Sharon Horgan On The Final Episode of Bad Sisters

Warning! Spoilers for Bad Sisters Season 2 lie ahead.

Somewhere through the latter half of Bad Sisters Season 2, a worrying thought crossed my mind. How on earth was Sharon Horgan, the star, writer, and showrunner of the Apple+ TV drama, going to tie up all the loose threads in a satisfying way? The only options available seemed to result in the sisters being, for want of a better word, f*cked. Would we be dragged, via a torturous cliffhanger, into a more-of-the-same Season 3?

I needn’t have worried. The final episode, now available on Apple TV+, concludes with the Garvey sisters free from the clutches of Ian (the season’s real villain) and Angelica (the season’s “decoy villain,” per Horgan). Becka has a baby, and (probably) the right boyfriend in tow. Bibi has succeeded in not torpedoing her marriage. Blánaid’s money has been returned, while a very-much-alive Angelica is no longer glomming onto Grace’s final sendoff. The Garvey family is finally at peace — no more murders to cover up! — and it’s remarkably satisfying.

“You don’t think about it when you’re at the beginning of the writer’s room, but it becomes clear midway through that you’re juggling an awful lot of balls,” she says. “There’s lots of different ways to wrap things up, though it doesn’t always have to be in the final episode. But everything, if it’s working well, all comes to a head and they feed into each other. And that was the plan.”

I’m meeting with Horgan to record an episode of One Nightstand, where we discuss her four favorite books. Given that our video is dropping on the same day as the show concludes, I snuck in a few questions about the final episode. Here’s what I found out.

A Possible Focus For Season 3

In previous interviews, Horgan has said she’s taking a “wait and see” approach to possibly renewing for a third season. But as the camera hovers on Blánaid, watching as her mother’s ashes drift out to sea, I wondered if we were actually being set up for a spinoff with Grace and John Paul’s orphaned daughter.

“That’s so weird that you would say that,” Horgan says. “Because when we were coming to the end of the edit, we were being asked about if there was a way to take it further. And for me, the end is the end, and I feel really strongly about that. But the only thing that I thought was about Blánaid.”

“But I do feel like there’s less worry for her at the end because I wanted to end it with the family altogether. She is surrounded by love and the legacy of her mother, and what a good person she was. You also find out in that moment that she heard so much — she knew more over the years [about her father’s abusiveness]. There were always little hints of it in the first season, but we never wanted to be too explicit. It’s that thing of how much do you tell the audience and how much do you let your audience figure out.”

Angelica’s Redemption

Fiona Shaw’s performance as the meddlesome Angelica has been one of the second season’s highlights, and by the show’s conclusion, we see that the boat’s perfectly-timed boom has actually knocked some kindness into her.

“I can’t wait for people to see where it gets to because, I mean, she is a wagon and she has so many flaws and makes so many bad choices, but she was the decoy villain, really,” says Horgan. “The girls are so full of grief and pain. They need somewhere to put it. And the fact that she gets to be the person holding that camogie stick at the end — she gets to be the heroine.”

Near-murder of Ian aside, Angelica’s arc concludes when she pulls up on her bike at home after things have calmed down. Despite her brother’s queries, Angelica tells him that he needn’t worry and the message is clear: Her emotionally-vampiric ways are no more.

“That episode was probably 30 minutes longer,” Horgan says of the succinct finish. “There’s so much good stuff in there, but I find it sometimes hard to expect an audience to live with multiple endings. I also find when you reduce something down, what you’re left with is the essence of what that whole scene was about anyway. Sometimes if you find the right moment, it can give you goosebumps, and that [scene] always gave me goosebumps, that moment with her and him. So it didn’t need more.”

A Cutting-Room Floor Flashback

“I can give you something interesting behind the scenes,” Horgan says as we wrap up our conversation. “You know that at the end when they’re going down to the shore and there’s these little flashes of them as younger girls? When we were making the first season, there was a whole scene at the beginning of the first episode that sort of told you the story of the sisters. Becka has this accident where she falls into the Forty Foot and [you see that] they’re always going to look after each other, but we just didn’t need it. It was like — you can just begin the story when it begins.

“But I always loved that footage. It was so beautiful. And those girls who played the younger Garveys, I loved them. So it was so gorgeous to get to use those moments. It was weird because I’d written it into the script, but I kind of thought, well, I’m not sure how we’ll do that. And then we were like, we’ve got all that f*cking footage. We’ve got these girls. Brilliant.”