Further Thoughts on Everything Will Be Fine

*Spoilers.*

 I wanted to talk a little more about Everything Will Be Fine, getting into spoilers I wanted to avoid in my Y tu Luna también reviews. As I’ve said, I wish we could get a second season of the show, not just because of how good it is, but because of the interesting turns taken in the finale.

After Julia and Ruy’s initial plan for an amicable separation/divorce turns contentious, they fight a nasty battle over the division of their family. Despite Ruy’s claim that both of them are 100% free to see whoever they want, he’s so incensed by the realization that Julia is dating Fausto that he changes the locks on her house. When Julia hires a lawyer in retaliation, Ruy pushes for full custody of Andrea. And when, in the midst of all the fighting, Andrea runs away, Julia and Ruy are caught between anger and fear—Julia doesn’t know whether to blame Ruy or acknowledge that he’s just as worried about their daughter as she is.

But when Andrea is brought home safe and sound, all that tension gives way. Julia and Ruy (and Fausto) are so happy that Andrea is all right, they spend the night celebrating—drinking, dancing, and getting high. More than once, Ruy and Julia steal away to make out, and when Fausto walks in on them, Julia invites him to join in.

We only see the very beginning of the threesome, which gives off definite Y tu mama también vibes, but when we catch up with them the next morning, there’s no sense that this was a step too far or something that’s lobbed a grenade into their existing relationships. Instead, they gently tease each other about it, with Julia pointing out that Ruy and Fausto had quite a good time with each other and the guys joking that they’d be the first recruits if Julia ever started a sex cult. The scene feels cozy and familiar—it doesn’t necessarily put an immediate new label on the dynamic between the three, but it does feel like something has shifted, and when Andrea wakes up and wanders over to them, it feels perfectly domestic.

We then jump forward about a year, so there’s no serious “what just happened?” / “what are we now?” / “do we really want to do this?” discussion. But when we check back in with Julia, Ruy, and Fausto after the early months of the pandemic, they’re all living in the house together. It could be argued that it’s now Julia/Fausto, and Julia and Ruy just get along well enough that he’s still living in the house and they’re all raising Andrea together. Since COVID would’ve hit pretty quickly after their threesome, it’s possible that Julia didn’t want to make Ruy try to find a new home and job during a pandemic and was feeling enough renewed warmth for him that they decided to give it a go as platonic co-parents. In the 2021 scenes, we definitely see Julia and Fausto together romantically/sexually, and we don’t see Ruy specifically interacting with either of them in that way. There’s a world in which Julia is pulling off a more successful version of Marvin in Falsettos, living her best life with “kid, wife husband, and lover” at her side.

That’s certainly not what other people think, though; it’s evident that people around Julia, Ruy, and Fausto think they’re in a polyamorous relationship. We get little hints throughout these scenes, like Andrea’s friend Caro not playing with her anymore, and at the end of the finale, their cute little family game of “last one inside is a chicken!” is brought up short by the hateful graffiti painted on their door. “Disgusting Pigs—Family is Sacred.”

Like I said, it’s possible that Ruy isn’t “with” Julia or Fausto, and it’s conceivable that other people’s ignorant judgments about them are based off something that isn’t even true. But I tend to think they are in a polycule of some kind. I find it the more interesting choice, and it goes along with the show’s theme that marriage is an outdated institution that was always more about ownership than love. And as much as I’d think to see more of them all together in a second season, I kind of like that the finale doesn’t explicitly define it. That’s interesting as well, that we don’t see Ruy joining Julia and Fausto in the bedroom after he puts Andrea to bed. Regardless of the specific relationship between Julia, Fausto, and Ruy, it’s clear that, along with Andrea and Idalia, they’re a family, and they’re deciding what that looks like.

Like I said in my review of the season finale, I think the show does a nice job of setting the scene for how the initial threesome happens. Emotions are high after Andrea’s safe return home, everyone is feeling generous toward each other, and there’s enough alcohol and marijuana that all three have dropped some inhibitions. But beyond that, this rewatch showed me just how much the series lays the groundwork for this ending. My first time through the show, I of course noticed Ruy’s friend Raiza, who’s in a throuple with two other women. She gives Ruy periodic relationship advice, and she reiterates multiple times that a polyamorous relationship is a lot like any other, just with even more communication—it’s not endless sex or an instant recipe for dysfunction, and they can succeed or fail based on the level of honesty, openness, and commitment from all involved. When Andrea meets Cameron, she balks at the idea of her being Raiza and Romila’s girlfriend, saying, “That’s not allowed.” Cameron simply smiles and assures her, “We’re allowed.”

Raiza and her girlfriends are the most obvious piece of foreshadowing for the ending, but they’re not the only one. While they’re small moments, we also get Fausto’s concerned reaction when he learns that Ruy found out about his and Julia’s relationship. It actually causes friction between him and Julia for a while, because she’s weirded out by Fausto worrying over Ruy’s feelings. And when the two of them make up, she rolls her eyes at Fausto encouraging her to work things out amicably with Ruy. She makes a “should I give you his number?” joke, and he quietly pushes back at the homophobia in that remark. Finally, there’s the scene where Andrea is deliberating between two prince dolls to go with her princess, and Julia makes a not-so-thinly-veiled speech about her own situation, ending in her tearfully asking why the princess is stuck with the first prince in a “happily ever after curse” when she met a second one that she loves so much. Andrea, not picking up on the analogy, simply wonders, “Why can’t she play with both of them?”

I don’t know enough about polyamory to say how any of this stacks up from a representation standpoint, and nobody really seems to be talking about the show online (it doesn’t help that the title is relatively un-Google-able.) But I personally found it really interesting, and again, I wish we could get another season and see more of the new dynamic between these three characters.