Like the Perfect Dark Joke, the ‘Hacks’ Finale Landed Just Right

They give us the swooning high of Deborah whisking Ava away to Paris. The trip isn’t just a rom-com cliché; it’s a callback to Ava’s confession, in the brilliant Season 3 episode “One Day,” that she’s never traveled out of the country, let alone eaten the life-changing Parisian bread that carb-cautious Deb raves about. There are some great jokes in this sequence. “Why am I in the rough draft of a car?” Ava demands, driving erratically through city traffic in a stick-shift that barely fits the two of them. She’s the comic relief at the Louvre, too, musing on the Mona Lisa: “I don’t get how she became that girl.” Deborah is more reverent in the museum, whether because, despite all her vulgar nouveau riche tastes, she’s more cultured or because she’s coming to the art from a more philosophical place. 

The European romp does, after all, happen for a reason that is impossible to accept—for viewers as well as for Ava. Supposedly vanquished earlier in the season, Deborah’s cancer has returned. (My shock at this twist, predictable though it should have been in retrospect, probably says something about how effectively the creators made us root for the characters’ happiness.) Instead of subjecting herself to the horrors of late-stage treatment, Deborah has made plans to end their vacation with an assisted suicide in Zurich. Fittingly, her mortality first came to the fore in “One Day,” an episode situated at the precise midpoint of Hacks’ five-season run, when she injured herself on a disastrous hiking trip in which she and Ava got lost in the woods. “The magic of one day,” she reflected, “is that it’s all ahead of you. But for me, one day is now. Anything I wanna do, I have to do now, or else I’ll never do it. That’s the worst part of being old.”