Photo: John Merrick/Prime Video
Let’s get this straight: Rachel Blanchard thinks Susannah is in heaven. “She’s having a good time,” Blanchard says of the afterlife for her The Summer I Turned Pretty character. As the deceased mother of Conrad and Jeremiah and pseudo-auntie to Belly Conklin, Susannah haunts season three’s love triangle heavily, to the point that after Belly and Conrad hook up in the finale, Belly’s first postcoital thoughts aren’t about the love of her life but his mom. “How are we supposed to know if we love each other because we want to and not because we were told to?” she asks Conrad. “If we didn’t lose Susannah, would it loom so large for us? What if you only love me because that’s what your mom wanted, and then your mom died?”
If there were a “haunting the narrative” competition between Susannah Fisher, The Bear’s Michael Berzatto, and Steven Universe’s Rose Quartz, it could very well end in a three-way tie. Fans see Susannah, who died between seasons one and two of the Amazon Prime series, as the architect of her family’s enmeshment issues: If she hadn’t proclaimed #TeamBonrad canon in a letter, could #TeamJellyfish have flourished? Or could Belly have just made her own choices without a Ghost Mom in her head? Blanchard won’t accept this villain edit of her character. “I don’t really think there is a villain. You’d have to ask Jenny [Han, the show’s creator], but I don’t think that was her intention. And I don’t think it was Susannah’s intention, either,” she says. “She just really wanted everyone to be happy and to be true to their feelings. I think some stuff just got lost in translation.”
In a way, Belly is right: Susannah’s feelings loom because she died. In the first few years of bereavement, everything the deceased said and did takes on such importance. But that was never Susannah’s intention, says Blanchard. “I think she always saw there was something between Conrad and Belly,” she says, “but I don’t think it was ever etched in stone for her.”
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