“Shrinking” stars Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein in the season 2 finale

Warning: this article contains spoilers on the Contraction season 2 finale, “Last Thanksgiving.”

Contraction and its characters have a knack for treading the line between feel-good comedy and the drama of the challenges of grief.

The season 2 finale is no exception, with the characters celebrating Thanksgiving. Jimmy (Jason Segel), Alice (Lukita Maxwelll), Gaby (Jessica Williams), Liz (Christa Miller), Derek (Ted McGinley) and Brian (Michael Urie) everyone meets up at Gaby’s for the holidays. Paul (Harrison Ford) is hoping to have a relaxing Thanksgiving, just him and Julie (Wendie Malick), until Julie tricks him into going to Gaby’s as well.

Sean (Luke Tennie), meanwhile, shows immense growth and spends the holidays cooking for his family, a plot point that might have been the most difficult for the writers. “We wanted Sean with everyone because we like people together,” admits Brett Goldsteinwho co-created the show. “But it’s like no, he has to be with his family because, it’s annoying, he’s grown so much that we have to separate him. And it was sad.”

The only person without a table full of turkey waiting for him is Louis (Goldstein), who isn’t invited to his co-worker’s meal after learning that his drunk driving resulted in someone’s death. “There are so many things that were references, but one of them is Manchester by the sea,” Goldstein talks about the harshness of that moment of rejection. “You can’t shake this thing. It doesn’t go away. We have these few episodes where we think that maybe his life will go well, but this thing will always be there. What we saw him experience, for example Alice, doesn’t necessarily happen to everyone. People make judgments and it’s a difficult thing. »

Heartbroken, Louis goes to the station, where he had brought Alice and told her that he was sitting there with his ex-fiancée. Since his role in Tia’s death, he contemplates suicide by jumping in front of one of the trains.

After texting Alice that he needs a friend (who doesn’t see his message thanks to Gaby’s attempt at an unplugged vacation), he gets closer and closer to the train tracks, apparently about to jump into his loneliness and despair. But Jimmy shows up just in time, and the two finally have the heart-to-heart they’ve been building towards all season.

“For two seasons, it’s been leading up to this moment for Jimmy,” says Segel, who co-created the series with Goldstein and Bill Lawrence. “He avoids looking in the mirror, which is like looking Louis in the face. It’s really, really hard, and also, it’s time, if that makes sense. This moment between the two of them is inevitable. One ways we wanted to highlight how Jimmy plays this game with Louis of inventing the lives of the passengers on the other side of the train tracks, but we never saw Jimmy learn more about this game. ‘was intentional.’

Goldstein notes that it was never in the writers’ minds to be able to bring Louis so close to an irreversible decision. “It was just, ‘We’re doing this story, so we have to do it right.’ We created this world and these characters and we’re going through this experience of forgiveness, although we always hope to balance it with laughter and lightness and heart, but it’s also a question of what is reality?

Most likely, the audience expects Alice to appear as Louis’ guardian angel in these final moments. But surprisingly, it’s Jimmy, even though we never see the conversation between father and daughter that leads him there. “These were big story questions about what we show and what we don’t show in order to pull off the magic trick of his appearance,” notes Segel. “You want the audience to feel a certain way when Jimmy appears behind him, so we chose to leave out the sausage preparation to achieve that.”

For Goldstein, however, it always had to be Jimmy, not Alice, to complete Season 2’s theme of forgiveness. “Alice had I found peace in episode 6 where she forgives him and it frees her,” he explains. “The whole story since the end of episode 1 is that Jimmy has to free himself and he’s been denying the whole season that he’s okay. It has to be him for there to be some peace.”

“The anger you’re holding on to doesn’t necessarily help anyone and only hurts you,” Goldstein continues. “And that’s Jimmy’s story. Louis can punish himself. Louis can hate himself for the rest of his life very easily without help from anyone else. He doesn’t need Jimmy to hate him (to) feel bad. If Jimmy never forgave this guy, we wouldn’t be mad at him as an audience. It’s hard, but doing so will benefit his life as much as he does. to everyone around him, because it is of no use to him not to hang on to it.

Luckily, there was never a version where someone didn’t get to Louis in time. “That would have been another setback for Jimmy,” Segel reflects. “But I like to believe that would never happen. Something bigger was at play between the angel that Paul is in Jimmy’s life, the angel that Tia is in Jimmy’s life, and the fact that Jimmy and Alice try and Louis I try, it brought them to a perfect moment.”

Of course, we know this isn’t the first time Louis has considered suicide. Goldstein posits that what has always stopped Louis before is this feeling of having to make amends, or at least, apologize to Jimmy and Alice. Now that he’s made the effort to do it, if it wasn’t for Jimmy’s sudden appearance, he might have been able to go through with it.

“If we want to be super, super real,” Goldstein says. “If you talk to people who have been that low, it’s always, ‘If you can wait just one more moment, this will pass. And maybe there will be a change, a resolution, some positivity, something.’ And I think that’s it, just wait another day. There’s this need in him to – that’s what Paul says to Jimmy about the act of revelation, regardless of how it’s received. – even. if they had just told him to fuck off, which they did – having to at least talk to them was something that kept him going.

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Now that Jimmy and Louis have had this one-on-one, what does he have in store for us? Will Jimmy form a friendship with Louis the same way Alice did? Goldstein says it’s too early to tell, noting, “I can’t say if we’ll see Louis again.” But Segel also notes how important it was to cast someone the same age as Louis, to emphasize the potential for friendship, even if it never materializes.

“I don’t think we really know yet what Season 3 has in store,” Segel says. “But the reason it was important to me that it was someone who was a contemporary of Jimmy was I wanted Lewis to look in the mirror. It’s built into the story that these guys could have be friends.”

Regardless of what happens between them, Jimmy’s willingness to save Louis and offer him forgiveness marks a major milestone. “It was a really big step,” Segel says.

There have been other small steps this season, notably Jimmy flirts with Sofi (Cobie Smulders) after buying your used car. “You have to see these little sparks of what Jimmy probably looked like before the accident,” Segel says of the small gesture to open Jimmy up to the world outside his patients and friends. “In grief and depression, there are the acute phases where that’s all we talk about. But at some point, it gets boring to keep talking about it to everyone. Then you live with a sprain emotional ankle where you “You walk around and live life, but you know that every time you put weight on it, it hurts. This is how Jimmy has lived since the accident. ”

So, having mastered the depths of his grief and depression and now turned toward forgiveness, what growth should Jimmy tackle next? “I’d like to see him try to be happy,” Segel says. “It’s something I’ve only come to in the last couple of years for Jason – it’s supposed to be part of the deal. You have so much ambition and drive and you want to make sure you’re there for others it’s easy to do like, Oh, I haven’t really thought about whether I’m happy. For Jimmy, he doesn’t feel like he deserves to be happy. So, it would be nice to see Jimmy get to a point where he puts himself first by asking himself, “What would make me happy after all this sadness?” »

Maybe he’ll find the answer in season 3.