The Summer I Turned Pretty Ended… Perfectly Messy (And That’s Kind Of Perfect)

There’s a version of me who wanted fireworks, a Cousins Beach wedding montage, and a Jenny Han epilogue ribboned into a neat bow. Instead,  The Summer I Turned Pretty finale gave us Paris, lots of panic, a Bollywood style sprint through a train station, and a kiss that felt like three seasons of yearning collapsing into one breath. As a card‑carrying TSITP stan and a professional nitpicker, here’s where I landed: the ending was imperfect, human, and, yes, pretty. Also: we need that movie next Wednesday!

Short answer: Belly goes to Paris to finally live a life that’s about her, not the Fisher family’s gravitational pull. Conrad turns up (because of course he does), and they play tourist, talk grown‑up truths, sleep together, then freak out about “forever.” Belly’s wobble feels very real, she is 22 after all, Conrad's buried in med school, and trauma doesn’t evaporate in one night just because the Eiffel Tower is glittering in the background. She sends him away… and then chooses herself and him by chasing him down on a train. Kiss, clarity, cut to a flash‑forward: future-summer Cousins, and Bonrad is a thing.

Was it rushed? Yes. Was it honest to the show’s DNA, romance as a coming‑of‑age instrument, also yes. The finale’s job wasn’t to punish Jeremiah or canonise Conrad; it was to show Belly picking love without abandoning herself. Mission mostly accomplished.

Conrad. It’s Bonrad endgame on screen (again), with the show remixing the books to let Belly make an adult choice after actually living a little. The Paris night isn’t just fan service; it corrects a long‑standing gripe that Belly’s desire was filtered through teenage nostalgia. Here, she initiates, apologises for prom, names her fear (that he loved her because of Susannah), and then crucially changes her mind with a renowned sense of agency. The train chase isn’t just about the teen rom-com dramatics; it’s Belly choosing the version of herself who can love Conrad without making him her personality.

Do I wish we’d sat in that reconciliation longer? Absolutely. The episode kept cutting to side quests, Jeremiah’s desire to become a part of The Bear, Steven and Taylor's San Francisco logistics, which muted the emotional crescendo. A penultimate “Paris” bottle episode and then a Cousins victory lap finale would’ve landed cleaner. Still, the choice is ever so clear to the fanwars, Belly and Conrad forever.

Not quite. Just when we thought it was all over, hours after the finale aired, Prime Video confirmed a TSITP movie. The “final chapter” promises to follow Belly’s journey through the final big milestone of her life, which, let’s be honest, feels like where the missing wedding, vows, and some unappreciated tension will live. Consider the series finale a door half‑closed, half‑held for the film to walk through.

Paris with a purpose. Finally, a location shoot that isn’t just a stock-image montage. Conrad was truly seeing Belly's Paris. Her friends, her budget birthday dinner, her questionable bob, it was the first time it felt like he was stepping into Belly’s world, not the other way around.

That sex scene. Let’s be real: it was hot as hell! Not 'cute teen drama' hot, more like global fanbase losing their minds hot. Tender, sensual, awkward, funny (“I have to pee, I don’t want a UTI”), but also genuinely steamy in a way that felt both earned and adult. That scene is going to live rent-free in fandom history forever.

The train speech. Yes, it was dramatic. Yes, I teared up. The line “in any reality, I’d choose you” hit like the kind of thing you’d scribble in a Notes app at 2 a.m. after three extra dirty gin martinis, and I mean that in the best way.

No Belly–Taylor goodbye. Three seasons of building that friendship into an actual love story of its own, and the finale gave us… nothing. Not even a classic FaceTime. For a show that usually takes platonic love seriously, it felt off-brand.

Jeremiah’s quick-fix growth arc. Suddenly, he cooks, suddenly he’s accountable, suddenly there’s a new love interest. It read less like character development and more like the writers saying, “fine, give the other brother something.”

Where was the Cousins crew? The flash-forward teased our beautiful endgame, but without Laurel, Steven, Taylor, even Adam and his champagne, the finale felt smaller than the story we’ve actually been living in.

TSITP has always been less about who Belly chooses and more about how she learns to choose at all. Season 3 finally lets her be a young twenty-something year old woman without life-altering punishment. She picks study abroad, makes a bad haircut look good, dates a nice Paris boy for a little bit (sorry, Benit-No), panics, grows into herself, and then literally runs toward the life she actually wants. The finale’s "imperfection" I guess then does become the point: love is not the fix to our problems; it’s the context where we practice being brave.

Call it perfectly messy. The romance lands, the pacing limps, the heart is intact. As a fan, I wanted ten more minutes in Paris of Bonrad and ten more reunions in Cousins. As a critic, I appreciate a show that refuses to treat marriage like an end-screen achievement. Let the movie give us the milestone; the series gave us the muscle.

Until then, rewatch the cab scene, text your first love, remind yourself that you're not getting bangs, and remember: sometimes the grown-up choice is letting yourself want the thing you’ve always wanted, without disappearing inside it.