Emily in Paris Season 3 Ends With a Massive Plot Twist

This story contains major spoilers for Emily in Paris season 3.

Well, well, well, if it isn’t another season of Emily in Paris we’ve just shamelessly binged in one sitting. The divisive Netflix series has returned with more eye-popping fashion and more drama than ever before, and it all ends with a plot twist that’s sure to send viewers reeling.

But first, let’s backtrack: The newly engaged Gabriel is reopening his restaurant, L’esprit de Gigi, with the hopes of earning a Michelin star someday. He’s even brought his grandmother to help him cook for the opening to make an especially good first impression. Later that week, his now-fiancée Camille will host an engagement party for them at her family’s chateau, and the whole crew is invited. But before then, Emily and Mindy run into Camille at lunch with Sofia, the artist she’s been having an affair with, unbeknownst to Gabriel. (Quelle horreur!) Not wanting to meddle, Emily continues to keep the intel from Gabriel. In the friendship department, Emily has been butting heads with Mindy’s new boyfriend Nico, the heir to an LVMH-like luxury house, but when Mindy finds out Nico asked Emily to leave her party, she finally confronts him about it. (As the old Spice Girls proverb once said, Nico: If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.) Trouble is brewing in the office, too: While Emily, ever the overachiever, is brimming with ideas for creative marketing campaigns, she oversteps into Julien’s latest project, which leaves him feeling bitter and undervalued. So much that he might leave Sylvie’s company.

Everything comes to a head at Gabriel and Camille’s engagement party. Gabriel learns that his restaurant is in fact on the path of earning a Michelin star. (Thanks to Emily’s colleague Luc, who brings his former girlfriend, an anonymous reviewer, to enjoy a few meals.) High on the good news, Gabriel approaches Camille and her family with an impulsive request: Let’s just get married now! She agrees, but when they’re finally exchanging vows in the chapel, she realizes: She can’t marry him. “Gabriel, the only reason we’re together is because I knew you were in love with Emily,” she says. Cue shock from the congregation, including Emily and her current boyfriend Alfie. “You and Emily have been in love with each other since the moment you met,” she adds, before running out. Struck by the news, Alfie leaves too, telling Emily that he won’t be anyone’s second choice.

As the dust settles, Emily and Gabriel meet outside the chapel to decompress. Now they both know how they really feel about each other, but the plot twists don’t end there. Just before the episode ends, Gabriel reveals some life-changing news to Emily—and it involves a baby.

“The big moment at the end of the series was, I think, just to kind of like, turn everything on its head and have the audience sort of suddenly have to reevaluate everything they’d seen for the past few episodes from a different perspective,” show creator Darren Star says.

Below, we’re breaking down the finale’s biggest moments, with some help from Star and the Emily in Paris cast.

Is Camille really pregnant?

After getting jilted, Gabriel reveals to Emily the real reason why Camille came back home early from her Greece holiday with Sofia: she’s expecting. That explains why Gabriel was in such a good mood when Emily ran into him after Camille’s return, and why they were in such a rush to get married. Of course, the episode ends after Gabriel delivers the news, so we have yet to see Camille announce her pregnancy herself. But Camille Razat, the actress who plays her, talked to us a little bit about what her character might be feeling throughout all of the madness.

“First of all, the marriage,” Razat says. “I feel there is so much pressure on Camille to get married also because during the party, [it] was not planned to get married so soon and the parents are pushing her, and Gabriel is like, ‘Oh, let’s get married tonight.’ And she’s like, ‘Okay!’ I think deep down she wants it, and she knows that it’s not going to happen already. But maybe she’s doing it because she’s pregnant and she thinks that’s the way it has to be. In some way, she has to be with Gabriel, that’s the love of her life. She’s [been] with him for such a long time. She has a baby coming. So it’s the logical thing to do.”

However, Camille’s mind isn’t completely clear of distractions. She’s probably still thinking of her friend-turned-fling, whom Gabriel still doesn’t know about. “I think she still has Sofia in mind,” Razat adds. “I think she really does like Sofia, and I think she doesn’t want to do what people expect her to do. I think she wants to be her own person. On her own path.”

Creator Darren Star felt the finale was “the right moment to kind of sort of drop a piece of information that I think justified a lot of what had happened in the prior couple episodes: the rush to get married and all these sort of things, that I think Emily was kind of wondering and questioning and swept under the rug and was sort of like, looking at everything from one point of view and suddenly had to flip her point of view on everything.”

But some of the clues were already there. For example, the threads were set up through the season showing Gabriel’s dreams of having children and owning his own restaurant—and having a general sense of commitment.

“One of the things he was gonna commit to was Camille and this idea of having a child with Camille,” Star explains. He says “a sense of purpose is what was most important” to Gabriel as he makes these big life decisions. “And they weren’t decisions that he was sharing with Emily. They were private decisions. And I think it was nice that there were sort of private things going on with other characters that Emily wasn’t aware of. And because we see the show from Emily’s point of view, the audience didn’t have all the information either.”

What happened between Gabriel and Emily?

Shortly before the baby reveal, Gabriel and Emily confess their true feelings for each other, but in a rather awkward way. When he asks her if she does have feelings for him, she shrugs and says, “They’ve always been there.” He responds, “It’s been hard for me too.” This isn’t the romantic, climactic confession you see in most rom-coms; the two are still fresh from getting dumped by their respective partners moments earlier (in the same room!) and are still reeling from watching the wedding culminate in disaster.

“There were many different ways to play that last scene,” Collins, who stars as Emily, tells us. “And you know, [Gabriel and Emily] never fully expressed their feelings for one another directly, ever. It’s always been through looks or the kind of ‘will they, or won’t they.’ And this was the first direct contact of expressing feelings in this kind of environment. Especially for Emily, who had moved on with Alfie. It is such a tense, bleak situation at the end. And it’s just the two of them.”

Then their confession is quickly followed by Gabriel revealing that Camille is pregnant, so they couldn’t relish in the romance for too long. Lucas Bravo, who plays the heartthrob chef, felt a deep responsibility as the one to deliver the bombshell at the very end of the season. “I felt a big sense of duty because, you know, you get the last word and you know that on that sentence, a million people are gonna go, ‘Oh my God.’ So there’s that sense of duty, and also I was like, ‘Oh my God’ [after reading the script],” he says.

The ambiguous feeling at the end of that sequence was intentional, Collins explains. “The idea that we end it with us both looking off into the kind of abyss in this kind of settled-within-the-confusion type of feeling was really important, because it couldn’t be too much of anything,” she says. “It couldn’t be too much sadness, it couldn’t be too much happiness. It had to just be this overwhelming feeling of like, ‘Wait, what?’ And then it cuts to black. And so it allows us to sit with our thoughts as actors as to what happens next season, because you couldn’t decide too much now, because we don’t know how [season] four starts. So it was important to have it be left within this quiet confusion, as opposed to something too outlandish and loud.”

Filming the wedding scene, however, was a different experience. “I love filming those kind of scenes because I love when there’s an emotional intensity and everybody has to be very focused and the set is very quiet; I thrive on this type of energy on set,” Bravo says. “So it was the most fun I had this season ‘cause we measure how important those scenes are for the story. And so everybody wanted to give their best. And I think everybody in that church gave their best performance. Camille is absolutely breathtaking. I think Lucien, as he leaves the church, is amazing. Everything, every little detail, every little nuance. Even just Lily kept looking into Ashley’s eyes and you can read so much. It’s so rich.”

What happened between Alfie and Emily?

As Camille made her big exit from the chapel, Alfie was caught in the crossfire. He was stunned to hear Camille say that she and Emily pledged to each other not to date Gabriel, because they both had feelings for him. “I knew it,” Alfie says under his breath. His trust in Emily is completely broken now. As he gets up to leave, he tells Emily, “Sorry, but I’m nobody’s second choice, Cooper. Now go and get your man.” Before Emily can exclaim, “But you’re my man!” he cuts her off: “No, I’m not. I don’t think I ever really was.” Ouch. Alfie deserves better.

As much as I loved seeing him and Emily together, there were already some cracks in their relationship throughout the season, like Emily still spending time with Gabriel and Alfie hesitating to introduce Emily to his mother.

Filming that tense wedding scene “was really kind of special because I think everyone brought their absolute A-game and you don’t really get to see that side of the characters,” Lucien Laviscount, who plays Aflie, says. “It was heartbreaking. So personally, for me, it was so easy to kind of jump in, because you’re just reacting to everyone else’s emotions and feelings.”

As for how he feels about his character by the end of it? “And for Alfie, oh, it’s devastating. Devastating. This girl has got it all going on. He’s at this family house and the mic gets dropped and the bomb explodes and…yeah, I was heartbroken for Alfie. I was a little bit caught up for him, I almost admit.”

Is Julien leaving Sylvie’s company?

While all of this is happening, Julien is dealing with a dilemma of his own. With Emily as the star employee in the office, he often feels overlooked and his hard work ignored. He finally loses his patience when Emily derails his pitch for his client, Turner & Ascot, with her own ideas for a social campaign. He storms out of the room. And though he returns after a quick pep talk from Sylvie, that isn’t enough to convince him to stay. Later that night, Julien sends an email to an unknown recipient, hinting that he’s leaving Sylvie’s agency: “I’ve considered your offer. Please don’t discuss with anyone.”

“I think that it’s very difficult for him to make this decision,” Samuel Arnold, who plays Julien, says. “And I even want to go as far as saying that making choices in this season is at the center of the story. And his own choice is very difficult, because he has to weigh it, because the company is his family, his loved ones, but it feels like he’s gotta put himself first. If he’s undervalued, he’s gotta do something that will give you a win, professionally speaking. And yeah, that’s where he’s at by the end of the [season].”

As Arnold says, this won’t be an easy move for Julien, considering his close relationship with his other colleagues, including Sylvie, who is not just a boss, but also a mentor and even, sometimes, a friend. “I think this [season], it’s that dynamic where Sylvie is our boss and the adult in the office,” Arnold says with a laugh. “But at the same time, we grew closer to her and really, really connected with her and became allies and almost equal within that dynamic.”

Sylvie, portrayed by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, also gets herself into a work-related pickle by the end of the season. Her husband, Laurent (Arnaud Binard), plans to open a branch of his private club, Laurent G, in Paris, and he’s enlisted her help to market the opening if the plans are confirmed. He’s just waiting for the approval of one more board member—who turns out to be Louis de Léon, the owner of JVMA, with whom she has an icy relationship.

And is Mindy going to Eurovision?

Looks like it! Ashley Park’s Mindy has been handling a few boy-related problems herself this season, after parting ways with her performing partner Benoît and linking up with Nico de Léon, her former boarding school classmate. But in the finale, Benoît reemerges with good news: His song “Mon Soleil” was selected for the Eurovision Song Contest. “We’re going to Eurovision!” he tells her. Swept up in the moment, Mindy embraces Benoît and they almost kiss, but then her phone vibrates and she snaps out of it.

“I think my biggest hope is, if we do Eurovision, we get to do another original song,” Park says. It looks like we have a lot to look forward to in season 4.