The Ending Of Platonic Explained
Contains spoilers for the season finale of "Platonic"
Celebrated as a revival of R-rated comedy, the Apple TV+ series "Platonic" reunites actors Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen with writer Nick Stoller, who teamed up on the 2014 film "Neighbors" and its sequel, "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising." This time, they've crafted an eight-episode story centered on a pair of best friends of different genders: Will (Rogen) and Sylvia (Byrne), old school friends who haven't spoken since a bitter falling out many years before.
Rekindling their old friendship, however, means overcoming plenty of hurdles, from Sylvia's very different lifestyle, Will's recent acrimonious divorce, and the curiosity of their friends and family who often don't quite understand their platonic friendship. But can a man and woman ever truly have a friendship with no romantic entanglements at all? That's just what "Platonic" ponders, as Sylvia struggles with a mid-life crisis and Will deals with a failing business and is unlucky in love. Can Will finally be free of his past, and can Sylvia find a new purpose? The season finale tries to answer these questions, and we'll explain all that and more as we dive into the ending of "Platonic."
What you need to know about Platonic
When "Platonic" begins, we meet Sylvia as she learns that her old friend Will has recently gotten divorced from the uptight, pretentious Audrey. This touches a particular nerve, because Sylvia never liked Audrey, and her friendship with Will fell apart after she'd told him exactly how she felt. Now that Will's marriage is over, Sylvia longs to reconnect, as she's never gotten over the loss of that platonic friendship.
The problem is that their lives are in very different places now: Sylvia is a stay-at-home mother of three, married to successful lawyer Charlie (Luke Macfarlane), while Will is a fun-loving bachelor and co-owner of a hip, local bar called the Lucky Penny. While Will loves to go out drinking, partying, and carousing, Sylvia lives a more ordinary suburban life. But once they reconnect, Sylvia begins to let loose a little, joining Will at his late night jaunts while realizing that she might not be as happy with her life as she thinks.
While Charlie is at first supportive, he quickly becomes resentful of all the time Sylvia's spending away from the family. Encouraging her to get back into the workforce, he grows more concerned when he believes that Sylvia might be fooling around with Will behind his back, even as they search for a new, bigger, family home. Heading into the finale, Will faces new problems with his bar's co-owners — one of which is his ex-wife's stepbrother — while Sylvia's search for meaning has hit a crossroads.
How Sylvia and Will's friendship has evolved
When Sylvia and Will first meet, it's an awkward encounter. They seem to be on entirely different wavelengths, with Sylvia a suburban mother ferrying her kids to and from school, organizing play dates, and chatting with fellow moms. Will, meanwhile, still dresses like a teenager, works at a bar, and doesn't seem to understand his old friend's new life at all. But after an unfortunate encounter on the street where she witnesses Will fighting with his ex-wife Audrey, Sylvia decides to help console him, spending the night out with him drinking and having fun.
Once they've shared that night together, Sylvia and Will become fast friends again, and it's not long before they're spending almost all of their free time together. Will helps Sylvia with various problems — from a broken toilet to checking out a house for sale that she's considering — and Sylvia returns the favor by encouraging Will to meet new people and sever ties with Audrey. At the same time, they've also managed to work through the lingering resentment of how their friendship had dissolved years before, with Will forgiving Sylvia for being blunt about his ex-wife's flaws, and Sylvia forgiving him for cutting her out of his life afterward.
As the show's season finale draws near, Sylvia gets caught between Will and his bar's negotiations with the restaurant chain Johnny Rev after its celebrity CEO sexually harasses her.
Sylvia's journey
Sylvia is more than just a good housewife and mother of three: she's also a talented lawyer herself. Years before she had kids, she was an associate at the same firm as her husband Charlie, but she'd abandoned her career to embrace motherhood, with no regrets. Yet, now that she's re-affirmed her friendship with old pal Will, she's realizing just how much of life she's been missing out on. At first, she deals with this by partying with Will, reverting back to her high school days where she used party drugs and stayed out all night.
But Sylvia soon sees that Will's freewheeling ways aren't actually making him happy, and they aren't helping her either. Eventually, Sylvia finally accepts Charlie's offer to help get her an associate's position at another law firm. But after a disastrous first day, which ends with Will trying to rescue her with a harebrained scheme, she's left facing yet another crisis of faith.
By the finale, Sylvia is unsure of what the future holds for her: she's still struggling to find her dream home, seems to have no career hopes, and has nearly lost her marriage after Charlie gets physical with a coworker while drunk. Thanks to Will's encouragement, though, she decides to help her mom-friend Katie (Carla Gallo) — who just so happens to be marrying one of the co-owners of Will's bar — organize her nuptials. That gives her a promising new start as a wedding planner, completing her journey through her mid-life crisis.
Will finally moves on
As the series comes to a close, Will's partners in the Lucky Penny have been trying to force him out because he has ruined every major money-making idea they've had. With him unwilling to leave, they've demoted him in his own business, and now he finds himself taking orders from a lower level brewmaster who has no idea what he's doing. Likewise, his new relationship with the much younger Peyton (Emily Kimball) has ended, and now it's his turn to have no idea what the future holds.
Thankfully, Sylvia is there for him, and after the owner of Johnny Rev is exposed as a sexual predator and ousted from the company, he's faced with a new opportunity: a job offer from Johnny Rev to become their brewmaster. Showing just how far he has come since the season began, and how strong their platonic bond has become, Sylvia encourages Will to leave his bar for good and take the job, embarking on an all-new life for himself. He's also able to parlay the role into a romance, linking up with the company's new CEO, Jenna (Rachel Rosenbloom).
In the finale, Will has relocated to San Diego and begun his new life as a happily engaged man, finally ready to settle down and be the adult in the room.
Charlie accepts his wife's platonic friendship
"Platonic" is mostly focused on Sylvia and Will and how their friendship helps each of them through a difficult moment in their lives. But Sylvia's husband Charlie also gets some time to go on his own journey, facing his own dilemmas, before blossoming as the final credits roll. At the outset, he's happy to see his wife reconnect with Will, but begins to grow suspicious when he learns that she's keeping things from him. Before long, Charlie comes to fear that Sylvia may be having an affair with Will, and while working through it, he mistakenly has a drunken intimate moment with a coworker.
In the season finale, though, Charlie is able to hash things out with Sylvia, who forgives him for his drunken mistake. Realizing that even married couples need friends outside their marriage, Charlie is finally able to see that Sylvia's relationship with Will is a strong one, and he ultimately comes to accept their friendship as a healthy part of their lives. After a turbulent season that saw their marriage tested, it seems that Charlie and Sylvia are happier than ever when all is said and done. In fact, at Katie's wedding, Charlie can even be seen bonding with Will during the reception, proving just how far he's come over the course of the story.
Charlie and Sylvia find their dream home
When audiences first meet married couple Sylvia and Charlie, they're visibly frustrated by the size of their small home. With three kids and just one bathroom, it's always a challenge to find enough space for everyone, and for some time they look at the prospect of buying a bigger home. But on just one income — even if it's Charlie's hefty lawyer salary — finding the right home proves a bigger struggle than expected.
At one point Will helps Sylvia assess a prospective home, ultimately deeming it a disaster. Following a flirtation with doing some construction to expand their existing residence, the finale finally has the couple move into their dream home. Aside from the fact that the new, bigger house was once the site of a grisly triple murder, it offers everything they want, including three bathrooms, at a price they can afford. Just as all of their personal struggles are smoothing out, it seems so too is their living situation, giving everyone a new home, including Will — who's off to live in San Diego.
The saga of The Lucky Penny
While Sylvia was off becoming a mother to three beautiful kids, her old friend Will was building a life of his own. Married to Audrey, who Sylvia never approved of, Will started his own business with two other partners, becoming co-owner and brewmaster of a local bar called The Lucky Penny. Though he's a genius when it came to making brewskies, one thing Will isn't great at is business. As he labors over making the perfect beer, his partners have to find ways of turning a profit, because Will always seems more concerned with his integrity than in bringing in the cash.
As the season opens, Will is faced with a double dose of problems. His divorce is more than just an emotional gut punch that he's unable to heal from: Because Audrey's stepbrother is also one of his business partners, the friction between the three friends is now finally coming to a head. In the season finale, the efforts to get Will to leave the bar don't go as planned, but Will is finally able to let go, releasing the last vestige of his relationship to his ex-wife when he agrees to sell his shares in the bar.
In the end, despite Will's insistence that The Lucky Penny couldn't succeed without him, it seems the remaining partners are able to get along just fine.
Kicking the bikes
A recurring joke that winds its way through "Platonic" is Will's apparent disdain for the city's public scooters. Early in the season he shows Sylvia how useful they can be in getting around, but when they get to where they're going, he kicks them over, and encourages her to do the same. Will repeatedly kicks the scooters over any time they appear, which at first seems to be little more than a running gag. But Will's aggression towards the scooters is also symbolic of his personal journey, and the finale hammers that home.
The scooters, in fact, seem to represent all that's wrong in Will and Sylvia's life, because when things are at their worst for Sylvia — after she loses her job after just one day — even she gets in on the scooter-kicking. In the final episode, Will kicks them one last time, but this time he's confronted by the city maintenance worker who manages them. Though Will tries to get away, the man finally catches up to him and scolds him for kicking the scooter, saying bluntly, "I don't know what you're angry about in your life, but take it out on something else."
The fact that this confrontation happens almost immediately prior to his decision to leave The Lucky Penny for Johnny Rev makes it something of a growth moment for him, too. Or perhaps he only decides to relocate to San Diego because the worker has revoked his scooter privileges.
So were Sylvia and Will truly platonic?
In the world of television, it's exceedingly rare to find a friendship between a man and a woman that is truly platonic, never once becoming romantic. Sure, there are coworkers, acquaintances, even a few that skirt the edges of more, but few that show the kind of loving bond that you might find between two female best friends or two masculine buddies. And even in the rare cases where such a friendship is portrayed, TV shows often find it hard to resist the allure of a will-they/won't-they dynamic, and usually have the friends at least once entertain the prospect of a romantic encounter.
"Platonic," however, completely defies this concept, and by the end of the finale, the friendship between Sylvia and Will proves as strong and loving as any seen on TV, without ever becoming romantic or sexual in any way. Sure, Sylvia's husband Charlie begins to worry that they could be involved in an extra-marital affair at one point, but the truth couldn't be further from his fears. Because at the end of the day — and by the end of the finale — we're left with the reality that Sylvia and Will love and care for each other in a truly platonic way that is rare to find on television.
So did Will and Sylvia really see a UFO?
Sylvia and Will go through many adventures together during "Platonic." They repair an overflowing toilet, go to an underground art replicator to fix a ruined corporate painting and save Sylvia's job (which fails), and break into Will's ex-wife's house to steal a lizard. In the final episode, however, they have what might be their strangest experience, while up on the roof of Sylvia's new home fixing some lights: they witness an apparent UFO.
Amazed by what they've just seen, the two best friends ask everyone else at the party if they'd seen it too, but nobody else can confirm it. In fact, the rest of the guests seem to mock the sighting, and poke plenty of fun at them for their claims of seeing an alien spaceship in the night sky. So the question remains, did they really see a UFO? Well, if the ending of the episode is to believed, yes, they really did. Because when Will and Sylvia meet at the end of Katie's wedding to talk about their evolving friendship, it's the only thing they want to discuss. And they both agree that the UFO they saw that night was very real.
How the actor's real friendships inspired Platonic
The central concept of "Platonic" — as suggested by its simple title — is to examine the ins-and-outs of an adult friendship between a man and a woman who share a deep love of one another that is never romantic. It's an idea that one of the series' stars can relate to. "I have a friendship with a guy who we were very, very close," Rose Byrne told the Hollywood Reporter while promoting the series. "We were each other's best friend and buddy and comrade out here in L.A.," she explained. "Nobody could believe that we were platonic friends ... people [were] always commenting."
When the idea for the series arrived, Byrne knew it was the perfect project for her and her former "Neighbors" co-star Seth Rogen, because they shared a similar dynamic. "We had such fun doing the 'Neighbors' movies and it felt like a good opportunity to explore something that we haven't seen that much," she said. "This idea of a friendship between a guy and a girl and what that can look like." In the season finale, Byrne and Rogen — as Sylvia and Will — demonstrate that such platonic friendships can weather any storm, through separate marriages, divorce, and other major life changes.
How the ending of Platonic sets up a possible second season
From the sobering beginning of "Platonic" to its delightful conclusion, Will and Sylvia go through remarkable life changes. As Sylvia grows from housewife and mother to successful career woman — with a burgeoning business as a professional wedding planner — her best platonic friend Will has accepted his divorce, left his own business to take a job in another city, and even found a new love and is set to be married. With the two buddies now more than 100 miles apart, it might seem that the story of their close friendship would be over. But the developments seen in the final episode actually provide the perfect jumping-off point for a possible Season 2.
While the first season of "Platonic" focused often on the troubles that Sylvia encountered in her own marriage as her friendship with Will grew, a second year of stories could do the same for Will. And while it was Will in this first season who fought his frustrations in his business, a potential Season 2 could see Sylvia battling with clients in her wedding planning business and seeking Will's counsel. It could also explore the challenges faced by friendships that are strained by distance, a problem many real-life bonds face.
We haven't heard anything about a second season for "Platonic" as of press time. But with the way the ending has left things off, there's plenty of story left to tell about the friendship between Sylvia and Will.