Summary
“Love” is a powerful and cathartic ending that will undoubtedly pull on your heartstrings.
Hulu’s original Tiny Beautiful Things concludes with episode eight, “Love.”
In the season finale, Clare (Kathryn Hahn) confronts her abusive father after many years of silence. While in flashbacks, a younger Clare tries to find her brother Lucas (Owen Painter), so the siblings can say goodbye to their dying mother together. It’s an emotional ending that brings fitting closure to the series.
Tiny Beautiful Things Season 1 Episode 8 Recap
In the opening moments, Clare relegates to the basement once again after her husband, Danny, decided to end their relationship for good. This decision was inspired by an advice column called Dear Sugar. Ironically, Clare is the one who writes this anonymous column. In her latest email, she asks when is the right time to declare your love to someone?
While Clare ponders an answer, Rae drops a bombshell of her own on her mother. Clare’s father was the one who handed her the check, returning all of the money that Clare had initially stolen from Rae’s college fund. Clare goes into panic mode, trying to reach Lucas.
She calls his house, which is also their childhood home, and their father answers the phone.
READ: Who plays Clare’s mother in Tiny Beautiful Things?
She asks Rae to drive her to this childhood home. Once there, Clare starts to dig up her mother’s grave, possibly hoping to move her ashes away from her father now that he has returned on the scene. Lucas and her father find her digging in the dark and confront Clare.
Why does Clare hate her father?
Clare realizes that Lucas has accepted their abusive father back into his life. Lucas admits that his dad has changed, is sober now, and helped save the childhood home from being foreclosed. Clare can’t believe that Lucas has forgiven him after all the emotional and physical abuse he put their mother through.
On top of all that, the father now owns their precious home.
In flashbacks, we see Clare’s mother, Frankie, confined to a hospital bed. Her cancer has worsened, and the doctors say she only has two weeks left to live.
Panicked, Clare decides to hunt down her wayward brother so they can say goodbye to their mother together. As Clare leaves, Frankie musters the strength to say ‘love’ but is too weak to manage the other words.
Clare hunts high and low for Lucas, who is emotionally unstable. Once she’s finally tracked him down, they agree to head to the hospital in the morning. This is unfortunately too late, though; Frankie has already passed away. Clare is heartbroken she missed her only chance to say goodbye, something she holds over her brother from this day forward.
Why does Clare blame Lucas?
Back in the present, Clare brings up this salient fact and adds that Lucas has also ruined her marriage too. She gave Lucas her daughter’s college fund to help him pay rent, and that one act has ended up destroying her entire relationship. Lucas argues back, stating that it was Clare’s choice to leave their mother and to find him, and then it was her choice to hand over the college money. Clare is blaming others for her own actions.
Feeling unstable herself, Clare decides to leave. She tells her father that the house isn’t his, and then she threatens him that if he hurts Lucas again, she’ll kill him. Back in the car, Rae confesses, she was the one who told Lucas about her college fund in the first place, she blames herself for starting all this chaos. Clare comforts her daughter, believing that she only did all that out of love.
How does Clare reconnect with Rae?
Clare replies to the latest Dear Sugar letter, advising the emailer that they should always focus on love and that you should do everything for love. We then see further flashbacks of Clare and Lucas spreading their mother’s ashes.
And in the present, Clare takes Rae to a field filled with horses, reliving one of her favorite childhood memories. This helps to repair Clare’s broken bond with her daughter.
Tiny Beautiful Things Season 1 Ending Explained
In one of the final scenes, Danny returns to the therapist’s office, after hours. The showrunners never really clarified if Danny was having an affair with therapist Mel, and here we don’t get any conclusive evidence to support the accusation either, but it is heavily implied that they are both overstepping their boundaries at the very least.
Then in the final moments, Clare dreams of finally getting the chance to say goodbye to her mother. It’s a cathartic and powerful end. Clare’s whole existence was shaped by her past regrets, but now she feels mentally prepared to finally say goodbye and ready to let that part of her life go. Hopefully, Clare can now move forward with her life, proud of the successes in her writing and her reconnection with Rae.
What did you think of Tiny Beautiful Things Season 1 Episode 8 and the Ending? Comment below.
The series was amazing, and I really enjoyed it. I was thrown off by the ending though, which led me down a rabbit hole of reviews trying desperately to find out about the possibility of future episodes.
One after the other review only writing of the book adaptation, the association with Reese, and Laura, and showing the same trailers with no mention of any further episodes! Then As luck would have it, I found this article you wrote explaining the ending of the finale episode. I had to read the title twice to be sure my eyes weren’t fooling me. As relief set it, my feelings of desperation subsided and I began to calm down. As I went through the details of the finale episode with you, I began to understand why it ended the way it did.
I guess as a 50 something year old woman myself who has a rocky relationship with my only child, who’s mother died when I was much younger when I wasn’t in the room, and who’s marriages broke up, the last one in the therapist’s office too, I guess I really just wanted to see what happened next. Because I myself am living it to find out.
I know one thing though, as a horse lover and one who has literally been dreaming the last few days about finding a place where I could connect once again with a horse where I live now, I will not only dream of cleaning out the stall, and smelling the new fresh bedding of hay, I will be dreaming of being in the middle of their field in the middle of the night surrounded by a handful of those magestic creatures and lying next to my mother on a blanket.
She had been lucky enough to acctually have a beautiful palimino horse herself. His name was Pablo. I’m sure he’ll be there in my dreams too. Thank you again so much for your explanation of the ending of this heartfelt story, beautifully told, and exquisitely performed.