You’re the Worst Review: Pancakes (Season 5 Episode 13)
You’re the Worst Season 5 Episode 13, “Pancakes,” ends the series on a high note with a finale that feels entirely in keeping with its spirit.
To paraphrase Chuck from Supernatural: “Endings are hard. Anyone can poop out a beginning, but endings are impossible.” The pressure that exists there is enormous. You not only have to make a good episode within that series — where it is your last opportunity to make one — but you also have to leave it off at a place that feels satisfying and is consistent with the show you’ve created thus far.
It’s there that “Pancakes” truly excels as a swan song to this weird little anti-romcom of a show. While some of this fifth and final season has been hit-and-miss, the series finale is all hit. If nothing else, this definitively lets us all know that there has been a firm grip and understanding on the type of story that it’s been telling all along.
At its core, You’re the Worst has always been a show that has strived to explore what it means to accept yourself while finding ways to improve yourself — to be a greater, less destructive version of you. While this is a show that sometimes tipped too far into its own negativity, it most often didn’t lose sight of its unique kind of hopeful vision of its future.
On top of that, it understood one thing that made it almost revolutionary in a way: There is not one absolute way of loving someone. By its very nature, lampooning many of the tropes of the genre and the type of characters presented, it was able to explore areas that oftentimes go unexplored.
The show allowed its leads to be brusque and rude. Sometimes they were toxic and you hated them, but always without exception they felt like real human beings — people that would screw up, wake up the next day, and try a little harder to be a little better. They weren’t perfect people, because that doesn’t exist.
Your soul mate, if such a thing exists, isn’t what your mind has idealized. Chances are good that they are messy and complicated and will probably hurt you more than once. Love is this insane thing, and it cannot and should not mean the same thing for everyone.
The thing that works for you in a relationship or as a partner won’t necessarily work for someone else, and that’s the wonderful conclusion that this series is able to come away with. For some people, marriage is great. For Gretchen and Jimmy, they finally realize that that constraint upon their relationship is unhelpful.
Again, their relationship is messy and they aren’t like a “normal” couple. Their rough edges are rougher than most, and they don’t fit cleanly into a societal norm for what a healthy relationship should look like. What they realize — and what essentially becomes the thesis the show has been building to for five seasons — is that love is a journey, never a destination.
When all is said and done, will the pair stay together forever, even with a child? That’s for you as the viewer to decide. A lot of the time, a happy ending depends on where you put the period and no one understands that better than Jimmy and Gretchen. Perhaps one day Gretchen will do what she warns and step in front of a bus.
That’s not the point, though. There’s no prize waiting if you’re able to stay with the same person for fifty years. For them, it’s enough to build a life with each other as they decide to choose each other every day — not because they’re forced to by a vow, but because they want to.
Jimmy and Gretchen’s relationship was never going to be normal. Normalcy wasn’t in the cards for them for even a moment, but happiness together is what they make of it. The trajectory of their relationship has been rocky, “Pancakes” solidifies them as something to strive for through mutual acceptance, which has always been the greatest thing the show has to offer.
Structurally, this is a fantastic series finale. We’ve been led by the nose all season into believing that the pair was going to break up by the end of the series through brilliantly constructed flash-forwards, and they work like a charm in their final form.
The show took advantage of our misgivings around their impending marriage and the result is nothing less than a stroke of genius that we all should have seen coming, but didn’t. Well played, You’re the Worst.
Honestly, this is the only way it could have ended. Any other way would have come off feeling cheap and dissatisfying. Either other option — the two breaking up or getting married — wouldn’t have felt like an ending that this show deserved. Deciding not to get married at all is the perfect note to strike.
In the end, You’re the Worst is a show that swung wide and didn’t always land its mark. It always tried, though. What it will always have, that not even the show itself could take away, is that this is a show that had some of the most woefully human characters to ever grace our screens. They were ugly and nasty sometimes, but they were never just that.
Their nuances as deeply flawed people are what made them special. And what made them intolerable sometimes is what always brought us back to them: We recognize the same humanity in them that’s in us. They make mistakes just like we do, and the amount we hate them is often proportional to how much we relate to them in that moment.
Like its characters, You’re the Worst was often times deeply imperfect, but it went out on perhaps a higher note than it’s ever hit before — and there are so many worse things to say about a show than that.
What did you think of the series finale of You’re the Worst? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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You’re the Worst airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on FXX.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.