Warning: The following contains spoilers for Tuesday’s Abbott Elementary finals. Proceed at your own risk!
Abbott Elementary ended its very strong freshman season with a trip to the zoo, which ended in Splitsville for a couple.
During the unsanctioned field trip — Ava desperate to go to the zoo, but not enough to tell the school district about the plan — grossly underqualified attendant Tariq received an email from the FADE program. They want him to come to New York for a year and Tariq assumed his girlfriend Janine would leave her beloved Philly to move with him. But after a heart-to-heart conversation with a terrified student, Janine told Tariq that they should take a break to find out who they are without each other.
Will this split open the door for Janine and her fellow teacher Gregory, who is now at Abbott full-time but is seeing Barbara’s daughter? Below, star and creator Quinta Brunson talks about Janine’s big moment of growth and what the future holds for Janine and Gregory.
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TVLINE | What was important to you when designing the finale?
Janine is growing up. And I think that’s been the theme of Jeanine’s journey for us all along. She grows as a teacher, grows as a person, grows in this relationship – or grows out of this relationship. So I feel like as we finally get to the end, our finale, she finally knows it’s time to grow and this is just the first step in what we hope will be a very long journey as a young person. At the moment Janine is 25. As the show continues to grow she will grow into an adult like a real adult. I know you think you’re an adult when you’re 25, but you really aren’t. She has this dream of being like Barbara and it’s not that easy to just snap your fingers and be like Barbara. Also, she won’t turn into Barbara. We want her to become her own person. So the finale is the first step towards that.
TVLINE | She definitely finds herself as a teacher in that moment when she tells the kids to sit down. She finds her strength and power as a teacher.
That’s one of my favorite moments because it’s a big leap for Janine. It’s a small step, but it’s such a huge step, especially in our first season. That was kind of the goal: How do we make their growth so small, but at the same time so big?
TVLINE | On a personal level, in her romantic life, where is she headed?
I think the first step for Janine is to know herself and that’s a part of her romantic life as far as I’m concerned. Knowing herself as an individual outside of her relationship with Tariq is important to whatever comes next. I feel like this is a young woman who needs to know herself before she can know anyone else, be it Tariq again, some random guy [or] Gregory. She needs to have her own kind of self-love journey, and I think we’ll see that with her. It doesn’t sound romantic, but it can be very romantic.
TVLINE | In making this finale, was there any discussion about how far you should go with the Janine/Gregory “Will They/Won’t They”?
It felt like it was too early in the series. In my head I have an endgame for the whole show, every character. But let’s say we didn’t want the space to mean anything to this ‘will they/won’t they’, maybe or later, I wanted the space to do that. So we ended it like we did with Gregory on his own journey and Janine on her own journey. That’s two characters, when they meet in the middle and they’re together, that’s awesome. And we want the audience to feel the same way. We’re hoping that at some point the audience will feel, “You know what, I’m happy for them alone, but we all secretly know we want them to get together.” But we’re taking an old tradition and trying new the wheel to invent, like shows like Parks and Recreation, The Office, even like Sam and Diane, even Friends, all of those [shows] have reinvented what that can look like, and that’s our goal.
TVLINE | Does Gregory know Janine is staying because he was sitting behind her when Barbara mentioned it on the bus?
[Smiles] I do not know. We’ll find out.
TVLINE | Did Gregory consider her decision to stay at all?
I don’t think he consciously took that into account. Janine is once again a person who doesn’t know herself as well as we viewers know her. That’s a cool thing about mockumentary: you know a lot more about these characters than you know about yourself. It’s like who you are when nobody is looking. Sometimes you’re not ready to confront that person. Janine hasn’t even admitted she has feelings for [Gregory]. The audience knows it, but neither of these two characters has admitted it to each other. So far, I don’t think he consciously played a role in her staying.
Abbott Elementary fans, what do you think of the end of the season? Rate it below and then hit the comments!