After three seasons of frank exploration of modern relationships against the backdrop of media-saturated Los Angeles, Netflix's Judd Apatow-produced series Love Season 3 ReviewAlongside the most carefully nuanced exploration of love and impermanence of perceived happiness of Apatow's work has been the pair's professional lives. Gus is an on-set teacher for a teen drama trying (and repeatedly failing) to break into screenwriting, with often embarrassing professional results, while Mickey produces at a local radio station for a lustful "advice" "doctor". The end status for both jobs plays an essential role in the emotional state of the two characters come the series finale, although what we're really going to dive into is the couple's relationship - and their marriage's future.This Page: How Gus & Mickey Finally Found Happiness
How Gus & Mickey Finally Found Happiness
From the very start, Love made no illusions that Gus and Mickey were seriously flawed. She, obviously, represented a wholly hedonistic, selfish lifestyle, but his constant pleasing and inability to stand-up for himself was just as socially crippling. This, of course, made them unlikely romantic partners, but also provided key motivation to improve. The danger was the other trying too hard to interfere; Gus helped Mickey get and keep clean but often extended to be nagging, while Mickey helped boost Gus' confidence yet not without fuelling his introversion.
This all came to a head at Gus' parents, where a joke about their future revealed respective concerns about commitment and sobriety. Rather than splitting the pair up, it forces Gus to finally be honest about his repeated failures - including a humiliating email chain shared around half of Hollywood by Ridley Scott - to his family, and he and Mickey finally see eye-to-eye. As Mickey later says, they "crack the code" to their relationship: be open, be real, be there for each other, and work through anything.
This helps them find clarity in the rest of their lives. Mickey becomes a smart, work-driven producer for an up-and-coming sex advice star, while Gus' repeated efforts (at his girlfriend's ing) eventually lead to him getting a staff writer job on a new show (he turns his erotic thriller screenplay into a short film, a production that fractures friendships and goes disastrously, but in overstepping and getting his famous student to star brings attention to the screenplay). And this status quo brings us to the wedding...
Before The Wedding: Bertie's Love Triangle Is Essential
We'd be remiss to go deeper to the show's finale without putting some focus on Bertie (Claudia O'Doherty). Pretty much the third main character in the show, Mickey's Australian housemate begins as light emotional and comic relief (her hyper-awkward date with Gus remains a series highlight), but over the course of the show comes to embody a more frank, realistic romance conundrum.
She hooks up with Randy, one of Gus' neighbors, in Season 1, they begin dating in Season 2, and in Season 3 finds herself trapped and sleeping with another neighbor, Chris. The first flirtation between the secret couple leads to one of the best episodes of Love, a bottle episode following Bertie's Birthday and discovering the only person who has time for her, and their emotional-turned-physical affair dominates the rest of the series. Unemployed Randy is nice but conventionally unattractive, lazy and thoughtless, while stuntman Chris is simple yet well-meaning, caring and fun; the right choice is obvious, but the deciding complicated.
The resolution has Bertie breaking up with Randy, going to Gus and Mickey's wedding with Chris, only for Randy to start causing a scene before accepting the broken situation. In contrast to what's going on with the leads, this is messier and uncertain - and may be essential contrast to that wedding.
Gus And Mickey's Secret Wedding
As already established, at their peak of happiness, Gus and Mickey decide to elope to Catalina Island and get married. They invite all their understandably skeptical friends who each cast their own doubts, but move ahead anyway. That is until the ceremony is interrupted by a beach towel fight leading to a heart attack and the crowd dispersing. The almost-weds recognize the hands of fate and realize they're rushing things, deciding to take a foot off the gas and be content in their now-stable relationship.
Except they don't. As the unengagement party with their friends wears on, the couple sneaks out for a rearranged ceremony in private where they giddily tie the knot, ending the whole series with their laughing nuptials.
Love has, on the face of it, a happy ending. Our two main characters sort their lives out and find something they've never truly got elsewhere. They are closer to each other than any of their friends in the bar, or their numerous prior relationships, and are ready to live out the rest of their lives happily ever after. And, because the show chooses to end in this way, that is a completely legitimate reading: it can be argued that Love is just about two broken people rebuilding themselves.
However, we're talking a show that started with its disgruntled recent singletons throwing Blu-rays of misleading Hollywood rom-coms out of a moving car in a rejection of the relationship myths peddled by mainstream media: this ending lines up with what we were conditioned to be suspect of. There's a more complex situation at play here.
Will Gus and Mickey's Relationship Last?
As the credits play out, the question on every Love fans' mind is whether this resolution is real: will Gus and Mickey's relationship last? The show doesn't say - and doesn't for a reason - but aside from its established cynicism, there's enough to say the road will be tough.
Most of their friends don't have faith: Truman views it as a prank; Bertie and Chris think it's going too fast; Mickey only es Syd's three questions for marriage suitability on technicalities. That last point highlights the biggest problem here: everything is happening too soon. Gus and Mickey have known each other for less than a year by the time the series comes to a close, and things have rarely been stable during that time. They can't truly say they have "cracked the code" or if they've simply fallen into early love and that misguided belief their relationship is somehow better than everyone else's. Indeed, there's plenty of complications to come.
Crucially, Mickey never told Gus about Justin. At the end of Season 2, while he was away working on location for Arya's film Liberty Down, Mickey re-hooked up with her ex, much to Bertie's displeasure and the risk of her very-much-not-on-a-break relationship. This was resolved to a point when she chose Gus in the finale, but remained simmering under the surface early on in Season 3 as the lie she'd never told. And, despite Gus coming clean about his past engagement to Sarah, his embarrassment with Ridley Scott, and much, much more, Mickey kept Justin a complete secret right up to the wedding. That's a big lie, one that's just as potentially damaging as Bertie's affair even if Mickey made the opposite choice; it comes out and immediately destroys Gus, or remains hidden and gradually eats away at Mickey.
That's why Bertie's subplot is so important. It holds a mirror up to the optimistic ending and reminds of the messier side of love, the conflict of the emotional and physical, the empty holes left by dissatisfaction. Every happy moment in Love has been marred by its fleetingness, something's that's funny in the moment but builds up to create honesty. Bertie's with Chris now, but she does it it's very much sexual based, and we don't get much sense of where they go next. Is this just her story, or is it a reminder that, as Gus and Mickey ride off into the sunset, there will be a tomorrow to deal with?
Love's Ending Is About The Now
But that's as much as an inference as the straight-up happy reading; both come from the weight you bring to it. And that is, ultimately, what the ending is about: what you take from it.
There's a gamble to the decision at the end of Love's finale. Gus and Mickey believe they will work, yet can never know. This is an unpredictability that Season 3 has been prepping us for all along, most prominently with Mickey's discussion of relapse; it could happen in a week, a month, a year, or a decade without warning. That's something the couple had to learn about addiction, and is reflected in career progression - Gus got frustrated after not progressing enough after being in L.A. a mere three months, but now understands the waiting game - yet have the lessons been learned to truly apply to their relationship? Or have they bought into a myth of perfection?
And that debate is what the show's finale is truly about. Stripping every future concern away, the question at the center of Love's ending perhaps should be less of whether Gus and Mickey will last, but whether they believe it now.
