Insecure Returns and Shakes Things up as Final Season Begins

**SPOILERS FOR FINAL SEASON OF HBO’S INSECURE.**

HBO’s Insecure is back and Black Twitter can return to its favorite social media pastime: arguing about the choices (and messes) of its core characters, especially Issa Dee (Issa Rae) and Molly Carter (Yvonne Orji).

When we return into the world of Insecure, the gang is going to Stanford for their 10-year reunion, and Issa, who has started and is running her own company called the BLOCC—which has an acronym she can barely recall—is asked to be on a panel. During the panel she, along with other CEO alumni, is asked when she felt “stable.”

After already stumbling to connect with the audience, rather than give a fluffy answer, Issa is honest. She doesn’t know if she feels stable. She doesn’t know if this job is the right decision, but she needs to live in it and move forward.

There was something almost surreally pre-pandemic about the previous season of Insecure. The freedom of mobility in the characters’ lives to throw block parties, travel on international vacation, feel settled in something that had upward mobility.

Yet, in the personal world, fissures cracked within Issa and Molly’s friendship, Molly’s relationship with Andrew (Alexander Hodge), Tiffany (Amanda Seales) becoming a new mother, and the usual Issa/Lawrence (Jay Ellis) mess.

Throughout the pandemic, I have found people clinging to their pre-established relationships with a cuffing season-like intensity. Now, as the pandemic is still ongoing but people are desperate to live once more, things are changing. People are quitting their jobs, ending relationships.

Or, on the flip side, finally getting married or taking that new step towards something.

In many ways, that is what “Reunited, Okay?”sums up: stepping towards something new and allowing yourself to be uneasy, while embracing change. Stability is not always one thing, and it can’t exist if you don’t actually know what you want or need from yourself and others.

At the end of the episode, Issa gets a ride home from Lawrence. Last season, it was revealed that Lawrence’s ex-girlfriend was pregnant and she is keeping the baby, putting their relationship in a weird spot. After the drive home, with time and two months in-universe since the last season, she realizes that this isn’t her path. They break up.

Rae discussed why it was important for the writers to end that chapter in these characters’ lives and explained that the focus of this season is Issa and Molly’s relationship.

“That was the most important thing for us to acknowledge and repair. That’s why the Issa and Lawrence decision happens at the end of the episode because Issa needed to figure out where she was with Molly and get that relationship repaired and using that as a foundation to kind of give her the clear head to make a decision about what was best for her,” Rae told HuffPost.

“We had a lot of discussions about that in the room where Issa would be and the idea that she just wants to move forward in her life is indicative of that decision at the end. What you’ll see, even in the second episode, we just wanted to move forward with these characters and see where they ended up,” she continued.

At the end of the episode, Kelli, who had to deal with people thinking she was dead the whole episode for some reason, asks, “If you knew the end is coming, what would you do with the time left?” That is the question Insecure is answering for itself with this final season.

(via HuffPo, image: HBO)

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