That Haunting Beef Season 2 Finale Shot Is Meant To “Make You Wonder”

Spoilers ahead for the Beef Season 2 finale. As in its Emmy-winning debut season, Beef Season 2 ends on a hopeful note — but it leaves a lot up to interpretation, too.

In the Season 2 finale, both of the show’s core couples — Austin and Ashley (Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny) and Josh and Lindsay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan) are captured by Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung) in Korea. Austin makes a harrowing escape to deliver incriminating information about Park’s deadly corporate cover-ups to Eunice (Seoyeon Jang) and the authorities.

But despite telling Eunice “I love you” by phone on the cab ride over, Austin appears to have a major change of heart and turns the USB back to Park instead — preventing her secrets from getting out and currying favor in the process.

“Charles gives such an incredible performance in that long push, after he hangs up the phone, and you kind of see that full roller-coaster of emotion happening inside,” creator and showrunner, Lee Sung Jin, tells Bustle. He envisions the scene — and its full meaning — as a “blank canvas” for viewers to project their own lives onto. “I think that’s what I love about that moment, is it’s not prescriptive,” he says. “We’re not telling the audience, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on in Austin’s head.’ We’re left to make you wonder.”

In other words, the shift is intentionally ambiguous. But it seems that Austin’s new mindset might have been encouraged in part by Park, who tells him in the finale that love isn’t precluded from the system of capitalism, and that she thinks it’s OK to be self-serving. Indeed, eight years later, Austin and Ashley are parents and — in a parallel to the season’s opening with Josh and Lindsay — appear to be living the privileged country-club facade they once aspired to.

Melton attributes this development to the season’s theme of samsara, which refers to the repetition of cycles. “Love is special and such a beautiful thing, but there’s different stages and different circumstances in life,” he says. “The structures of capitalism have an impact on choices.”

Elsewhere, Josh is released from prison nearly a decade after taking the fall for Park’s cover-up. Meanwhile, Lindsay has a new partner and child of her own — and watches with a smile as Josh says in an interview, “I’m really glad that everyone I love is happy.”