The tension in the Nobody Wants This Season 2 finale isn’t something that can just be “tabled.”
Going into Episode 10, “When Noah Met Joanne,” our beloved unlikely pair, agnostic podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Jewish rabbi Noah (Adam Brody), have just had a hard, honest conversation about their relationship. In Episode 9, “Crossroads,” Joanne gets evicted from her apartment. Noah is excited about their future, but he isn’t ready to commit to moving in together — let alone taking a new step at all — when they’re still unsure if she’s going to convert to Judaism.
“Don’t you think we deserve to be in relationships where we can both be exactly who we are while still moving forward?” Joanne wonders. While neither Noah nor Joanne wants to rush her process, he doesn’t want this conversation to be off the table forever when his religion is so important to him.
“Noah cannot be with Joanne unless she converts but doesn’t want her to do it for him. Joanne doesn’t want to change for a guy but wants to be with Noah,” says Bell. “So there’s an incredible amount of friction.”
The Season 2 finale takes place at Joanne’s sister Morgan’s (Justine Lupe) engagement party. (Los Angeles locals will recognize the lavish venue as the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.) Morgan is set to wed her former therapist, Dr. Andy (Arian Moayed) — you read that correctly — so Joanne and Noah walk in faking happiness for Morgan’s sake. Noah’s brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons), and sister-in-law, Esther (Jackie Tohn), also feign happiness — they’ve been trying to reignite the spark in their marriage all season. Everyone’s going through a crisis of faith — in religion, sure, but also in themselves and their relationships.
So where do all the Nobody Wants This characters end up after the party? Let’s break it down.
All season long, Joanne is wrestling with, “Do I want to be Jewish? Can I be Jewish? Am I Jewish? Should I fake it?” says creator Erin Foster. But faking it isn’t in Joanne’s nature and isn’t how her relationship with Noah works. She wants to feel it but isn’t sure how. “She’s trying so hard to see it that she can’t see it,” says Foster. “She’s yearning for something to give her structure, purpose, boundaries, values, and traditions. Judaism can give her all of those things.”
After Noah ran to her to prove his love at the end of Season 1, they both clearly had different understandings of their conversation. Joanne thought deciding to convert was tabled indefinitely, whereas Noah thought it was paused but still on the table. “If the end of Season 1 left you with some questions, they have similar questions of each other,” says Brody.
As a rabbi who offers counsel for a living, not being able to figure this out quickly and thoroughly is challenging for Noah, explain co-showrunners Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan. “He’s the kind of guy who wants to solve things,” says Konner. Kaplan adds, “[If] you’re in a relationship that you want to be in for good, you have to navigate your professional life with that. His story in Season 2 is forcing him to figure out what he derives meaning from.”
With every episode, Joanne finds herself inching more and more toward being Jewish, even if she doesn’t fully recognize it at the time. She even excitedly texts her mom, Lynn (Stephanie Faracy), after Noah says her desire to analyze things from every direction is “very Jewish of her.” “She’s enjoying all these different things about Judaism,” says Foster. “But she keeps thinking God is going to just come down from the sky and be like, ‘And now you’re Jewish!’ ”
During the engagement party, it feels like she and Noah have reached the ultimate impasse on the conversion issue, and she ends up confiding in Esther in the bathroom. Their deepening friendship is a surprise to them both. But Joanne’s ability to “literally force” Esther to be friends with her no matter how much she’s resisted is further proof to Esther that she’s Jewish. Esther is able to open Joanne’s eyes to parts of her that she’s been overlooking. “She realizes in the finale she ‘couldn’t see the forest for the trees,’ ” says Kaplan. “It’s like how in The Wizard of Oz, the answer has been there all along. She just didn’t understand it.”
Foster says the writing team really toyed with who would help guide Joanne in her breakthrough moment. “It’s nice that it ended up being Esther. In the beginning of Season 1, she rejects Joanne completely. At the end of Season 2, she’s the one that’s like, ‘It’s so obvious you’re one of us.’ ” Tohn’s deep connection to her own Judaism helped her understand how to deliver that message. “And in real life, Kristen and Jackie are best friends. So that was cool,” says Foster.
Once Joanne has her Jewish epiphany, she rushes off to tell Noah. “In the first season finale, he’s running to her. Now she’s running to him,” says Konner. But unbeknownst to Joanne, Noah is already searching for her to clear things up. Just as he feels like he’s lost her and is catching his breath in front of LA’s scenic LACMA lampposts, he turns around to find that she’s already there waiting for him.
It may have seemed established earlier in the finale that he needed her to change for them to be together. But “he chooses her without her having to change in any way,” says Kaplan. Before she can even spit out the words, “I’m Jewish,” Noah tells her, “None of it matters, you are my soulmate. I don’t care if you’re Jewish. I don’t care if you’re not Jewish. I choose you, every time.”
With a wry grin, Joanne tells him, “You’re in luck,” and they seal their reconciliation with a kiss before the scene cuts to black. She doesn’t say the exact words we all know she’s thinking, but “with the ending, we felt that Joanne does tell Noah,” says Konner.
The parallel ending to Season 1 intentionally closes on a swoon-worthy note. “We wanted to end on romance, not religion,” says Foster. “The romance is him saying, ‘I don’t care what you are, I’m choosing you.’ We don’t really need to hear her saying, ‘Oh, my God, you’re not going to believe this. I’ve been Jewish this entire time,’ because we know that’s about to happen.”
How Noah and Joanne work through celebrating Valentine’s Day teaches them both about balance and specificity in how they care for one another. In the writers’ room, Kaplan says they all spoke about what Valentine’s represents to each person. “Sometimes you have an idea of what Valentine’s Day is or should be, but it’s not specific to who the other person is,” he says. “That’s a subtle thing that feels very real.”
On Valentine’s Day, Noah acts like the “perfect boyfriend” he’s always been — he gets flowers for all the women in his life, buys Joanne the same designer necklace he’s bought for girlfriends past, and curates a bubble bath. But repeating the same script doesn’t make it feel special and personalized for their relationship. Joanne helps him see true romance lies in his thoughtfulness in the everyday, like buying her a bedside table when he sees she needs one. “It felt romantic to me because he’s paying attention to what you need,” says Foster. “That in itself is very hot, romantic, and has real conviction. That’s what I want Noah to always have. He’s very confident and clear with his intentions.”
Joanne also helps him take accountability for his past toxic patterns. She learns he may have led people on before. “He’s flawed, but he’s perfect for Joanne,” says Foster. Joanne even makes Noah apologize to his ex, Rebecca (Emily Arlook). “She had been thinking this whole time Rebecca was a nut and awful. And all of a sudden, Joanne’s like, ‘Wait, you were a little crazy with her,’ ” says Konner. For Foster, “it balances things” between them.
Noah and Joanne’s approach to conflict resolution is one of their most commendable strengths as a couple, with healthy communication ingrained into how they operate. “It’s not Noah against Joanne,” says Bell. “It’s Joanne and Noah against the problem, which I think is a great framework to come at any relationship with.”
No, Morgan breaks off her engagement to Dr. Andy at their engagement party. She’s finally had enough of how he weaponizes confidences she shared in therapy. Even though he’s enamored with her and knows everything about her, she realizes it’s not enough to be worshipped. She can’t ignore the red flags that keep coming up, like the fact that he’d dated another patient of his before her. She also barely knows anything about him — like the fact that he has a twin!
“Morgan realizes that this guy is kind of a stranger to her. He knows a lot about her because they’ve been in therapy together for years, but she actually doesn’t know the person who’s across from her on the couch,” says Lupe. “On top of that, she was interested in this relationship because not only does he know her, but also he treats her really well, puts her on this pedestal, and he is obsessed with her. She needs something that’s healthier and more dimensional than that. She needs something real.”
Kaplan was keen to explore what would happen if Morgan were in a serious relationship. “At her core, she really wants the happy ending that she and Joanne always made fun of,” says Foster. After they end their two-year patient-doctor relationship, Morgan and Andy quickly move into boyfriend-girlfriend territory. Soon they move in together and eventually get engaged.
At first, Morgan relishes diving into the relationship full throttle and isn’t very apologetic about it, says Lupe. Only down the line does she realize what she’s getting into and how fast she’s moving. “She also might have moved so fast as a reaction to seeing Joanne and Noah in a happy, thoughtful, evolved relationship. There’s a little bit of her wanting to lap them or get into a relationship of her own.”
Morgan admits that she’s scared she’s just impossible to please if she doesn’t like being put on a pedestal. But her mom advises her that this just isn’t an equal or healthy partnership. “She’s trying to figure out what she wants and what kind of partner she should be with,” says Foster. “She doesn’t figure that out in the season, but she does learn a lot about herself. She knows what she doesn’t want.”
It’s complicated. “Joanne and Noah’s love shines a light on what could be wrong in other relationships in the show,” says Konner. Sasha’s burgeoning friendship with fellow “loser sibling” Morgan in Season 1 forces Esther to question in Season 2 why she isn’t having any fun — and why she hasn’t been for a long time. “Esther was so tightly wound in Season 1, and she really loosens up in Season 2,” says Tohn.
Sasha and Esther were originally friends who married young because they got pregnant with their daughter, Miriam (Shiloh Bearman). As Miriam gets older, “they’re wondering, ‘Are we committing to this for the rest of our lives? Is this it?’ That scares them and also makes them make some questionable choices in service of bringing them emotionally back together,” says Konner. (Think Sasha’s Valentine’s Day choreography to Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.”)
After fearing she might be pregnant, Esther feels palpable relief when she learns that she isn’t. Sasha is much more excited than Esther, but mostly because it could bring them back to a time in their marriage when they were happy. “He thinks that having a baby will help get them back there,” says Simons. “Ultimately, that’s not something that Esther really wants, but it might not have been something that he really wanted either.”
By the time they reach the finale, Esther surprises even herself by telling Sasha she wants to separate at Morgan’s engagement party. “She has this realization of, ‘If given the opportunity, is this the person that I would’ve picked? I don’t know. I love him. We have a wonderful thing, but I also realize that I’m pent up, angry, and want to sow my oats as Esther,’ ” says Tohn. “There’s something missing, and that might be work she has to do on herself. But she can’t come to that conclusion while they’re together.”
Sasha reveals his loyalty to her and tells her he’ll be waiting for her to figure out what she wants for herself. “Going into Season 2, it was important to us to show Sasha as the unlikely great husband who knows how to stand by his wife,” says Foster. Konner adds that while he’s a “man-child,” he also can be a really loving partner. And truthfully, he’s a little confused, too. “The thing that set this off was Morgan. He knows he has some responsibility in this crisis that Esther’s having and is trying to be patient,” says Konner.
Both Tohn and Simons consider the decision their characters come to in the finale “sad as hell.” Sasha confides in Morgan that if this is what Esther needs, then he’s got to ride for her. “Holding on even tighter isn’t going to help anything. It’s not going to make her happier,” says Simons. “He has to give her space to go do that, and, ultimately, he does.”
Watch every episode of Nobody Wants This Seasons 1 and 2 only on Netflix.
