‘Beef’ Season 2: Do Any Couples End Up Together After the Latest Feud?
The feuds at the center of Beef Season 2 take many forms across the Netflix series. While most will see the sparring couples at the heart of the series as the titular beef, the new season of the Emmy-winning series is just as much about the internalized conflict within those pairs. (Warning: Beef Season 2 spoilers ahead!)
First, audiences meet Josh (Oscar Isaac), the general manager of the Monte Vista Point Country Club, and his wife, Lindsey (Carey Mulligan), a seemingly perfect couple who have reached their breaking point at home over failed pregnancies and sexual dissatisfaction. An explosive fight between them is captured on camera by Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), a lowly employee at the country club, and her boyfriend, Austin (Charles Melton), who works part-time at the club.
After Ashley and Austin blackmail Josh and Lindsay with the tape for better jobs within the club, the uneasy new relationship between the foursome erupts in murder, money laundering, and the death of a precious dog. But by the finale, all four are in Korea working together (to a begrudging extent) to survive as the pawns in an elaborate game of crisis management by Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), the owner of the club.
Do any of the relationships survive this latest slab of Beef? Let’s find out!
Netflix
Did Lindsay and Josh end up together?
While technically they agreed to divorce before the finale even begins, Josh and Lindsay can’t quite leave each other behind. He goes on a disastrous date, and she flirts with a handsome fellow traveler on the plane to Korea. But they light each other’s fires in demented ways the average person simply can’t. By the time Park tosses them all in luxurious patient rooms/holding cells at her Korean clinic, Josh and Lindsay are getting existential about their relationship. He confesses he heard a podcast that said the average human only has 960 months to live. Through tears, they are adamant they haven’t wasted any of their months on each other — even if they don’t fully believe it.
Then Josh falls on the sword of their circumstances and agrees to take the blame for the crimes Park is trying to evade, including the embezzling and money laundering through the club as a means of covering up the malpractice and dead patients of her husband, Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho). As he is being perp-walked by authorities, Lindsay jumps a police barricade and lays one on her husband, saying she loves him. It is the most sincerely passionate these two have been all season, and of course, it happens right as he is headed off to prison. Speaking of prison, hold that thought.
Netflix
Did Ashley and Austin end up together?
Austin follows Ashley to Korea with the promise to himself and to the new object of his affection, Eunice (Seoyeon Jang), that he is going to break up with her. He definitely tries to do it, but Ashley tells him she is pregnant, temporarily luring him into a fantasy future where they have a kid with his smile. Ashley makes the case that, even though Austin is actively saying he is now in love with Eunice (who bailed on them the first second she could), they know each other’s baggage already, and that counts for something in a world of shady people. He reluctantly seems to agree, until they are captured along with Josh and Lindsay. Through a wall, Ashley doubles down on her devout commitment to him. But Austin hits her with a truth bomb, one he delivers kindly but bluntly. Her parents divorced and moved on to different lives without her as a kid. It imprinted some deep abandonment issues on her, and that isn’t the same as love. “You don’t want me, Ash. You just don’t want to be left by me,” he says, before breaking up with her.
But never count these two crazy kids out, especially when it comes to making bad decisions. Even though Austin escapes with the incriminating flash drive, calls Eunice to declare he is taking it to the police, and that he loves her, he ultimately decides the hesitation in her voice isn’t enough to risk everything. So, instead, he hands it over to Park, hoping to avoid the mounds of money she could use to destroy them, even from prison.
It works and, eight years later, Austin and Ashley have now become the new Lindsay and Josh. She is the general manager of the club, and Austin is her doting arm candy, even though his arms are full with their son. They are friends with Troy (William Fichtner) and Ava (Mikaela Hoover), they are the toast of the club, and they seem to have it all. But in the car heading home, they are anything but rock solid. Alas, the cycle continues.
Netflix
What happened to Josh?
On the other side of the eight-year time jump, Josh is doing well in prison, still serving at the pleasure of his members — this time, the people in his cell block. Trading goods for information, he manages to find out what happened to Lindsay after she slowly stopped calling him. She remarried and now lives in the countryside with her new husband and kid. Josh decides not to get her address, though, choosing to leave her alone when he is released. But she hasn’t forgotten him. Hiding from her new family in the bathroom, she watches him being interviewed outside the prison, making amends for his crimes and shooting a pointed nod in her direction. “I’m really glad that everyone I love is happy,” he says, with a knowing look right down the barrel of the camera. She seems to take that message to heart, proving they are still the only ones who can light each other’s fire — together or not.
Netflix
Did Chairwoman Park and Dr. Kim stay together?
Before the insane gun, knife, and scalpel fight to escape the Trochos offices, Dr. Kim gives Lindsay, Ashley, and Austin a heartfelt, vulnerable confession about the loveless marriage he is in with his wife. “If Chairwoman Park married me because she loved life and not me, what happens when her life turns on her?” While that is a lofty question, Park’s imploding life is, in part, due to Dr. Kim’s negligence and unfitness as a doctor, as evidenced by the patient he killed earlier in the season.
But all of it falls on deaf ears because Austin doesn’t speak Korean, so what becomes Dr. Kim’s final words is lost in translation. In the chaos, he is shot in the head by Park’s henchman, ending his marriage and Park’s devotion to her deadly doctor of a husband. In many ways, the only enduring love story in Beef Season 2 is Park’s undying love for her first husband, whose grave she visits in the final scene, admitting she has become her mother, old and full of regrets. Money can’t buy the one thing that is elusive to us all: Time with the ones we love. No matter how hard we try to hold onto it or how many feuds we get into to distract from it.
Beef, Season 2, Streaming Now, Netflix
