**Spoiler alert: this article contains massive spoilers for Younger season seven, episode 12. Read at your own risk!
Younger has officially come to an end after seven very tumultuous and fashionable seasons and the finale was certainly a tearjerker.
For seven years we have wondered if Liza (Sutton Foster) would end up with Josh (Nico Tortorella), Charles (Peter Hermann) or choose to be an independent, single woman who was all about her career.
As it turned out, it was something like the latter, as Liza and Charles — who seemed to enjoy a happy reunion in the preceding episode — realised that their relationship could not survive the weight of Liza’s past lies.
Looking back, this break-up was not that surprising, given how different Liza and Charles actually are. Yes, they are both book-loving, 40-something-year-olds who have daughters, but as season seven crept toward the finale, we could see their similarities ended there.
It pains me to say it, but Charles was quite unlikeable at times throughout the final episodes — he reacted quite immaturely to Liza not wanting to get married again, immediately started dating Quinn as soon as he and Liza split up and then decided to test Liza’s honesty instead of having an adult conversation about how her past lies were affecting him. Overall, he showed himself to be fairly patriarchal with something of a “my way or the highway” attitude which was not cute (even though he still totally is).
Even so, when Liza quietly whispered: “We’re not going to make it are we?” to him, I couldn’t help but feel a bit heartbroken when he replied, “I don’t think so.”
Ultimately though, this was a very grounded and realistic conclusion to their story and it was handled sensitively and with a lot of love. While I will admit to being very indignant when Liza offered to quit Empirical so things wouldn’t be awkward, I was mollified when, instead, Charles made her Editor-in-Chief. Hooray! Seeing as Liza’s whole reason for lying about her age, to begin with, was to land her dream publishing job, it was satisfying to see her get this — even if she lost what she once thought was her dream man.
Meanwhile, Kelsey (Hilary Duff) is off to Los Angeles after Reese Witherspoon’s company invested in her Inkubator app, Maggie (Debi Mazar) is suddenly in love with her former nemesis Cass (Janeane Garofalo) and Lauren (Molly Bernard) ended the series in the most fabulously Lauren way possible — by having a threesome with her gay ex-boyfriend and his fiancé.
In my opinion, all of these storylines felt rushed and, given how integral particularly Kelsey and Maggie have been to the series, I felt they deserved more.
And then, of course, there was Josh — who didn’t feature terribly much in the final episode but is apparently now rich enough to buy an entire apartment building in Williamsburg. The producers decided to save his screen time for the final moments of the series, where he and Liza sweetly recreated the scene of their first meeting, right down to what Liza was wearing.
This final scene, which absolutely leaves the door open for future reconciliation, made a beautiful point about what a good relationship should look like. While Charles was so stuck in his ways that it made it impossible for him and Liza to grow as a couple, Josh has always been open-minded and has accepted Liza, lies and all, which allowed growth not only for her but for them.
We may never know exactly where Josh and Liza’s relationship goes, but I love that Younger, in the end, was a show about the fact that the people who love you, warts and all, will always be right there by your side all along.
The seventh and final season of Younger is now streaming on Stan.
