Anyone who has boarded the Dead To Me rollercoaster will tell you, in no uncertain terms, that the Netflix series has proven itself to be one hell of a wild ride.

Starring Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini as Jen and Judy respectively, it kicked off with a hit-and-run; Jen’s husband, Ted, has been knocked down and killed by a speeding car in the darkness, and his widow – firmly ensconced in the ‘anger’ stage of the grief spectrum – meets bohemian angel Jen at one of her local (and deeply unsatisfying) grief counselling sessions.

The pair hit it off immediately, bonding over the deaths of their significant others. Except, as it turns out, Judy has a secret: she’s the one who killed Jen’s husband – her “perfect” partner, Steve (James Marsden), is alive and well (albeit an abusive shit) – and what she’s actually grieving is… well, the loss of her unborn baby, the end of her volatile relationship, her infertility and her role in Ted’s murder, obviously. Go figure.

Come the end of Dead To Me’s first season, it seemed unlikely that Jen and Judy’s friendship – which blossomed like a beautiful phoenix from the ashes of all they’ve lost – could ever survive the lie that brought them together.

To quote Jen: “How do you forgive someone who hits your husband with their car and then drives away, leaving him to bleed to death on the side of the road? How do you forgive that?”

Somewhat surprisingly, it’s Steve who brings them back together. Or, rather, the death of Steve; Jen shoots him, he dies in her pool, and, just like that, Judy’s back in the picture, helping her friend clean up the blood, bury his body in the woods and cover up the messy trail of clues that leads the police straight to their door.

They also take the time to sabotage their exciting new romantic relationships: Jen with Steve’s twin brother, Ben (also Marsden), and Judy with Michelle (Natalie Morales). And then the show ups the ante even further with yet another hit-and-run car crash: Ben smashes his car into Jen and Judy’s vehicle as it idled at the very same intersection where Judy crashed into Ted.

Essentially, the series has blended soapy melodrama with soaring moments of very real, very raw human emotion – not to mention all of those deliciously dark undertones. Where, we wondered, would we wind up come the end of the third and final season?

Somewhere, as it turns out, entirely unexpected.

The action picks up in the hospital shortly after the car crash, where Jen and Judy are receiving some routine scans. The former is informed that she has cervical cancer – a devastating development that makes a lot of sense, given her previous breast cancer diagnosis and her mother’s history with the disease.

Except, as it turns out, it’s Judy – sweet, effervescent, eternally altruistic Judy – who is unwell; the doctor mixed the two women up due to the fact Jen is now sitting in her friend’s hospital bed. 

And, just like that, we assume that everything’s going to be OK. That the chemotherapy will work. That, if it doesn’t, the highly experimental treatment that Jen tracks down will do the trick. That someone, anyone, will save Judy, before it’s too late – because that’s what happens in this show, isn’t it? Something always happens, just in the nick of time, to veer our heroes away from the grasping hands of the cops, the FBI, the Greek mafia, and sets them back on course for a happy(ish) ending.

Not this time, though. After Judy confesses to murdering Steve – in a desperate bid to save her friend – the duo take a trip to a beachfront property in Mexico. There, Judy does what Judy does best: infects Jen with some of her own trademark positivity and optimism, ultimately convincing her best friend to visit Ben in prison (doing time for the aforementioned hit-and run) and tell him that she’s pregnant with his baby. To give their relationship another try.

And then? Well, then she urges Jen to go home, and – as is implied in a subtle scene, wherein Jen gazes out into the sea and spots the sailboat from her dreams – our beloved Judy dies in the ocean.

“You’re not leaving me,” she promises Jen during their deeply poignant final moments together.

“I’m staying.”

It’s a sobering moment for Dead To Me fans, who have become so used to the dark fairytale element to the series; sometimes, there isn’t an easy way out. Sometimes life is cruel. And sometimes – more often than we’d like to admit – it deals the very worst cards of all to the people we love most.

This blow hits all the harder when you consider the fact that, while she was filming the third and final season of Dead To Me, Christina Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that disrupts communication between the brain and body. Production shut down for about five months as she began treatment, and she was forced to grapple with the fact that she was fighting an incurable illness.

“There was the sense of, ‘Well, let’s get her some medicine so she can get better,’” she recalls during an interview with The New York Times. “And there is no better. But it was good for me. I needed to process my loss of my life, my loss of that part of me. So I needed that time.”

Applegate adds: “Although it’s not like I came on the other side of it, like, ‘Woohoo, I’m totally fine.’ “Acceptance? No. I’m never going to accept this. I’m pissed.”

Is it any wonder, then, that there were some takes where Applegate and Cardellini “couldn’t get the dialogue out” for crying? These two women had, after all, formed an instant bond when they first met on set – and the resulting friendship has proven itself to be one that runs every bit as deeply as Jen and Judy’s.

“I knew it was going to be really hard to get through, but I also wanted it to feel as weighted and authentic as possible – beyond just Jen and Judy saying goodbye, it was Christina and Linda saying goodbye, it was me saying goodbye and it was the entire crew,” creator and writer Liz Feldman tells Variety.

“When we shot that scene, I stood there with Kelly Hutchinson, who’s my best friend, a writer on the show and very much one of the inspirations for this relationship, and we just stood arm in arm bawling. Then I realised everyone was crying – the crew, our producers. I think we actually did have to sound edit some sniffles because it was not just coming from the two women on camera. It was really beautiful.”

Despite all of this, though, there is some ambiguity to that ending – or, at the very least, Cardellini likes to think so.

“You never know if she’s totally telling the truth,” she tells EW, adding: “I think there is a part of it where you’re like, ‘Well, she could have gone, I don’t know, anywhere.’ Is she gonna be in San Francisco? You know what I mean? There is an open-endedness to it that I think allows for people to make their own sort of choose-their-own adventure there.”

Adding that the aforementioned sailboat represents a bittersweet happy ending for Judy, Cardellini notes: “Even though Judy is a free spirit, I don’t think she was ever really free. I think she had a lot of guilt and shame, and so that maybe represents a sort of freedom that she could finally have.”

Whatever fans make of the ending, Applegate hopes that they can get past the visible element of her illness.

“If people hate it, if people love it, if all they can concentrate on is, ‘Ooh, look at the cripple,’ that’s not up to me,” she says. “I’m sure that people are going to be, like, ‘I can’t get past it.’”

“Fine, don’t get past it, then. But hopefully people can get past it and just enjoy the ride and say goodbye to these two girls.”

Hear, hear!

Dead To Me season 3 is streaming on Netflix.

Images: Netflix