In season one, Platonic was an enjoyable little sitcom that nonetheless faded from my memory pretty quickly. But something was different about season two from the beginning, and I still haven’t totally figured out what it is. There’s just something clicking this time around — the characters and their dynamics are more lived-in and distinct, and the storylines themselves feel more engaging and thoughtful without ever fundamentally altering the tone.
That’s truer than ever in “Brett Coyote’s Last Stand,” which manages to efficiently wrap up several different season-long arcs in its slightly supersize 40-minute run time. At the beginning of this finale, the two main pairings (Will-Sylvia and Sylvia-Charlie) are both at odds in appropriate low-key ways. There’s no serious threat of Sylvia and Charlie getting divorced, for example — I don’t think that idea ever occurred to either of them this season, and I don’t think Platonic ever really wanted us to fear that. But there is a natural strain in the marriage from these built-up resentments and the lack of communication between them. That gives the story stakes while letting it maintain its breezy feel.
The episode begins by patiently establishing this new normal, with Sylvia landing big gigs that require her to travel almost nonstop. She’s the breadwinner of the family now, as Katie points out on her podcast, and it does feel validating for her to be working again. But she’s clearly lonely and misses her family. And Charlie isn’t exactly happy either, even with the freedom to devote most of his time to Brett Coyote. He has writer’s block, and nonstop time at home means too much time to get distracted by masturbation.
Charlie’s lunch with Stewart is a very necessary scene. For one, hanging out with an employed friend helps Charlie realize he doesn’t love being at home all the time; he actually might want to return to work full-time and turn writing into a hobby for nights and weekends. But it also gives Stewart an opportunity to acknowledge how weird it was that Charlie announced his retirement so abruptly. When Charlie explains that Sylvia was frustrated he didn’t consult her before quitting, he seems to understand he was in the wrong there.
Sylvia and Charlie patch things up in a sweet scene where they drop off their 2012 Honda minivan at the dealership. Both of them speak about how they feel and really listen to each other this time: Charlie feels like his writing is “masturbatory,” but she encourages him to keep writing, having finally read his book. It’s nice to see her genuinely support his unconventional path here, volunteering to take on the “rock” role after all the years he supported her. But it’s even nicer to see him clarify that she has always been his rock.
I struggled to like Charlie at certain points this season, but his story resolves in a satisfying way, with a reading where his friends and family treat him like a celebrity author despite the cheap spiral-bound look of the self-published Mediation Season. Maybe writing doesn’t need to be his true career path after all. Just hearing one kid refer to him as “a real author” almost gets him choked up.
Part of Charlie’s arc is about learning to make peace with what he has and maybe tame his unrealistic ambitions a bit. It’s common for a guy in his position to start questioning his career path, not because he’s unhappy with how things have gone, but because life is flying by and it’s hard not to think about all those hours spent at the office. Will is also thinking more about what he really wants out of life these days, but he’s going in a different direction, dedicating himself to making his bar dreams a reality.
To be fair, Will is Will, and he’s never going to shrug off his slacker tendencies entirely. Aside from the pop-up he’s planning, he doesn’t have much going on, which means he’s in Katie’s hair all the time. She only manages to shake him off and get him to crash somewhere else by having sex with him, then bringing up her clinginess and daddy issues. I wasn’t sure if the show would take these two in a romantic direction, but I like how this finale handles it, using their presumably one-time dalliance mainly for a one-off joke.
After that, Will stays with Reggie, an arrangement contingent on buying multiple packs of Celsius a day. The Celsius running gag in this episode would threaten to tip over into annoying commercial territory if the show didn’t also have fun with the nonsensical marketing copy about the drink being “clinically proven to function.” “What drink on the planet Earth tells you not to drink it?” Will asks. Hours later, he’s addicted.
When he visits Sylvia’s house to finally move his beer stills, the two reconnect, catching up about the pop-up. It’s all going well until Sylvia accidentally blasts herself with beer from the still, which empties all over her yard. Even though it’s not directly Will’s fault, it brings up her latent issues with him — she’s still thinking about his role in Charlie’s new career path — and before long they’re both shouting at each other again, accusing each other of ruining their lives.
Thus begins another Will-Sylvia break, but this one doesn’t last as long. They make up when he stops by her place to collect mail and finds out Johnny 66 sent him a noncompete. Shitty Little Bar is all ready to go now, but he can’t open. Will asks Sylvia for real advice, admitting that his life is better because of her honesty, and she encourages him to at least try to change Jenna’s mind. She also returns the compliment, acknowledging Will’s role in her career taking off.
Visiting Jenna’s office only gets Will one last quick fuck and one last “go fuck yourself,” but the final scene at Charlie’s book party resolves the issue by raising a tantalizing possibility: Sylvia being the face of Shitty Little Bar to get around the noncompete. I have to say, I’m pretty excited by the idea of a season three where Will and Sylvia are officially working together (like Ian and Poppy from Mythic Quest, to name another pair of platonic soulmates on Apple TV+), especially with Sylvia as Will’s boss. What could possibly go wrong?
That said, I’m not excited about actually waiting for the next season, or waiting for a season renewal to begin with. The Studio may have won all the awards, but Platonic is the real standout Seth Rogen sitcom on Apple TV+, a warm and raunchy sitcom that harkens back to peak Judd Apatow. (After all, co-creator Nicholas Stoller is an Apatow acolyte.) Not enough of the world knows about Platonic, but those of us who get it, get it. Bring on season three.
Inside Jokes
• Nice cameo from Rose Byrne’s husband, Bobby Cannavale, as Charlie’s mental picture of Brett Coyote.
• Lots of good moments with Katie this episode, including the vocal fry she puts on while she’s in girlboss mode.
• Katie, after forcing Will to help drop her mom off at assisted living, says, “I don’t know why I was dreading that. Oh, do you wanna hit Panda Express?”
• A good touch to show that Will misses Sylvia’s influence: He moves Reggie’s can onto a coaster.
• Will gets in one final kick on a delivery robot. What will he kick over in a theoretical third season?
• Sylvia rear-ends someone when Will breaks the news that he slept with Katie. I was speculating what her reaction might look like after “Road Trip,” so it’s fun to see it actually play out.
• Maybe I’m missing something, but the sequencing is a little confusing during the mini-time jump toward the end of the episode. Sylvia gets soaked in beer prior to the pop-up, then she gets cleaned up and goes with Charlie to the Honda dealership, then she sees the piece about the pop-up’s success in the newspaper at the airport. Presumably the airport scene is a couple weeks later, but she mentions catching a flight at the end of the Honda scene, which suggests it’s the same day somehow?
• Possibly the funniest line of the episode comes from a girl whose mom made a book out of her stories: “We’re both writers. We are the same.”