Summary
Good American Family doesn’t deliver the fairest ending, but it does provide an odd sense of justice for Natalia and a damning indictment of the Barnetts — especially Kristine — and the legal system.
If you’re looking for justice, especially the typical TV version of the concept, you’re not going to get it from the finale of Good American Family. There are no A Few Good Men-style courtroom outbursts or triumphant, fist-pumping guilty verdicts. If you know the true story of Natalia Grace, you surely weren’t expecting a happy ending. But Episode 8, “Blood on Her Hands”, still puts you through the wringer, highlighting the gross deficiencies of the American legal system and portraying the Barnetts, though undeniably Kristine particularly, as true monsters.
And yet what you come away with, ultimately, is a sense of triumph. Natalia’s story has, after all, been told. The truth did eventually emerge. The Hulu series always boasted about providing a balanced perspective, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily accurate. The first four episodes were a fakeout. Given everything we now know and how this dramatization ultimately shook out, the only two sides of this story are right and wrong. And we know where everyone stands.
Natalia Is All Grown Up
The penultimate episode ended with Natalia on the Dr. Phil show, and that’s where the finale picks things up. She’s 16 at the time, and Imogen Faith Reid has done an excellent job of ageing up her performance. She’s great throughout this episode, although you won’t always be very fond of her.
Most of the finale takes place three years after that appearance, in 2022, right on the cusp of Michael’s trial, which is a key matter since if the charges against him don’t stick, the charges against Kristine won’t either. Natalia is “grown up”, both in terms of her age and her demeanour. She still exhibits some characteristics that stem from her experiences — such as a near-obsession with Kristine’s public appearances and the progression of the case — but mostly just wants to have her say and let the world know what happened to her.
But that’s easier said than done. A key theme here is the idea of there being two courts that need convincing — the court of law and the court of public opinion. The Barnetts, thanks to Kristine’s public work with children, control the second already. Natalia is relying on the former.
Kristine’s Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost
The Barnetts are on the back foot, legally speaking. The more time elapses, the more damning the case becomes. Natalia has oodles of evidence and multiple witnesses prepared to testify on her behalf, many of them former acquaintances of Kristine’s whom she alienated for one reason or another. It seems like nobody is prepared to vouch for the Barnett family.
Their situation is only exacerbated when, at Natalia’s urging, the state subpoenas Kristine and Michael’s Facebook messages, which contain tons of damning exchanges, even cavalier use of the “M-word”. It’s a major development just a day before the trial commences, leaving Kristine and Michael’s legal team to freestyle a viable counter-argument.
But the general sentiment is very negative. As a result, Michael’s lawyer, Terrence, privately floats a nuclear option to him. If he’s found guilty, he may well be offered immunity to testify against Kristine. The state wants her more than it wants him, since she’s the more noteworthy public figure. But can Michael do it?
Let the Gaslighting Commence
Since Kristine believes that if the charges against Michael are dropped, the ones levied at her won’t stick either, so she knows that she needs to play the doting ex-wife to steer things in her favor. Before that, though, she tries to convince Val to perjure herself by claiming to have seen Natalia’s various violent outbursts (which she never did.)
Kristine then targets Michael, taking him home on the pretext of going over the Facebook documents together and then immediately gaslighting him and making sexual advances. It’s also implied — though not confirmed — that she deliberately pretends the boys aren’t home so that Michael runs into them, letting him buy into the family dynamic they once had. Because Michael’s so spineless and needy, Kristine can play him like a fiddle.
Luckily, Terrence calls with even more bad news when the family is out to dinner. Natalia’s birth mother back in Ukraine has come forward with information, including documents that prove Natalia was a child when the Barnetts adopted her. It’s looking more and more likely that Michael will be found guilty, and thus more and more likely that Michael will have to testify against Kristine. He confirms he will.
Dule Hill, Imogen Faith Reid, and Christina Hendricks in Good American Family | Image via Hulu
A Broken System
The trial is a fiasco and terribly frustrating to watch. Good American Family Episode 8 deliberately frames the whole thing so that the audience becomes powerless, denied the satisfaction of Natalia’s legal team being allowed to present the compelling evidence they have in spades. Because the state never officially appealed the re-aging, any charges relating to Natalia’s age, which is basically all of them, are off the table. Every witness is shut down by Terrence’s ceaseless objections. Even Natalia herself is forced to say on the stand that she was born in 1989.
Again, for anyone who knows the story, none of this is a surprise. But it’s painful to watch. And most crushingly of all, Natalia blames Cynthia for the verdict. When Michael is cleared of all charges, she lashes out at Cynthia for refusing to appeal, even though she was trying to protect Natalia by not putting her through that stress. (Or was she? A postscript reveals that since the show was filmed, charges of abuse have been leveled at Cynthia and Antwon Mans. They deny them.)
A Different Kind of Justice
Kristine, naturally, is very smug about the verdict. But she has lost the court of public opinion. She’s getting hammered online. Even Val turns on her. Given how much older Natalia looked on the stand, and how all the witnesses corroborated her story with nobody to support Kristine’s, the writing is on the wall.
Kristine takes her usual gaslighting approach. She leaves Val’s place with Jacob (even subtle notes, like the fact that she tells Jacob not to tell his brothers that she prefers it when it’s just him and her, lend credence to the idea that Kristine’s a psycho) and sets out for Michael’s. On the way, Jacob tells her that he remembers what she did to Natalia.
When Kristine and Jacob arrive at Michael’s, they find Natalia there. She had visited him in the hopes of being given some kind of explanation for what he did, but the simple answer is that he was a coward. Jacob apologizes to Natalia for not helping her and says that Kristine made them scared of her. But she was just a kid. So was he. Michael asks Jacob if he’d like to stay, and he does. Kristine is left alone, her only remaining ally the mother she can’t stand.
Is this justice? Of a kind, perhaps. When Natalia gets home, her siblings show her all the positive comments and support she’s getting online, and she can’t help but smile. In many ways, she got what she wanted. The truth was told. As if to confirm this, we learn after the episode that in 2024, Natalia received a U.S. passport restoring her original birthdate of September 4, 2003.
Kristine still maintains her innocence.
