in a corresponding color palette, all of them bleak and ugly to look at.) We’re left to fill in the gaps between those months, with the show suggesting they led to something terrible happening: Luke’s murder on Jan. 1, 2000.
The season built toward revealing who killed Luke, how, and why. By the finale, Isabella and Megan have been named as probable suspects, and the show provides plenty of motives. The girls learn that Luke leaked his own sex tape with Megan, which was outrageously shown at an event they, their friends, and their families attended; Isabella had taken the fall for it, rendering her a social pariah. Megan also learned that Luke and Isabella secretly hooked up, devastating her. And Megan’s preternatural computer-hacking skills led her on a trail toward uncovering the proof of what happened the night Luke died.
But due to poor writing and performances, it was always obvious who killed Luke. No, it wasn’t his slimy older brother Brent (Braeden De La Garza), even though the show briefly led us to believe it was. Brent found Luke on the docks outside the family’s cabin, where Isabella and Megan had tied him up and drugged him to teach him a lesson for two-timing them. Instead of helping him up, Brent secretly pushed his brother into the water.
A classic brotherly drowning would be too easy an ending for a show that prides itself on surprises; no one should have bought Brent as his brother’s killer. It certainly wasn’t Megan, either, despite the cops eventually arresting her on a well-placed tip.
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No, it was obvious that Isabella killed Luke from the start—as Megan learns in the final scene of the show, in which she reviews the security camera footage from the docks that she was able to retrieve through her vaguely defined, time period-inappropriate hacking skills. In the footage, it’s clear that Isabella finds and suffocates a still-breathing Luke, as he tries to climb onto shore. Megan is rightfully shocked, but to us viewers, it makes total sense. We had, after all, just seen Isabella on a plane to Ibiza, chatting it up with another girl her age and introducing herself as “Michelle.”
Not a scene went by without Isabella clearly coming off as a master manipulator, something the show eventually revealed her to be. While she arrived on Megan’s doorstep as a newcomer to town, who had moved at her parents’ behest, Isabella’s arched eyebrows and perpetual smile always hinted that this was a bald-faced lie. Eventually, we find out that Isabella had lied about her name and backstory—she actually moved to town to escape her own suspicious past, involving the death of a friend.
Isabella’s character always rang false, even without the lies—a failing of the show to make her believable. In the August 1999 timeline, she arrives as a conniving, thirsty, too-cool new girl whom Megan slowly warms to. By December 2000, Isabella and Megan are as close as sisters, character development that the show’s structure conveniently skipped over. But Underwood’s affectless performance meant that Isabella simply told us she cared deeply for Megan without ever convincingly showing us. This made it impossible to trust Isabella, especially as her tendencies became more duplicitous and outright vengeful in the later part of the show’s chronological story. Perhaps if the writing around her was more show and less tell—and the acting conveyed any reason to trust her—Cruel Summer could have properly kept its cards close to the vest.
This was a non-starter twist to begin with. But solving the mystery around Luke’s death hardly felt appealing either, making Cruel Summer Season 2 a slog of a watch. It didn’t help that both Isabella and Megan always failed to even feign concern over Luke’s death, let alone Luke himself—which is fair, since Luke was incredibly annoying from the start. In his defense, he was a teenage boy, and teenage boys are unilaterally annoying. The show never encouraged us to root for him, to mourn the demise we knew had come.
The only character who engendered any level of sympathy was Megan, having lost her childhood best friend-turned-boyfriend. Learning what led the ambitious blonde to the girl we met in August 2000—one with slicked-back hair, pierced eyebrow, and lack of emotion—was far more appealing than learning who killed Luke. (It helped that Stanley’s large, sad eyes conveyed more emotion than any of the characters’ dialogue did.) Those earlier portions of the story, in which we see her as a feisty tomboy opening herself up to relationships for the first time, had Cruel Summer painting Megan as the real victim. The Season 2 finale reinforced this by pinning Megan for a crime we know she didn’t commit, but the lackadaisical way in which it tied up both Megan’s and its own story felt like the writers and showrunners had fully given up.
Cruel Summer’s first season was the perfect summer must-watch: expertly plotted with a unique story that felt both true to its characters and subversive for its genre. (How many teen dramas involve a mentally ill man locking a pretty, popular teen girl in his basement, which leads to another girl stealing her entire life?) Season 2, on the other hand, never elevated its love triangle into something compelling on any front. And to end on such an eye-rolling, obvious final note is the kind of cruelty that would only hurt if Season 2 were ever emotionally engaging in the first place. Alas: It’s time to put summer to bed, and perhaps for good.
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