Summary
Alyssa’s big day takes a funny turn, and a last-minute development makes matters even more complicated.
This recap of The End of the F***ing World season 2, episode 3 contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
You can check out our thoughts on the previous season by clicking these ones.
We pick up where we left off, with Alyssa and James face to face for the first time in ages. “My heart’s beating in my face,” Alyssa claims. Quite. Needless to say, the reunion is rather awkward. James admits to following her, but also provides the bullet. “Don’t you think it’s a bit sinister?” is quite an understatement. Alyssa tries to play the whole thing down, including how she feels about seeing James again, but she isn’t fooling anyone.
Anyway, in the meantime, James is stranded until his car is repaired. Leigh invites him to stay the night in the cabin, but Alyssa wants his assurance he’ll leave the next day, saying he shouldn’t have come here. Hardly the romantic reunion we were expecting, but, again, it’s obvious neither of them is being particularly honest about how they feel. On the eve of her wedding, Alyssa feels, in her own words, “Weird. Really weird.”
Alyssa equates her wedding to being “like a pony at a show”. She has doubts but reckons they’re normal, and her mother is so happy about the situation that it’d be quite a blow to express them. The ceremony is the first she’s hearing about Todd’s middle name being Allen. Nevertheless, James’s car is repaired, and he leaves, so it looks like the expected interruption isn’t going to happen until he finds Alyssa, still in her wedding dress, stood in the middle of the road. “Let’s get out of here, she says.” Well, why not?
“How was the wedding?” James asks, “Yeah, it was fine.” The height of romance, ladies and gentlemen. They immediately start bickering about the smell of the car, and where they’re going, and what James is going to do with his father’s ashes. James reckons Alyssa is different, like someone took her batteries out, which is a fair observation. He apologizes for the letter he sent and she claims not to remember what it said, as in voiceover she recites it word for word. There’s obviously a lot of baggage that still needs to be unpacked here, and neither of them can bring themselves to say how they really feel. Alyssa suggests going back, at which point she reveals that she actually went through with the wedding. At this point, James’s car gets towed with his dad’s ashes still in the back.
It’ll cost £400 plus VAT to get the car back, which neither of them has, obviously, and James isn’t even allowed to get his dad’s ashes out of the back. Alyssa suggests breaking in later, giving them time to chat a little more. They camp out on a pair of abandoned car seats on a hill overlooking the yard. When Alyssa falls asleep James lovingly tucks her in and is right on the cusp of telling her he loves her, but it’s time to get the car back.
The escape is a success, but they’re still a little directionless. That might change, though, when they pick up a hitchhiker — who just so happens to be Bonnie. Uh-oh.
Thanks for reading our recap of The End of the F***ing World season 2, episode 3.
