Beef spoilers follow.
No one could have predicted that an impetuous road-rage incident could have spiralled out into such a prolonged, deeply involved grudge match.
Yet somehow, Amy (Ali Wong) and Danny (Steven Yeun) — the characters at the centre of Netflix's new series Beef — have managed to take what should have been a transient interaction and magnified it to the point of utter destruction.
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Over the course of nine episodes, the pair's disdain for one another has been shredding the relationships in their lives, causing them to up the ante at every turn. Considering they've taken things to such extremes, the only way forward for them in Beef's final episode is down.
And what a fall they take.
What transpires is the most chaotic, distressing, yet weirdly beautiful end that fits the journey Amy and Danny have been on.
In a saga that has been pushing them to dangerous extremes, can the quarrelling duo make it out with their lives and their sanity intact? Let's find out.
Beef ending explained - What happened between Amy and Danny?
You would be forgiven for assuming Beef could only end one way, with Amy and Danny's hands wrapped around each other's necks as they choke the life out of one another. However, you would be wrong.
The final episode of the series does start out with the two not quite trying to kill each other but instead pushing each other to retaliate in a way that could lead to their deaths.
Case in point: After driving each other off the road and ending up stranded in the wilderness, Amy holds Danny hostage with a gun.
She means to force Danny to hand himself over to the police and take the blame for the events that transpired in the penultimate episode and everything leading up to it (the road-rage chase and the hostage situation).
However, when Amy is attacked by crows, Danny takes the opportunity to push her down a rocky hill, causing her to badly injure her ankle and lose the gun.
The only saving grace is that, at least for now, they've been separated — not unlike naughty children in need of a time-out.
The pair manage to survive the night despite their injuries and the lack of shelter, food and water. But their current predicament has only made them more bad-tempered when they stumble across one another again.
Unfortunately for both, they only have each other to lean on in this time of crisis.
Amy claims to know the way out but can't walk, while Danny can walk but doesn't have a clue how to get back.
As if that weren't enough misery to contend with, neither of them has mobile-phone service, so they're very much stuck with one another.
It's the perfect trust exercise as Danny piggybacks Amy across the wilderness and she navigates them to safety.
True to form, though, their truce lasts all of five minutes.
A fight over food erupts when Danny taunts Amy as he eats the last remaining Skittles. Annoyed, Amy pulls a tuft of Danny's hair, and he retaliates by dropping her to the ground.
There, she finds the gun, and a tussle over the weapon begins. Tenacious as she is, Amy manages to get Danny in an armlock and follows through in breaking his arm.
Victorious she might have been, but Amy was also tremendously short-sighted, as Danny is no longer able to carry her with a broken arm.
Instead, she thrusts the gun at him and instructs him to find food.
After eating what they believe to be elderberries, Amy and Danny become violently ill before tripping out. Here's where things get really interesting.
In their psychedelic haze, the adversaries begin to open up about what's really driven them to this desperately low place together.
They get philosophical, asking life's big, deep questions — like "What are chemicals?" and "Why are Asians all lactose intolerant?"
More seriously, their accidental, highly-dangerous intoxicated state has allowed them to be honest with themselves and each other about their own inner traumas.
"I mess everything up," Danny admits before opening up about the suicidal ideations involving the hibachi grills he'd tried to return — the very grills that led to him being in the parking lot where he met Amy for the first time.
"They wouldn't let me return them, it's like the world wanted me gone," he adds.
"Maybe that's why we're sick," Amy responds, and in doing so inadvertently admits that she feels the same.
Danny continues to open up as he reflects on his relationship with his parents and his upbringing. He also gets candid about his brother Paul (Young Mazino) and confronts the many ways in which Paul has deeply failed him.
"I think he just wanted to be seen," Amy deduces about Paul.
"We all do, right?" Danny agrees.
And in that moment, Amy feels safe enough to share that she doesn't want anyone to see who she really is.
It's an oddly healing exchange in which the pair start to understand one another and question their difficulties to find happiness.
The universe, however, seems to want them to reach a deeper empathic level. It wants them to fuse their experiences so that they really get a sense of each other's struggles.
With the aid of the druggy berries, they begin to connect on a mental level. And by that, we mean they are in each other's minds.
They're not just sharing thoughts but have become one person, speaking together as they tell the same story in tandem. It's a well-crafted moment that demonstrates how interconnected they are.
Once the tandem speaking stops, it isn't long before that connection evolves to the point of them speaking with each other's voices.
It transpires that they view their lives as a Catch-22, an empty but solid void slipping away — and if that makes no sense, it doesn't need to. The point is that Amy and Danny understand each other. They see the broken parts of each other, the rawness, the parts that need healing, understanding and compassion.
Eventually, when they believe themselves to be dying, they reach the pinnacle of this peaceful, euphoric healing.
"I see your life," says Amy in Danny's voice. "You poor thing. All you wanted was to not be alone."
"You don't have to be ashamed," he tells Amy in her own voice. "It's okay. I see it all. You don't have to hide."
By hearing the kindness they have longed for in this unusual way, it's as if they are giving themselves grace and compassion while simultaneously receiving it from each other.
"We should have done this more often," Amy-Danny says.
"What a waste," Danny-Amy agrees.
"At least we did it once," Amy-Danny replies.
Shortly afterwards, the scene fades to black. And if you think this is a dark, poetic way to close this chapter in their lives, then you're right.
Thankfully, they wake up lucid and with a new revived energy to put things right in their messed-up lives.
In their wandering, they finally reach a place in the wilderness that has mobile reception.
It's then that Danny discovers Paul is alive. Amy also learns that her husband George (Joseph Lee) has tried to reach her multiple times.
In the spirit of their camaraderie and something more intimate than friendship, Amy and Danny now work together to find a road out.
It becomes evident that things have really turned a corner in their relationship when Amy offers to help Danny with legal fees and Danny declines, saying: "Everything will work out as it should."
It's such a swift 360 that when George shows up, having used phone tracking to find Amy, he misreads the situation.
Thinking Amy is in danger, George shoots Danny, who's left hospitalised and seemingly in a critical condition.
As the show draws to an end, Amy waits by Danny's bedside. She sits, reflecting on their journey from the start — all the pain, hurt and regret.
It's ironic that the person she despised most of all becomes the one who knows her best. Danny sees and accepts all the ugliness Amy feels she has inside of her because that perception of self lives inside him too.
Danny is a reflection of Amy's pain — and she his. This becomes the glaring point as to why they hated each other so fiercely in the first place, having been forced to confront the worst parts of how they feel about themselves.
In the end, they only truly have each other. So Amy curls up into Danny on the bed as the time passes, denoting that she's the one to stay by his side during his recovery.
As the show concludes, Danny's hand moves ever-so slightly to embrace Amy — a nod to the stark transformation of their relationship and the healing point at which they've reached.
And it turns out these final moments were planned way in advance. According to series creator Lee Sung Jin (via The Hollywood Reporter): "We actually knew the end scene even before we pitched the show, because I knew mood-wise, there had to be something that felt like these people are really connecting.
"The idea that here’s the person who’s seen the worst of you and they’re still there was always the North Star, but we didn’t quite know how to show that.
"It was actually Ali Wong who pitched Amy crawling into the hospital bed. Once she pitched that, me and Steven and A24 were like, 'Oh, that’s it', so we incorporated that into the pitch.
"Having that as the ending really helped the writing, because then you can kind of reverse-engineer it. I knew that because the finale was probably going to be kind of quiet, I wanted the penultimate [episode] to really go off."
Beef is now available to stream on Netflix.
Netflix/Left Bank Pictures The Crown season 3 with Amazon exclusive box artwork
TV writer, Digital Spy Janet completed her Masters degree in Magazine Journalism in 2013 and has continued to grow professionally within the industry ever since. For six years she honed her analytical reviewing skills at the Good Housekeeping institute eventually becoming Acting Head of Food testing. She also freelanced in the field of film and TV journalism from 2013-2020, when she interviewed A-List stars such as Samuel L Jackson, Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson. In 2021 she joined Digital Spy as TV writer where she gets to delve into more of what she loves, watching copious amounts of telly all in the name of work. Since taking on the role she has conducted red carpet interviews with the cast of Bridgerton, covered the BAFTAs and been interviewed by BBC Radio and London Live. In her spare time she also moonlights as a published author, the book Gothic Angel.
