‘Younger’ Final Season Premiere Review: “Younger Forever”

Younger is back! Final season lands on Paramount+ with the premiere of nothing more and nothing less than 4 episodes and it could not have started in better shape. These 4 episodes have been emotional, they have made us cry, laugh and smile as only Younger knows how to do it while they established the plots on which this season is based. The last journey for Younger begins. And what a ride it will be. Ready to take it all in in our breakdown review?

Here we go!

The first thing we´re going to do is analyze the big elephant in the room: Charliza. The final season opens at the same time that season 6 ended, Charles just proposes to Liza. And her answer is ambiguous … she doesn’t say yes but she doesn’t say no either, she just asks for time to think about it, she loves Charles and he loves her, that is clear to them but … Liza needs to think. And that’s never a good sign …

However, everything seems to be fine between them. Josh, on the other hand, when he learns of the possibility that they are engaged… it hurts him, it breaks his heart but he takes the blow and accepts it. It’s … what she feels, even if it kills him, he wants Liza to be happy.

So when he sees her, he doesn’t hesitate to tell her. That conversation is killing him but … she has to be happy, she deserves it, it doesn’t matter that she’s not with him, if it’s Charles who makes her truly happy … he wishes them all the happiness. That’s why he doesn’t know what she are waiting to say “yes”, that is, they love each other, right? It’s time for her to embrace her happiness.

And this seems so precious to me that tears come to my eyes because you have to be very strong to let go of the person you love and wish her/him the best, even if that happiness is not with you, while you are breaking to pieces. That’s why in that last hug between them Josh has eyes like glass from unshed tears, he’s letting her go …

But what seems to me the most special and magical of all is that both of them make it clear that they want to be in each other’s life. What they have is forever, that bond, that connection, will never disappear. Both of them at this point may not want the same thing from each other or have been different things to each other, but they have always been together. Josh will not disappear from Liza’s life and she will not disappear from his. It is a fact.

Josh would rather have her as a friend than not have her at all in his life and she… she just can’t leave him behind. Liza just can’t imagine a life without him in it. This is a goodbye between them… but it is also a new beginning.

I never liked that Charles made Liza choose and forced her to cut off her entire relation with Josh, simply because that’s not something you do to who you love. That’s why I like that they fixed this. However, I´m Team Josh so this farewell pains me and my heart is broken as well. 

We all wanted an answer to this love triangle and I think it has been given to us. As Josh says, relationships need to be defined – I see what you guys have done there, producers – and it’s time for definition in Younger. It is not something that I like because I think they have chosen the most obvious and least risky option and I think that this story and its development asked for a greater risk but I think they have shown that, although Josh is still in love with Liza, it is not reciprocal. So Charliza fans, despite everything, I think this is your moment.

Of course, I will continue to be Team Josh (I will always defend that he is the logical and best choice for Liza) and who knows, with the turns this show takes, the choice may not be as final as it seems … hope is the last thing we lost. In the meantime, we have fanfics, thank goddess for them. So do I like it? Nop. Not at all. But it was about damn time that they defined this.

However, Charliza fans didn’t have time to savor this small victory. After the conversation with Josh, Liza has her answer. We all thought she was going to say “yes” but Younger always surprises us and Liza opens her heart to Charles about how much she loves him … but her wish not to marry him.

She was afraid of how he was going to react to this… but it’s what she really wants. She has already been married and, for her, a marriage brings with it other expectations and demands… she didn’t have a good experience with that and she loves Charles, it’s forever, she doesn’t need anything more than that. But Charles did. He’s old-fashioned and needs marriage, he needs to declare to the world that the two of them belong to each other.

I´m the most romantic in the world so I love marriage, the public declaration of love and all the pomp and I would say “yes, go ahead” but Liza is not like me. She doesn’t need it and that’s perfectly fine. Just like it’s perfectly fine that Charles does need it. That is, for him, it is important because it means committing to the world forever, for life. It means that it is something that neither of them will ever want to get out of, it means that they are not going to take any step back.

His line of thought is that if Liza truly loved him, she wouldn’t mind getting married, she would be delighted with it. And this is where we start to have problems. It is simply a logical conclusion that we would all come to but that doesn’t mean it is real, it is not. In fact, it is very clear in the conversation between Charles and Maggie.

He literally tells her that he thinks he never had all of Liza´s heart. Because he really believes it. He thinks that if he had it, just like she has his, she would say “yes”. For him it is simple, if Liza doesn´t want to marry him, it means that she doesn’t want to commit for life and that she wants to leave an open door, the possibility of taking that step back. However, Maggie clarifies that he has Liza’s complete heart but he… he just can’t believe it.

In fact, I think he needs to see it with his own eyes, Charles needs to see that he is wrong about Liza and what she feels. He needs to understand that he is making a mistake here and that Liza loves him with everything she has just… she doesn’t want to have any public weddings because, for her, they are already married. But one only learns by blows… and I think that is what Charles will have to do this season.

All of this brings Charliza to a point of no return. Both want different things right now and when that happens, it’s best to break up. I agree with Charles here. Going forward the way Liza wanted it would only hurt them more because right now neither of them are going to change their minds. So breaking up is the best decision one wants to make when a relationship is not going to give you what you want out of it. Because they both deserve to have what they want.

I don’t deny that, despite not shipping this couple, it has hurt me to see them break in such a hard and abrupt way but, above all, what has made me cry has been to see Liza’s farewell with Charles’s daughters. For her, they´re like her own daughters and having to say goodbye makes it all more horrible. That’s why she doesn’t want to say goodbye to them, because that would be like accepting that it’s over for good … and she’s not ready.

This breakup changes everything. Quinn, who is still a harpy, gets too close to Charles, clearly showing her interest and although he doesn’t pay attention to her, this serves to make Liza make the biggest mistake of her life due to jealousy, treating Charles unfairly – jealousy does that to you – and running off with a random guy whose only goal was to sleep with her.

I did not like Liza’s attitude here (in fact, at all times I was thinking “no Charles, don’t do this” “no, Liza, don´t do that”) although I understand her, she is simply human and therefore imperfect but that makes her real. And we can all feel identified with this, with doing something stupid out of spite.

That’s just what Liza does. At first, she rejects the guy but, later, it is she who takes the step … and she sleeps with him. It is not serious, it is not real, it is simply a product of spite, jealousy and pain. We like it? Nop. We understand? Yes. Even if it hurts.

Quinn, for her part, doesn’t hesitate to make her move and kisses Charles. He doesn’t take her away but I think that, at first, it’s more out of his surprise than because he really wanted to let her kiss him and then his anger and pain do the rest. However, I think another…relationship? begins here out of spite and, above all, with a harpy who has always wanted to sink them and is something like the arch enemy of Liza and Kelsey. Facepalm, Charliza.

Of course, Quinn wasn’t going to leave things at that and, true to her viperine nature, she asks Liza’s permission to go out with Charles just with the intention of hurting her. Liza´s hurt but… they don’t have anything anymore and she must accept it, she must let Charles move on.

However, she wasn’t going to miss out on snapping at Quinn and I applauded her standing for this. But Quinn has a lot more experience of being a b*tch and threatens Liza with firing her if she talks to her like that again. In fact, she calls herself the new girlfriend of her boss. Isn’t she going a little fast? Who is volunteering to kick her ass?

As this whole earthquake goes on, Charliza’s relationship reverberates on Josh. He has no choice but to resign and accept Liza’s choice. In fact, he already believes that she will have said “yes.” This is why he is so surprised when Liza confesses that she and Charles broke up. For Josh it’s… he sees a glimmer of hope. He consciously knows that hope is empty hope but he can’t help feeling it. To look at her and imagine what it would be like… to win her back, to try to rekindle that fire that was between them now that her break with Charles seems final.

But he then sees her. He sees her sad eyes, her serious expression, the effort she makes not to cry … and that fleeting hope disappears. He knows that this is not the time, that it may never be it again. She is sad, hurt, angry, vulnerable … he is not going to take advantage of a moment like this. If something happens between them again… he wants it to be real and right now it wouldn’t be.

So Josh just has to give time to time and hope … hope that their paths will meet again, although he doesn’t have much because he doesn’t believe that Liza’s feelings for Charles can disappear so quickly, maybe they never will.

That’s why he looks at her with that longing in his eyes as he walks away from her. He is in love with a woman … with whom he feels that he will not be able to be again, that he will not be able to have that moment of happiness that he longs for so much. And it hurts.

However, Liza has moved on and he… he must do the same. For the sake of his heart, he should forget about Liza and just see her as a friend. So he meets a nice and funny girl and sleeps with her. Although he makes it clear that he only wants occasional, no-compromise sex… he’s not ready for anything else right now. The only person he wants to have something more with is Liza, with someone he feels he lost. And it is still too early for him to think about having something like that with someone else. Not while Liza occupies his heart.

Now, let’s talk about the other elephant in the room AKA Zane and Kelsey. Due to COVID reasons, Charles Michael Davis, our Zane, could not participate too much in Younger final season so they had to find a reason to justify that absence. That is something that they could not control but, nevertheless, the way of dealing with this…is bad and I don’t like it. Breakup with someone on the phone/message /video call will always be the height of cowardice. And why Zane did it seems to me somewhere between ridiculous, unfair and retrograde.

I mean, Kelsey gets promoted and he can’t stand it … or something like that, because it’s not made too clear either, and later, we learn that he got a new position that surpasses Kelsey’s. Zane’s excuse about competition is… absurd. After all, their relationship has always had a point of competition between them and if they love each other, if they finally dared to take the step, I don´t understand why he does this now.

Kelsey had a hard time accepting openly what she felt for him and living it, that now Zane leaves her for such a weak reason and, on top of it, with a video call is … unfair and has completely destroyed her. Speaking of that video call, cowardly acts where there are… there are things that must be said in person.

I know this is all conditional on the actor’s inability to participate more in Younger but they could have shown something like Zane getting a job in another state. A distant relationship, with its ups and downs, with its difficulties … I think that would have been more fair.

This is Younger‘s final season and I just want my ships to end up happy and together, that’s why I want Zane to come back at the end of the season to tell Kelsey what an idiot he was and fight to get her back but he must fight a lot because now, he doesn’t deserves Kelsey.

Have I ever told you how much I love Liza and Kelsey’s friendship? They´re adorable and cute together and I think they are a reflection of what true friendship is. Both always support each other and are there for each other, they don’t even need to speak, they just know how the other feels and if they need a hug, an ice cream or a kick in the ass to wake up. I love them and I was very excited to see them again, I didn’t  know how much I missed them until I met them again.

Our favorite Bridgerton visited us again! We saw Claire with the adorable little Emma and it was really a pleasure to have Phoebe Dynevor in Younger again, even for a short time. Although, doesn’t it happen to you that after seeing her as Daphne Bridgerton, you just wanted to ask her where left her husband AKA the Duke? Because I do. And, yes, I admit it, I’m quite obsessed with Bridgerton but, luckily, Netflix is ​​going to have my obsession well fed for a few more years. Let’s hope to have Phoebe at Younger again.

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As a last note, I LOVE LAUREN! Seriously, I don’t think I can love her more. She’s a diva and a queen who just makes me laugh out loud and I adore her.

Here ends our Younger breakdown review of the first 4 episodes of the final season. We will be back next week with a new one.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to share with us in the comments below!

Younger final season airs Thursdays on Paramount+.