When Oscar wakes up from his accident in the ballroom, he’s a little out of sorts. For a moment, he isn’t sure what’s going on, but it isn’t long before he (still) finds it in him to berate June. And they argue: first over Kase, and what June’s willingness to run away with her could mean; then, with June’s decision to skip Riverside without talking to Oscar; and then, about June’s willingness to leave Oscar, in general, after building a life together. It’s the most visibly emotional that we’ve seen them behave around one another. Eventually, Oscar asks June for a divorce, and they raise their hands to make it so.
Once they’ve made it “official,” Oscar says, “Good-bye forever.” And then he claims he’ll head back to Riverhead “where people are nice.”
As June makes her way back to Oceanside, and the mansion, and her new life, she is nearly hit by an end table falling from the sky. When she asks why people are throwing shit from the windows, she learns that Oceanside’s residents are getting ready for “The Cleansing”: it is (apparently) a sort of purge, so that they can “forget, forever.” June doesn’t spend much time dwelling on the thought, but that night, at another party, when she tells Kase about that morning’s events and Oscar’s general ridiculousness, Kase replies that she wishes that she’d gotten to get a divorce.
When Kase decides to head home for the evening, June decides to stay at the party. After a cue to the bandleader directing the evening’s music, she brings herself to the stage launching into a maybe ill-advised performance of “This Is How We Do It,” which, okay. Sure. YOLO, etc. But the important thing is that it’s on stage that June catches sight of Oscar, hiding just beyond the festivities. Turns out, he hasn’t left Oceanside after all.
But his (ex-)wife wasn’t supposed to see him. So Oscar tries escaping on the beach, and June walks him down (“You’re not gonna get away,” she notes “you’ve got fucked-up feet”). And it’s then that Oscar tells June that he tried to leave, but couldn’t. When June questions him, Oscar leads her to the little man in the road who told her that Oceanside existed to begin with. When they don’t make any progress convincing him otherwise, the pair decide to leave.
They head to the beach, where Oscar’s been shacking up. He’s got a pile of rags in the sand, and, like, three logs. His plan is to build a boat to head back to Riverside, and June summarily informs him that it probably won’t happen. But, later, when June brings Oscar a bedsheet from the mansion, and she asks him how the boat’s coming, it turns out that she’s surprised by his progress.
In this way, the two go about helping Oscar build his boat: June brings things from the Riverside mansion for his raft, and Oscar adds it to his boat. Eventually, once June brings Oscar a platter of ham, he tells her that he’d meant “hammer,” and it turns out the seagulls on the coast had knocked away the rest of the word. But obviously June isn’t going to turn down a cooked ham (like, who would), and the pair share it on the beach. June says, “It’s not bad.”
They talk a bit about the sandiness, and the ham, and their brunch situation. June asks Oscar what the All-Time Best Beach Food is, and that question harkens back to their Q&A in the car in the very first episode: this particular interaction is the one thing they share that’s unique to them alone. And in this conversation, and its give and take, and its jokes and concessions, they’re able to reach the sort of relationship that they just can’t match in the rest of their interactions. In the end, the (former) couple argues with the slab of meat between them. It’s pretty fucking strange. They’re both pretty fucking strange. But — and this is the thing about virtually any sustainable relationship — they are exactly strange enough for each other.
The mood is spoiled by Kase. She arrives on the coast, only to ask what’s going on, before immediately deciding, “You know what, we’re all too dead for this shit.” But before any real conflict arises, June demurs away from Oscar, (“He and I are done”) and she leaves her guy on the beach. But it’s only one more scene before she returns to the coast, and with an actual hammer in hand. With the last tool he’d been looking for, Oscar finally completes his raft.
It isn’t the best boat anyone’s ever seen, alive or dead. But it looks like it might work, maybe. And June tells Oscar, “You know, the whole time I’ve known you, I think I underestimated you a little bit.”
She tells Oscar that she used him as an excuse. June blamed her husband for not becoming a hypothetical version of herself — but, she says, she was never going to become that person. She tells Oscar about the new gig she pulled, right before she died, and how it wasn’t through the consequences of her actions at all. June tells Oscar that he wasn’t the problem, because she was, and then she apologizes for that.
But Oscar adds that he knew June wasn’t happy, at times. And he wasn’t happy either. He says that he made everything worse, and he pushed her away. So he apologizes, too, and they say good-bye to one another, again, and June tells Oscar that she thinks they just had their first honest conversation. Ever. Oscar quips that it’s too bad it didn’t happen when they were alive.
That night, when June meets Kase before “The Cleansing,” she doesn’t lie about where she was. “The Cleansing” happens, and Kase and June realize that they’re starting to forget their memories. But while Kase appears to be just fine with that, she leaves June for a moment to think about what that means; the next morning, June returns to the raft to tell Oscar that bananas are the ideal beach food.
Oscar agrees. June tells him that she loves him. Oscar tells her that he loves her. They decide not to go to Oceanside, or to stay in Riverside, and in their indecision, the raft ends up being washed away.
This is, of course, the only way Forever could’ve ended. There wasn’t really a point where it looked like June and Oscar wouldn’t reconcile. Having seen what we’ve seen, that just wouldn’t make sense. But it’s certainly stirring to see that, while it took us a while to get here, their making up with one another holds a certain amount of feeling. So June asks Oscar if he trusts her, and he does. They walk into the water. They cross the sea, hand in hand. And when the couple emerges, they’re on another shore. We don’t see where, exactly, but that isn’t the point. The point is that that they made it.
