Summary
It’s tonally all over the place, but the finale of Summer of 36 does a semi-decent job of wrapping things up in a satisfying way.
With Summer of 36 having already bogged itself down in a lot of competing subplots and ideas, the finale finds itself in a tough spot. And, frankly, if you were looking for a coherent and satisfying ending that justified the bumpy journey to get here, then Episode 6 is probably going to leave you a little disappointed. Sure, most of the loose ends are tied up, and we find out who killed Jacquart and Edgar, and more importantly why, but there’s still a fair amount of tonal whiplash to suffer through on the way there.
Still, it’s important to answer the big questions and try to unpack some deeper meaning, even if there is none, so let’s just go ahead and do that.
Who Killed Jacquart?
First, the big question. This is the inciting event, the main dramatic predicament that keeps Blanche, Eugenie, Giulia, and Leonie occupied throughout the season. Naturally, none of them is the perpetrator, despite endless allusions to it. Their relationships to the victim were, of course, rather complicated, but this was a complicated guy, and there was no shortage of people who wanted to see him dead.
The truth is that Anne-Marie killed Jacquart. It was a revenge ploy. Back in the day, Jacquart had killed her son in a hit-and-run that he covered up to protect his reputation. It was an accident, but his response to the tragedy was very deliberate, and Anne-Marie never got over it.
Even years later, having been confronted, Jacquart tried to pay Anne-Marie off to keep things quiet. He never understood the human element, the profound sense of loss and guilt underpinning Anne-Marie’s crusade. In her horror at Jacquart’s inability to feel any of the things she had felt so strongly for so long, she stabbed him with a letter opener.
Who Killed Edgar?
Edgar, the second demise, is a little more complicated. He’s killed because of Anne-Marie, since he was a witness to her crime, but he’s not killed by Anne-Marie. In large part, he brings about his own demise.
However, it’s Anne-Marie’s sister, Marthe, who delivers the final blow to Edgar by poisoning him with arsenic, since he was attempting to blackmail Anne-Marie.
The Law Applies to All
The most daring element of the ending of Summer of 36 is that Anne-Marie and Marthe become a means by which justice can be done to someone who deserves it and who, otherwise, thanks to connections and power and privilege, wouldn’t be subject to its whims. Raoul is a guilty man on every level, and he’s the worst kind of guilty man – one who’s more than likely to get away with it.
Not if Blanche, Eugénie, Giulia, and Léonie have anything to say about it, though. They realise that they can frame Raoul for what happened to Jacquart and Edgar, and Commissioner Raven, despite having put the real pieces together, allows him to take the fall. He’s a bad guy who would never face accountability otherwise, so the moral scale remains balanced, more or less.
All’s Well That Ends Well
Outcomes for the leading quartet are largely positive. Eugenie takes over the family factory with her husband; Blanche leaves for New York with Edouard; Giulia continues to work at the hotel while waiting for Joseph to return from Spain, and Leonie, after getting her father exonerated, opens a detective agency, partnering up with Madeleine.
There’s a brief moment, as the characters watch the fireworks together at the end of the episode, where they consider whether what they did was right, but it clearly isn’t a complex moral quandary. Raoul was truly the Big Bad in that he was the most morally abject at his core, and the one most inured from traditional justice. He would have never been held to account for the things he did, so nabbing him on something he didn’t do can be justified easily enough.
Of course, mileage may vary in that regard. Two wrongs might not make a right, but then again, what’s the point in having a justice system if it doesn’t apply to those with the connections to evade it? Summer of 36 isn’t written well enough to truly answer these questions, but the fact that it raises them is worth a backhanded compliment in my book.
