If you stuck it out through seven hours of Peacock’s limited series Apples Never Fall just to be disappointed by an anticlimactic ending, you’re not alone. I’m working on forming a few different support group chapters for this very feeling, where attendees can gather in a safe space to process their anger and frustration over unsatisfactory finales. Look out for a meeting in your area soon; if this conclusion is any indication of what television shows will continue to give us, you’re going to need it.
The best part of Apples Never Fall—the latest television adaption of one of Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty’s dramatic thriller novels—was Annette Bening’s character, Joy Delaney. Joy was the maternal glue that held her family and this middling series together. Blessedly, the finale focuses largely on Joy, who is still alive, despite her husband Stan (Sam Neill) and children Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner), Troy (Jake Lacy), Amy (Alison Brie), and Brooke (Essie Randles) presuming her demise after being missing for 11 days. While that’s not exactly an irrational conclusion, given that Joy’s bike was found crunched on the side of the road and her bloody sweatshirt was dug up in the yard by a neighbor’s dog, it’s nice that the meandering series didn’t simply do away with its central—and most tolerable—character.
What was far more disheartening was the way that the writers slapped a period onto this protracted story after dragging it out for far longer than it deserved to last. Apples Never Fall could’ve made a decent thriller film, were television producers and streaming executives not so content-hungry that they wanted to stretch it into seven whole episodes. The final reveals would have played out with much more tension had this story been condensed. Instead, Episode 7 lets the piddling amount of remaining air out of the series, with no real danger, consequences, or lessons learned for the Delaney family.
(Warning: Spoilers for Apples Never Fall below.)
In the final moments of Episode 6, viewers learn that Joy is indeed still alive. She’s been holed up with Savannah (Georgia Flood)—the young woman whom the Delaneys took in after she showed up at their house one day looking for refuge—somewhere in Florida, far from her family’s estate in West Palm Beach. The top of the finale pieces together how this all came to be, from Joy’s bike accident to the present moment. Joy fell off her bike and got a huge gash in her knee. She tried to call her children and her husband, but all five of her calls went unanswered. Without much else to do, she tied her sweatshirt around her leg and made her way home, thoughtlessly tossing the garment aside when she reached the driveway. Cue the neighbor’s dog, who trotted by to pick it up and haul it away to bury it.
Joy patches up her leg and goes about her day, only for her husband Stan (Sam Neill) to return home. Joy finds a manuscript of a memoir written by Stan’s former tennis protégé, Harry (Giles Matthey), in which Harry reveals that he cheated in matches when he was coming up in the sport. Stan flippantly tells Joy that he knew he cheated, and Joy becomes incensed, wondering why Stan was always so quick to defend Harry over Troy, who was always pitted against Harry in Stan’s coaching days. That lack of support for his own son eventually resulted in Stan hitting Troy when he was a teenager, as well as Joy’s stealthy encouragement of Harry to drop Stan and find a new coach. Joy’s machinations were revealed in a flashback in Episode 5, having affected her family and her marriage for years prior.
In the wake of their argument, Joy storms off and walks to a bar, taking a thank-you note she received from Savannah with her. Joy calls Savannah, who meets her at the bar, and reveals that she is a con artist, just like the Delaney children always suspected. “I find people who have big hearts, and then I move on,” Savannah tells her. “I left because Troy paid me to leave.” Of course, this isn’t the whole truth, which Joy suspects when she follows Savannah out to her car and tells her she’s coming with. Savannah owes her after all of that hospitality Joy gave!
Meanwhile, the Delaney kids are looking over old photos after framing their father for murder and putting him in jail. They seem way too content with this, when any normal family would be going catatonic. But these kids are not normal; they’re far more self-possessed than that. While looking at one photo, Amy and Brooke recognize a younger Savannah, sitting alongside Harry’s family in a picture taken at Delaney’s tennis academy. It turns out: Savannah is Harry’s sister.
The four Delaney children seek out Harry, who tells them that Savannah’s real name is Lindsey. Harry became estranged from Lindsey/Savannah after Joy recommended that Harry drop Stan and find a new coach. That suggestion was all Harry’s father needed to take his son’s game to the next level, packing up and leaving the family to pursue Harry’s intensive training to make him a tennis superstar. Harry hasn’t spoken to Lindsey for three years because of the restraining order he took out against her.
“My mom was sick, unstable, and delusional,” Harry tells the Delaneys. When he and his dad left, he explains, “Lindsey had to deal with all of that on her own. If something doesn’t help your game, you block it out. I stopped taking her calls. But every time my name popped up on the news, Lindsey would show up. And whatever money I gave her, it was never enough. One day, three years ago, we found her in the house with a gun. Everything had to stop, so I retired from tennis and wrote Lindsey a check for $500,000.”
If you didn’t already glean that everyone in this show is a sociopath except for Joy, there’s your confirmation. Elsewhere at Savannah’s house (let’s just call her Savannah from here on out), Joy learns from a neighbor that there was a hurricane in West Palm. Suddenly, Joy realizes that maybe leaving her family for 11 days with no word might not have been the best idea, and tries to call them. Savannah tells her that the phones aren’t working, which Joy doesn’t believe. While Savannah is out running errands, Joy does some snooping and finds out who Savannah really is, and also stumbles upon a gun she has in the house.
The danger of this situation is pretty sparse, given that Joy is very easily able to convince Savannah to take her back to her family. In the car, Joy and Savannah unpack all of their mutual, intertwining pasts. “After you told my dad to fire Stan, that was all the encouragement he needed to pack up and leave,” Savannah says. “Before that, it wasn’t easy. But at least I had a brother, at least I had a father, at least it wasn’t just me and my mother. She wasn’t a mom like you, Joy. She was poison. You gave half my family a reason to leave. That’s why I wanted to destroy your family, like you destroyed mine.”
One would hope that Savannah would shed a little extra light on why her mother was so awful, but this never arrives. We are just supposed to take buzzwords like “toxic” and “poison” and run with them, assuming her childhood was so bad that an adult woman would seek out a strange family to try to tear them apart. But the only thing Savannah was successful at doing during her stay with the Delaneys was getting Joy to reveal that she was the one who got Stan fired from Harry.
With all of her subterfuge out in the open, Savannah panics and steps on the gas, while Joy begs her to slow down. Savannah tearfully tells her that she won’t, before the two get into what seems to be a pretty gnarly car wreck! Savannah comes out unscathed and flees the scene, apologizing to Joy once and for all. Joy is, somehow, just fine despite crashing into another car at about 90 miles per hour. The police bring her home, the Delaneys are reunited with all of their secrets out in the open, and Savannah is gone for good.
Joy looks out at the Delaneys’ tennis court, which was ruined in the recent hurricane, and turns to Stan to say, “Jesus, what a mess!” Her words couldn’t echo my feelings about this series and its finale more precisely. This is far from the clean, satisfying, and inspiring ending of something like Big Little Lies Season 1. None of the television adaptations of Moriarty’s books have been able to hold a candle to that conclusion; Big Little Lies Season 2 made a mess of its first season’s ending, and Nine Perfect Strangers was pure wacko delusion tied up with barbed wire rather than a bow. Apples Never Fall rarely felt like it had any stakes at all, but a finale as relaxed and tedious as this could be considered a new low for limited drama series as a whole. The genre seems to have dug itself into a rut that it can’t get out of, and it’s going to take something truly innovative to return us to the authentic highs of Big Little Lies, instead of these cheap, wannabe knockoffs.
