Summary
An unscheduled stop at a remote bed-and-breakfast only leads to further difficulties, as accidents happen and nobody can quite figure out what they want.
This recap of The End of the F***ing World season 2, episode 4 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.
In a quick montage to open the episode, in response to Alyssa asking Bonnie how long she’s been waiting for a ride, we see how Bonnie has been following the pair throughout everything we’ve seen so far — and also that she was the one who sent the bullets, although that should have been obvious anyway. Alyssa doesn’t respond well to quiet people, apparently, although historically she doesn’t respond well to anyone. Nevertheless, the car is forced to stop thanks to a flat tire, courtesy of Bonnie.
At her first opportunity, Bonnie is about to kill James, but she’s interrupted by Alyssa, who has spotted the tell-tale smoke of a house nearby. It turns out to be a remote bed-and-breakfast run by Gus (Tim Key), so Bonnie pays for two rooms — Alyssa justifies her and James sharing as better because it’s “cheaper”. She also claims to him it was the last room available, even though they all were.
Alyssa thinks Bonnie is “not right”, which is fitting coming from such a fan of irony, but she’s also right on the money — she’s in her room pointing her gun at the mirror. As an act of solidarity, though, James asks if she’d like to have a drink with them, and she accepts. This dynamic is awkward enough, to begin with, and only becomes more so when Gus offers to sit with them. Alyssa’s having none of that, though. “We’ll probably get stabbed in our beds now,” she says. “I probably deserve it.”
In a brief flashback, we see Alyssa leaving her wedding until we’re pulled back to the terribly awkward drinks with James and Bonnie. She promptly leaves, but while Bonnie seems keen to find the bottom of the bottle, James goes to check on Alyssa, who is sat in their room staring at the phone. She finally decides it’s time to take the dress off and sits misty-eyed in the bathroom, staring at it hanging from the back of the door. Sat in a dressing gown, she’s a little bit dismayed at the state of her honeymoon, while Bonnie continues to chin wine with Gus.
Alyssa asks James what happened to him after the beach. Whenever he refers to his dad he glances at the urn. Eventually, Alyssa announces she’d quite like to kiss him, and the conversation turns to sex, or at least James’s possible inability to have it anymore given his gunshot wound. He breaks down a little, and Alyssa hugs him. They kiss. Bonnie, meanwhile, returns to her room only to find that Gus has followed her there, becoming increasingly creepy until she pulls the gun on him. He gives his best sadsack routine, begging her to put the gun down, and she obliges — but when she does it falls off the dresser, going off when it hits the floor and blowing the top of Gus’s head off. The noise once again interrupts Alyssa and James’s romance. Maybe he’ll get there one day, but it won’t be today — Alyssa asks if he’ll sleep in the bathroom.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Bonnie has badly cut herself on the antler doorknob, passing out right on top of Gus’s corpse. As Alyssa narrates that everything might be “completely f*cked”, it’s hard to disagree with her.
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