Warning: spoilers abound.
Beef showrunner Lee Sung Jin has gifted us with another multi-episode meditation on wealth, class, and morality, and he does not disappoint.
Following up on his first season of road-rage-gone-wrong and generational Asian trauma, Lee gives us a different take on what it means to survive in a world where money is the anthem of success. This time, we are met with Josh (Oscar Isaac) and Lindsay (Carey Mulligan), a wealthy (-ish) couple who manage things at the exclusive Monte Vista Point Country Club while ignoring the cracks in their marriage. Their narrative foils are Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), a young Gen Z couple working at the club and hoping to blackmail the Martíns to get a little health insurance. Unfortunately, as the two pairs bicker and squabble, the club’s capitalist owner Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung) lies waiting in the background with a scheme of her own.
All eight episodes of this second season of Beef are now streaming on Netflix, and none of them presents us with easy answers. The season finale makes us chew on big, tough thoughts about striving for financial success (and its futility), while leaving us with a variety of endings for our ensemble cast (some happy, some not). So, in honor of the season’s release, we’re looking at each of its real winners and losers, and what each of their outcomes leave us with.
Losers: Austin and Ashley
Boo! Look at what money can do to you! Despite starting off as the season’s gooiest Gen Z couple, Austin and Ashley quickly realize that love does not, in fact, make the world go round.
However, the duo reach this conclusion at very different paces. Ashley is the first to figure out that blackmailing the Martíns is a smart financial move, especially if she wants to start a family soon (and remove the nasty, expensive cyst that’s twisting her ovary… there’s a metaphor somewhere here, and I hope you find it).
Austin, god bless him, is a little slower on the take. He isn’t a fan of how Ashley’s changed so much since they set their blackmail scheme in motion, and, as he tells his sort-of new love Eunice (Seoyeon Jang), “I feel like I don’t know her anymore.” But come the season finale, and he’s finally realized that trading morality for financial success is the only way to succeed in life. He throws Eunice under the bus, pledges allegiance to Chairwoman Park, and lives out the rest of his days as Ashley’s obedient husband.
Winner: Josh Martín
We first meet a version of Josh that isn’t doing too well in life, even if he is the flashy, shiny general manager of Monte Vista Point Country Club. He’s committed his whole life to ass-kissing the club’s wealthiest members, while his relationships with his wife Lindsay and his mother (who died while he was working a shift) have fallen to the wayside. All he’s left with are anger issues, half-baked dreams of becoming a musician, and a man cave where he can spend some quality time with his favorite OnlyFans camgirl.
Josh and Lindsay definitely have their own issues, but it seems like he’s the only one to completely work through them by the season finale (in part, thanks to a ten-minute psychedelic experience). He comes to accept that he’s the reason for his own shortcomings, and, in what is arguably the most satisfying conclusion to a character arc this season, he chooses to take the blame for Chairwoman Park’s entire scheme in exchange for Lindsay’s safety. Even though she ends up not staying by his side in the aftermath, Josh escapes the whole ordeal with a clearer head on his shoulders.
Losers: Eunice, Dr. Kim… Most People With a Moral Compass
Although showrunner Lee Sung Jin told Rolling Stone that he wanted a more hopeful season this time around, I beg to disagree. If we’re meant to see Chairwoman Park as the big, money-loving villain, then very few people, if any, stand up to her evil, capitalistic ways. Eunice is the only person who comes close to successfully reporting the chairwoman to the police, but Austin throws a USB-shaped wrench into her plans (and we never see her again). Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho) tries to stand up to his wife after realizing that she never loved him (took him long enough!), but gets a shot in the head for all his efforts. Even Woosh (Matthew Kim) tries to call her out (if only to blackmail her), but promptly gets run over in a mysterious hit-and-run.
Winner: Lee Sung Jin’s Writing
After finding so much success with his first season of Beef, Lee spent the following months trying to figure out how to make lightning strike twice. What resulted was the writer-director combining a neighbor’s heated fight, country clubs, and the divide between Gen Z and millennial couples to create an allegory for life’s cycle of social mobility.
“As you dig in,” Lee told The Hollywood Reporter, “we find that the passage of time became such a bigger theme, and you have actually four Russian nesting dolls of couples showing the four seasons of life. [I]t becomes a meditation of [the idea that] the stages of life come for everybody, and what are you going to do at the end of it?”
Reviews of the show’s second season have praised Lee’s sharp writing, especially because it gives us a different perspective on fortune and success compared to the one he explored with Ali Wong’s and Steven Yeun’s characters in Season 1. As Vulture puts it, “Lee’s new story is more wacky, condescending, romantic, and nastily, wonderfully furious than the already nastily and wonderfully furious first season.”
Winner: Late Stage Capitalism
We all saw it coming, but of course late stage capitalism escapes this season of Beef unscathed! Besides Josh, most of our ensemble cast end up kowtowing to Chairwoman Park (or else get mysteriously murdered, but oh well). Ashley and Austin become the country club’s new managing couple and all of Park’s worst crimes are pinned on Josh, leaving her to continue growing richer and richer with absolutely no consequences. While the rest of them must deal with the aftermath, Park has the luxury of growing old and staying on top.
