Did You Realize Who Was Missing From the Being Mary Jane Finale Wedding?
During the two-hour finale film for Being Mary Jane starring Gabrielle Union, the show wrapped up everything-except Mary Jane and Kara's friendship.
Without seeing Kara at Mary Jane's wedding, viewers got no closure after four seasons of their up-and-down friendship.
Being Mary Jane ended with a sappy, lovey-dovey ending that would've made its titular character happy. But as I and many viewers expected, the finale film did leave much to be desired-and attempted to do too much, too fast in just two hours. To the creators' credit, I imagine it would be hard to completely wrap up four seasons of a character's notoriously complicated life in what's actually just one hour and 20 minutes, when you include commercial breaks.
But there is one thing I cannot forgive the powers that be at BET and Being Mary Jane for: Not giving us a proper goodbye between Mary Jane (Gabrielle Union), a morning TV host, and her best friend and executive producer of Great Day USA, Kara (Lisa Vidal), who she leaned on since the very first season of the show. Despite many of the series' tropes-single Black woman agonizing over how to find a man-one of the most refreshing storylines has always been the relationship between BFFs MJ and Kara.
For four seasons, we watched as the duo picked one another up after heartbreak with baked goods, strategized how to take over the morning TV world together, and even fought-and then madeup-over work issues.
So in the finale, I looked forward to a tear-jerking moment where Mary Jane and Kara would offer us a moment to say goodbye, two friends all grown up and moving on with their lives. And we do get to see a happy ending for both women-for Mary Jane, as a new mom who ends up with her "unicorn" dream man, Justin (Michael Ealy). Kara, meanwhile, learns that her boyfriend Orlando will stand by her side through anything-even when she finds out she has breast cancer and has to get a mastectomy, he proposes, promising to always be there.
So in the final minutes when Mary Jane walks down the aisle toward her groom, I waited to see Kara standing by her side as the maid of honor, grinning with pride that her best friend finally got the happiness she always pined after. Instead, Kara is nowhere to be seen. She's also completely absent from the final scene of the series, when Mary Jane and her family and friends are all dancing the night away and the end credits roll. I angrily rewinded the shot in disbelief.
Perhaps workaholic Kara was busy preparing for the next morning's show. Or maybe she was still recuperating from her surgery-though, if Mary Jane was a real friend, she would wait until her bestie was well again to have an entire wedding. So the most likely answer is that Vidal-the actress who plays her-just wasn't available for filming that final scene. (I refuse to believe the creators just...forgot to include her.)
Whatever the reason, the series missed the opportunity to give viewers one final celebration of female friendship between two minority women. And as a viewer of Being Mary Jane for years now, that was an incredible disappointment. But at the very least, I guess I can rest assured that Kara is off somewhere with her hot baseball player boyfriend.
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