The Final Shot of Beef Season 2 Speaks Volumes

Spoilers below.

The final episode of Beef season 2 ends with a striking image. It starts with a bird’s-eye view of Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), an omnipotent billionaire, visiting her first husband’s grave. As the camera pans out, more scenes come into frame, featuring other couples from this season: There’s Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) fighting; Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton) sunbathing; Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho) and Park eating; Troy (William Fichtner) and Ava (Mikaela Hoover) flirting; and so forth. Together, they form rings around the chairwoman, creating a circular figure that looks like a clock face or a zodiac calendar. According to showrunner Lee Sung Jin, it’s a depiction of samsara, or the wheel of life in Buddhism and Hinduism. Regardless of how you see it, the shot underscores the theme of this season: that relationships are never-ending cycles with no escape.

Lee wanted to close season 2 with some “spiritual depth,” he told Audacity, and found a fitting religious metaphor. “I have these paintings saved on my phone that are depictions of the Buddhist or Hindu concept of samsara, which is the idea that we’re all kind of eternally trapped in these cycles of life and death and love and suffering.”

And our couples this season were trapped indeed, whether romantically, socially, or financially. What started as a petty rivalry between two duos (Josh and Lindsay vs. Ashley and Austin) snowballs into something more ominous when the 1 percent joins the equation. Enter Chairwoman Park, the owner of Monte Vista Country Club, who can move economies and governments with a phone call.

Youn Yuh-jung as Chairwoman Park and Song Kang-ho as Dr. Kim.

By episode 8, she has forced Josh, the club manager, to embezzle money for her so she can cover up a death at her husband’s cosmetic surgery clinic (a death that, importantly, her husband accidentally caused). She starts offering all-inclusive packages to club members that include flights, hotels, and treatments at his clinic, Trochos, to funnel even more money. And she plans to pin the embezzlement entirely on Josh so she can get away scot-free. She even has one of her henchmen try to kill him and frame it as a suicide, but Josh miraculously survives.

Most of the season finale takes place in Korea, on Park’s home turf. Ashley and Lindsay touch down in Seoul, accompanying Ava for her procedure at Trochos. (They had a very rough flight after Lindsay learned that Ashley inadvertently caused the death of her beloved dog.) Eunice (Seoyeon Jang), Park’s trusted employee, is here in Korea because she has the chairwoman’s phone—she snooped through it and learned about the embezzlement and death cover-up. She tried copying the info onto a USB before Lindsay dropped the phone in the airplane toilet. Austin is also here because he’s in love with Eunice and wants to help her. And Josh later joins to save Lindsay from danger…no matter that they just signed their divorce papers.

Everyone is fearing for their survival in more ways than one. The aforementioned group (except for Ava, who’s clueless) dreads that Park might harm them. Austin is especially nervous, as he swallows the USB to hide it, places it in his bag after it exits his digestive system, and then loses it the next morning. Park, of course, wants the USB so her dirty work doesn’t go public. Her husband, Dr. Kim, has his own motives. One morning in Trochos, he approaches Austin, Ashley, and Lindsay and confesses that he wants to have Park arrested in exchange for a shorter sentence for his accidental crime. It’s a great plan—except Park hears everything and sends her henchmen after them. A thrilling, bloody action sequence ensues throughout the clinic, and Dr. Kim is killed in the crossfire. Austin, Ashley, Lindsay, and Josh are taken hostage.

Carey Mulligan as Lindsay and Oscar Isaac as Josh.

As Park walks them to their rooms, she is not mourning her husband. In fact, she scoffs at something he used to say: that “love is putting the person before yourself.” Her monologue that follows doubles as the thesis for this season: “Maybe you put others over self a few times, but only when it is easy. The universe is not designed for this. Thank God we survived billions of years, from tiny cell to bacteria to monkey, because we only care about self. That is why capitalism works: It is a system of nature, a system of the self. Love lives in this system. All relationships exist in this system. They are all the same, another way to serve the self.”

Love does not exist in a vacuum. It exists within and is shaped by capitalism. People use their partners for wealth, status, sex, food and shelter, companionship, or even just to feel better about themselves. As Lee hints at with the image of samsara, it’s a cycle you can’t escape, or sometimes can’t resist. We see each of these characters exhibit selfishness throughout season 2, whether it’s Lindsay flirting with men on her phone, Josh flying to Troy’s chalet when their dog is missing, Austin’s attraction to Eunice, or Ashley ordering Austin around. Ashley also has an interesting response to the USB, especially after she learns that she and Austin have made a viable embryo via IVF, meaning they’re about to become parents.

Just like how they blackmailed Josh and Lindsay to get her a promotion earlier in the season, Ashley now thinks she and Austin can get something out of Park if they give her the USB. They “know how the world works now”—it’s no use trying to take down a billionaire when they, two people lacking privilege, can get whatever they want from one of the most powerful people on earth. They could finally afford to raise a kid and get a house with a yard! God knows everyone else around and above them has cut corners, too! It’s a bleak, brutal message, but it’s so damn incisive it’s refreshing.

Cailee Spaeny as Ashley.

The couples reach a few breakthroughs in Trochos captivity. To our surprise, Josh decides to take the sole blame for all the crimes so that Lindsay walks free. He’s sentenced to eight years in prison and, in a romantic send-off as he’s taken by police, she promises to wait for him.

Meanwhile, Austin and Ashley break up in their cells. He is in love with Eunice and thinks Ashley doesn’t really love him; she just doesn’t want to be abandoned. She gives in and tosses the USB into his cell—as it turns out, she swiped it from his bag. He escapes through the roof and hails a taxi, calls Eunice, and tells her he’ll bring the USB to her and the authorities. They exchange “I love you”s and hang up. But before Austin can get much farther, his face falls, and he gives the taxi driver a new address. He ends up giving the USB to Park instead, because he knows deep down that Ashley is right. They can get something out of this. Although he was the most selfless of the four main characters at the beginning of the season, Austin ultimately succumbs to the system. Even the most innocent minds can be corrupted.

The finale then jumps ahead by eight years. Josh is on the verge of getting out of prison and learns that Lindsay has moved to the English countryside and remarried. He decides not to go looking for her but is glad she’s happy. A scene of her in her new home reveals that she has a young daughter with her new husband, but will she go down the same path as her old marriage in this new one? Back in the States, Ashley is now the manager at the Monte Vista Country Club. She and Austin are married and have a young child of their own. On the way home, she seems to slip into old patterns when she asks Austin to read to their son tonight, because “I have so much to catch up on.” On the other side of the world, Chairwoman Park imparts some closing wisdom at her first husband’s grave: “This great, even beautiful cycle of life leaves us no choice but to accept it gladly.”

Lee spoke to The Wrap about this ending: “Lindsay kind of becomes a version of Troy and Ava, in a way…married to an older husband, probably for security, but still nostalgic for the past. And then eventually we know Troy and Ava become Chairman Park and Dr. Kim, and you see how that turns out, and Chairman Park now is…almost returning back to Ashley and Austin at the grave of her first love and lamenting her choices in life.” As Park rests her head on the tomb, a Phoenix song plays in the background, singing, “A visible illusion / Oh, where it starts, it ends / Love like a sunset.”

This season of Beef was conceptually more ambitious and maybe a little more amorphous than the first, but it lands like a sting. Instead of a steady, spiraling pattern of two enemies getting back at each other, the conflict here is more intertwined and convoluted—maybe even a little existential. (Are you really beating anyone if you’re just being beaten by the uber-rich?) The beef here is not only with other individuals, but with a pervasive system that puts everyone down. Like any good enemy, it drives competition to no end, and it’s so infuriating it could drive anyone mad. (Take the flaws of the American health care system, depicted expertly in episode 4.) If you really think about it, a beef is a kind of messed-up relationship. You need someone else to step on so you can get ahead. Revenge is a cycle, but so is capitalism. And so is life.