Well, Love Storyans, we’ve made it to the penultimate episode of the show, and I… am weirdly depressed. (Not just because this particular installment is tough sledding, which it is, but because we’re nearing the end of the JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette story, and we all know how that goes.) At least we still have the finale next week, and I guess we’ll always have Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly’s stunning good looks?
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Below, find every single thought I had—quite literally—about Season 1, Episode 8 of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette:
- We get it! Carolyn smokes like Don Draper on a delayed flight to LA!
- I wish I looked this good while sitting around depressed at home in a tank top.
- Also, I commend Carolyn for finding so many places to perch in her apartment; I only have two (bed and couch).
- “A journalist’s book party in Midtown” being “violently fine” checks out.
- Aw, Anthony 🙁
- Sorry, was that a…Lizzie Grubman reference?
- Is there a different ’90s-famous publicist named Lizzie that I’m not aware of?
- Never forget that Grubman went to my high school, which really checks out because so did Roy Cohn and one of the most prominently quoted “cruel kid” anti-woke influencers from this New York magazine story.
- This loft is so weirdly laid out.
- Aw, Sade! Harkening back to their happier days 🙁
- Oh man, John referring to Carolyn’s confidence and drive in the past tense would make me sooooooo furious.
- You’re the one whose fame has trapped her in this loft like a lightning bug in a Mason jar, man!
- As someone who has some experience with depression: the best way to deal with it in your partner is usually not by implying that making excuses for them is wearing on you.
- KFC bucket spotted!
- Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the fast food diva that you are.
- Ugh, marriage seems hard.
- Even if you’re not internationally famous.
- God, their schedule!
- If my year was booked out a year in advance, I’d be miserable too (even if it’s all fancy engagements).
- “Every minute of the day is accounted for” is my actual nightmare.
- I can’t disagree with John’s cousin that yogurt for lunch is “some Weight Watchers shit.”
- The “no TV during the day” decree, though, would give me instant hives.
- Much like Carolyn, I want the option!
- John saying that “spending your day in front of the TV on a beautiful summer’s day is just wasteful” just made him 30% less hot to me.
- “Vogue, now that’s a magazine.”
- Say that, girlina!
- Okay, I have to disagree with Carolyn on the midnight clambakes, which sound nice to me.
- Okay, writing in Lady Di’s car accident was smart, as I’m now considering the parallels between her and CBK (as, I assume, the writers want me to).
- This is clearly hitting John hard, but him bitching at Carolyn about whether the dishes are clean or not is also profoundly unsexy to me.
- It’s so weird to see someone drink water from a glass in the age of Owala.
- I will never not be annoyed at how free cis, straight, white men are to run at night.
- Yet another Radiohead needle drop!
- Ah, a post-run cig. How very ’90s.
- Oh no, Diana’s dead and Carolyn isn’t taking it well.
- Nor is John, for that matter, who’s pissed that Carolyn keeps watching the news and dares to compare him and his sister to Diana’s kids.
- I don’t really get his point, though; is he saying that Harry and William are better off because they’re royals, or that he and Caroline were better off because they lived a more normal life? I mean, a dead parent is a dead parent!
- John seems earnestly heartbroken, but his fundamental misunderstanding of what Carolyn is going through is just, like…can you muster an ounce of empathy?
- Well, this whole bit about John watching his mom suffer after his dad’s death and asking, “Why couldn’t she just play with me?” is making me cry my eyes out.
- Carolyn, too, for that matter.
- “I watched her die twice, and now it feels like I’m watching you slip away.” Oof.
- “You’re choosing the darkness”…I mean, is she, king? Or is she just depressed?
- Then again, I wouldn’t want to explain clinical depression to anyone who grew up doing a JFK Jr. level of tough-it-out outdoor activities.
- Aw, this parallel of Carolyn holding John and telling him to breathe after his mother’s death is extremely sweet and sad.
- Oop, it’s two years later, and things are not going well in the Bessette-Kennedy household.
- Same loft, whole different marriage.
- This shot of Carolyn under the glass coffee table is nice.
- Rollneck sweater spotted once again!
- Oof, John’s on crutches and Carolyn is blonder than ever, so we must be getting close to the accident.
- Cleaning up after a dinner party is really a hot zone for marital disputes (as is looking for parking, for that matter).
- My child-of-divorce ass is so stressed out by the palpable tension in the air.
- John’s reference to “my room”……..yikes.
- I mean, do we have any evidence that John and Carolyn were actually sleeping in separate bedrooms near the end of their life?
- I could google this, but I won’t.
- I get the time-jump and all, but it results in the incredibly awful, Albee-play energy between these formerly amorous spouses feeling kind of out of nowhere.
- André Leon Talley reference!
- Imagining another version of history in which CBK was a Vogue girl (and I was her union steward).
- This is a deep dialogue cut, but Carolyn telling John that he makes her feel “like I am this dead weight you are desperate to shed” is reminding me of Gone Girl’s Amy Elliott Dunne writing in her diary that her husband makes her feel like “something to be jettisoned, if necessary,” which is interesting, because Rosamund Pike based her performance as Amy partly on (you guessed it!) Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.
- Sorry, tangent over.
- Oh, babes, if you’re still dividing your social world into “your friends” and “my friends” this far into the marriage, it’s so joever.
- Were people saying “your thing” to mean one’s line of work in the late ’90s?
- I’m not so sure.
- “Is that what you’re doing all day alone in the apartment? Enjoying your life?” Ugh, shut the fuck up, John.
- I mean, I will say that Pidgeon and Kelly are really capturing the exhaustion and misery of reaching the point in a relationship where you’re just talking past each other.
- Bro, if you threw Jackie O. in my face while I was depressed, I’d freak out, too.
- Oh, shit, we’re going nuclear with the mommy issues.
- “You don’t know how lucky you are that I never introduced you to my mother, because she never would have encouraged this…us.”
- I’m reeling a bit! That’s so mean!
- I fully get why Carolyn then pulls out the trump card of her mom telling her not to marry John before the wedding.
- And now we get down to the real meat of the conflict (John’s Senate run).
- Setting aside two lunches a week for your wife…what a prince.
- “John, you’re not interested in me.” Ugh. Sad.
- Okay, a little vulnerability from John in this moment is nice.
- “I miss the person I fell in love with” is such a crock of straight-guy shit, which Carolyn correctly calls out.
- “You want the cold, unattainable, shiny version of me that’s like a trophy”…………TEA!
- I mean, it’s true that John didn’t make Carolyn quit Calvin Klein, I guess.
- Never, ever quit your job for a man, ladies!
- “You’re America’s son, and I am just another tragedy you bravely endure.”
- I mean, yeah, that was rough stuff, but John, don’t go to a hotel!
- Okay, I know I say “Emmy for Sarah Pidgeon” a lot, but watching a bereft and completely abandoned Carolyn softly cry as John leaves is actually fucking heartbreaking, and I feel like a lot of actresses couldn’t have pulled it off to this degree.
- Am I ever going to stop crying?
- Indeed, I need to be at a dinner shortly and my eyes are scarlet.
- Damn you, Ryan Murphy Industrial Complex!