{"id":547998,"date":"2026-03-27T07:11:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T07:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/547998\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T07:11:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T07:11:09","slug":"how-love-story-finale-handles-jfk-jr-and-carolyns-plane-crash-deaths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/547998\/","title":{"rendered":"How Love Story Finale Handles JFK Jr and Carolyn’s Plane Crash Deaths"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSPOILER ALERT:\u00a0This story contains spoilers for\u00a0the finale of FX\u2019s \u201cLove Story<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWe get a glimpse of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in the final moments of the finale of \u201cLove Story.\u201d But it\u2019s only in memory. The pair are shown on a Massachusetts beach, living the life they might have had fate not intervened.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFans of the FX series recounting the story of the presidential heir and his fashion-publicist bride have wondered from the first moments of the premiere of \u201cLove Story\u201d how we\u2019d get to its inevitable endpoint. The show begins with a flash-forward to an argument on the tarmac ahead of the real-life 1999 flight to Martha\u2019s Vineyard that killed John, Carolyn, and Carolyn\u2019s sister Lauren; it then backtracks to show the blossoming of John and Carolyn\u2019s relationship, their wedding and their eventual coming to loggerheads over disputes about how much publicity their marriage could withstand.<\/p>\n

\n\tTheir passing is treated with no small amount of sensitivity. We arrive at that tarmac once more, but we first walk through their final month or so. We learn that their marriage counselor had recommended taking a trial separation. They\u2019d been fighting a lot \u2014 Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon<\/a>) had told John (Paul Anthony Kelly<\/a>) that \u201cI cannot be the third person in my marriage,\u201d behind the spectre of the media, or the Kennedy mythos. But the notion of splitting even for a month came as a shock to the system: These two may have come to loathe one another, but they could never go no-contact.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPaul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of FX<\/p>\n

\n\tThis startling advice has short-term consequences (they slept together, as if to prove a point) and somewhat longer-range ones: Carolyn, imprisoned within the Tribeca loft for fear of paparazzi invasiveness, eventually attends a George magazine party because she understands it\u2019s important to her husband. After months in self-imposed exile, fearing the camera\u2019s lenses and the press\u2019 criticism, she makes the choice to smile. After that, John, craving outside validation, takes Carolyn to a super-secret dinner at their little Indian spot, and promises to re-examine his life to make room for her. He\u2019s even willing to skip a cousin\u2019s wedding, but she insists. \u201cI miss dancing with you,\u201d she declares on the walk home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of FX<\/p>\n

\n\tWhich brings the audience to the tarmac. The first-episode fight, over a perceived delay by Carolyn as she changed the color of her nails and over John\u2019s not engaging his flight instructor for the short trip, is elided with a fade to white. When we fade in, Carolyn is reading the Irish playwright Brian Friel\u2019s \u201cLovers\u201d alongside her sister Lauren (Sydney Lemmon), as John flies solo. Bored or stirred-up or having some kind of premonition, Carolyn asks her pilot \u201cPermission to enter the cockpit?\u201d Granted that permission, she dons headphones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI missed you,\u201d John says. \u201cI had a feeling,\u201d Carolyn replies. It\u2019s the full-on reconciliation the show has been making viewers wait for \u2014 and it comes just as John, piloting toward what he thinks is the horizon, suddenly loses his sense of it. He urges Carolyn to go back to her seat, but she refuses, staying by his side as dials spin and light his face red. \u201cIt\u2019s OK, just breathe. John, just breathe. Just breathe.\u201d As he looks confounded by the moment his destiny and choices have placed him in, she looks serene.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe remainder of the finale deals with the aftermath of the deaths of John, Carolyn and Lauren \u2014 particularly the grief of John\u2019s sister Caroline Kennedy (Grace Gummer) and Carolyn and Lauren\u2019s mother Ann Messina Freeman (Constance Zimmer). Freeman and the Kennedy family battle at first through Kennedy proxy, Caroline\u2019s husband Ed Schlossberg (Ben Shenkman), over where the three might be allowed to be buried; an impromptu meeting between Caroline and Ann, both visiting the star-crossed couple\u2019s loft, allows for a moment of d\u00e9tente, a relaxing of tensions, and an agreement that all three plane passengers might be buried at sea. We hear Ann reading, first, Henry Scott-Holland\u2019s \u201cDeath Is Nothing at All\u201d<\/a> and then Clare Harner\u2019s \u201cDo Not Stand at My Grave and Weep,\u201d<\/a> at a highly negotiated funeral service, then see the scattering of ashes, then a moment of that which might have been: John and Carolyn, entirely alone, embracing on a sand dune, happy in the company of no one, and no mediating force, but one another.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPOILER ALERT:\u00a0This story contains spoilers for\u00a0the finale of FX\u2019s \u201cLove Story.\u201d We get a glimpse of John F.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,11493,216821,210098,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-547998","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-love-story","10":"tag-paul-anthony-kelly","11":"tag-sarah-pidgeon","12":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}