How Love Story Finale Handles JFK Jr and Carolyn’s Plane Crash Deaths

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the finale of FX’s “Love Story.”

We get a glimpse of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in the final moments of the finale of “Love Story.” But it’s only in memory. The pair are shown on a Massachusetts beach, living the life they might have had fate not intervened. 

Fans of the FX series recounting the story of the presidential heir and his fashion-publicist bride have wondered from the first moments of the premiere of “Love Story” how we’d get to its inevitable endpoint. The show begins with a flash-forward to an argument on the tarmac ahead of the real-life 1999 flight to Martha’s Vineyard that killed John, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister Lauren; it then backtracks to show the blossoming of John and Carolyn’s relationship, their wedding and their eventual coming to loggerheads over disputes about how much publicity their marriage could withstand.

Their passing is treated with no small amount of sensitivity. We arrive at that tarmac once more, but we first walk through their final month or so. We learn that their marriage counselor had recommended taking a trial separation. They’d been fighting a lot — Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon) had told John (Paul Anthony Kelly) that “I cannot be the third person in my marriage,” behind the spectre of the media, or the Kennedy mythos. But the notion of splitting even for a month came as a shock to the system: These two may have come to loathe one another, but they could never go no-contact. 

This startling advice has short-term consequences (they slept together, as if to prove a point) and somewhat longer-range ones: Carolyn, imprisoned within the Tribeca loft for fear of paparazzi invasiveness, eventually attends a George magazine party because she understands it’s important to her husband. After months in self-imposed exile, fearing the camera’s lenses and the press’ criticism, she makes the choice to smile. After that, John, craving outside validation, takes Carolyn to a super-secret dinner at their little Indian spot, and promises to re-examine his life to make room for her. He’s even willing to skip a cousin’s wedding, but she insists. “I miss dancing with you,” she declares on the walk home. 

Which brings the audience to the tarmac. The first-episode fight, over a perceived delay by Carolyn as she changed the color of her nails and over John’s not engaging his flight instructor for the short trip, is elided with a fade to white. When we fade in, Carolyn is reading the Irish playwright Brian Friel’s “Lovers” alongside her sister Lauren (Sydney Lemmon), as John flies solo. Bored or stirred-up or having some kind of premonition, Carolyn asks her pilot “Permission to enter the cockpit?” Granted that permission, she dons headphones. 

“I missed you,” John says. “I had a feeling,” Carolyn replies. It’s the full-on reconciliation the show has been making viewers wait for — and it comes just as John, piloting toward what he thinks is the horizon, suddenly loses his sense of it. He urges Carolyn to go back to her seat, but she refuses, staying by his side as dials spin and light his face red. “It’s OK, just breathe. John, just breathe. Just breathe.” As he looks confounded by the moment his destiny and choices have placed him in, she looks serene.

The remainder of the finale deals with the aftermath of the deaths of John, Carolyn and Lauren — particularly the grief of John’s sister Caroline Kennedy (Grace Gummer) and Carolyn and Lauren’s mother Ann Messina Freeman (Constance Zimmer). Freeman and the Kennedy family battle at first through Kennedy proxy, Caroline’s husband Ed Schlossberg (Ben Shenkman), over where the three might be allowed to be buried; an impromptu meeting between Caroline and Ann, both visiting the star-crossed couple’s loft, allows for a moment of détente, a relaxing of tensions, and an agreement that all three plane passengers might be buried at sea. We hear Ann reading, first, Henry Scott-Holland’s “Death Is Nothing at All” and then Clare Harner’s “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep,” at a highly negotiated funeral service, then see the scattering of ashes, then a moment of that which might have been: John and Carolyn, entirely alone, embracing on a sand dune, happy in the company of no one, and no mediating force, but one another.