Spoiler warning: Spoilers for the Season 2 finale of The Summer I Turned Pretty and We’ll Always Have Summer follow. To my fellow soldiers on Team Conrad: We fought hard. We fought valiantly. We stood behind our cause when the world (and Jenny Han’s published novels) told us we wouldn’t see the light at the end of the summer. No one can take that away from us. But now that the Season 2 finale is out, it’s time for us to accept the truth of who Belly ends up with in The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 2: Team Jeremiah has come out victorious.
Love triangles are tricky business, and no one knows this better than Belly Conklin. She’s been caught between Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher for two seasons, and in the Season 2 finale, she’s literally caught between them in a motel bed. Let’s backtrack a little to understand what made her roll over to Jeremiah’s side.
Episode 7 ends with Conrad catching Belly and Jere releasing a summer’s worth of underlying tension (read: making out) against his car. Episode 8 shows the fallout of playing seven minutes in heaven while wearing your ex’s sweater. Conrad is pissed (naturally) and spends the rest of the car ride acting bratty in the backseat. The tension between the three characters manifests itself as a thunderstorm so heavy that they’re forced to spend the night at a motel. Romance lovers should have guessed what would happen next when the motel receptionist said there was only one room available: the beloved one-bed trope.
Like the gentlemen they are, the Fisher boys sleep on opposite sides of the ground by the bed they offer to Belly. She spends a restless night torn between her head and her heart. Conrad makes the decision for her in the morning by taking back what he said to her on the beach the night of their house party (that he thought she knew how much he cared for her). “Exile” plays as Belly mentally decides to exile Conrad from her heart, which is probably the most melodramatic execution of a Taylor Swift song ever aired on TV.
What she doesn’t know is that Conrad doesn’t actually mean it. He only says so because after talking to Jeremiah by the motel vending machines, he realizes that he doesn’t want to stand in the way of either his brother’s or Belly’s happiness. Jeremiah made the same choice after Belly and Conrad kissed on the beach during last season’s finale. He’s been paying the price for it ever since — until now.
We may have lost the battle, Team Conrad, but we will not lose the war! Prime Video officially confirmed that TSITP is coming back for a third season, and if Season 3 follows the plot of the third Summer book, I think you’ll be very happy with Belly’s final choice. After proposing to Belly in an effort to prove his commitment to her (that reasoning alone is a red flag) in We’ll Always Have Summer, Jeremiah cancels their wedding because he realizes that Belly will always be in love with Conrad. He’s right, of course. The epilogue flashes forward a couple of years to Belly and Conrad’s wedding.
Keep your head up, soldiers. The fight’s not over yet.