3.20, “We Were Here” - Nothing Like You
I was doing okay through the first couple parts of the finale. The opening with Celia, and the stuff about party planning and SAVA, and I was thinking, okay, maybe I can make it through this.
And then this scene happened and it broke me and I don’t think I ever recovered.
This is the first of four scenes in the finale with the major couples on this show, and each one of them is just phenomenal in how perfectly they capture the essence of these relationships and display so beautifully their pasts, presents, and futures.
This scene starts with Bex descending the stairs to the party in her dress, clearly reminiscent of the first party, when Andi did the same.
When the first party took place, Bex was recently returned. She was still living at home, she’d just took a job at the Fringe, and she was just beginning to adjust to being Andi’s mom while still behaving a bit too much like her fun older sister.
And Andi was meeker then – she had lived a pretty sheltered life under Celia’s protective watch – so you can feel that she’s nervous as she comes down the stairs and sort of symbolically enters this new world: a wild party where she’s trying to put herself out there more. Andi asks how she looks and Bex makes the “You look okay… You look amazing!” joke to give her the encouragement she needs.
This time around, the roles are reversed.
Where Andi was wearing a flashy yellow dress, Bex is wearing a wedding dress, which, if not symbolic of settling down per se, is, at the very least, one of the classic symbols of entering a new stage in one’s life.
And she truly is. She’s grown so much since the first party. She has her own home now, she owns a small business, she’s fully embraced being Andi’s mom and she’s now also a wife.
But you can still sense she’s nervous, as Andi was, and not just about how she looks in the dress. She’s entering a new world, too. This one, though, one of maturity.
And this time, Andi makes the “you look decent” joke, which is a cute throwback, but to me the better line is her telling Bex, “If you only knew how beautiful you look.”
I think that sort of nicely calls back a line in the pilot, when Andi is putting herself down after playing frisbee with Jonah for the first time and Bex tells her she can’t see herself. Or, basically, if only you knew how amazing you are. What Bex is telling her at the time is that she needs to know how great she really is, and if Jonah doesn’t see that, someday Andi will meet someone who does see her for how amazing she is.
Like, as Andi points out in this scene, how Bowie sees her.
Andi goes to let Bowie in and he walks in through the same door to Celia’s he used to first walk into their lives once upon a time.
But he, too, has grown. He has a steady job, a place to live. He’s no longer the unreliable, wandering musician. He’s a husband now, and a beloved father, like his father before him, whose tux he now wears.
And Bex and Bowie meet and just look at each other with such a sense of love and amazement and gratitude that this has all worked out as it did.
And through all this, I was still keeping it together. It’s so well done, but I’m like, I’m okay, I’m okay.
And then Andi gets them to do their first dance, and she plays that song, “Never Seen Nothing Like You”. It’s such a sweet, soft song, and the lyrics are so perfect, it’s like it was written just for them.
And I’m remembering the first time the song was played, in Bowie’s video, where he said how important Andi was to him and basically stated his desire to be a part of the family.
And the second time the song was played, following the birthday party the whole family threw for Bowie, and after Andi calls Bowie “dad” for the first time, and basically says without saying “you are a part of this family.”
And now, here it is again, in the finale. And they are the family.
The same song. The same people. The same house. Three different, important points in all their lives and in their journeys.
Bex and Bowie are together now, and Andi is with them, and they are finally the family unit that once seemed so improbable given where they started.
It just so beautifully, wonderfully comes full circle.
And that is what broke me.
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