Who Killed Luke? ‘Cruel Summer’ Season 2 Ended With a Twist
This post contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Cruel Summer.
Cruel Summer wrapped up its second season on Monday night, and as with its debut installment, the finale ended with a major twist. In Season 1, that twist involved Jeanette, who was far less innocent than she pretended to be. To jog your memory: the last few minutes of the finale revealed that Jeanette heard Kate in Martin’s house, meaning that she knew all along where Kate was while she was “missing.”
The Season 2 finale attempted to pull off a similar last-minute surprise, but it wasn’t quite as successful as Season 1’s shocker. “Endgame” picked up right where episode 9 left off, with Luke (Griffin Gluck) on the dock looking surprised to see the person he’d paged to ask for help. That person turned out to be his brother, Brent (Braeden De La Garza), but Brent didn’t end up being Luke’s savior. After Luke confessed that he was tired of pretending like it was his fault that their mom died in a car accident, Brent pushed Luke into the water. Brent then dove in and tried to find him to no avail. Until the last few minutes, we were left thinking that Brent accidentally killed his brother and covered it up with help from their dad, Steve (Paul Adelstein).
Who killed Luke in the Cruel Summer Season 2 finale?
Steve managed to briefly pin the murder on Megan (Sadie Stanley), but Brent, overcome with guilt, eventually admitted the truth (in earshot of the sheriff). Later, however, Megan went to the lake to say one final goodbye to Luke—and saw a security camera pointed directly at the dock. She watched the footage at home and discovered that Luke actually didn’t drown when Brent pushed him into the lake. Somehow, Luke survived long enough to wash up on shore, where Isabella (Lexi Underwood) found him. Instead of saving him, though, she stepped on his head until he drowned. The episode ended with the implication that Megan will hand this footage over to the authorities, and Isabella will finally get her comeuppance.
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The problem here, though, is that none of this really made any sense. If Isabella was cold-blooded enough to drown her ex-boyfriend, then she probably also drowned Lisa in St. Bart’s—but it was never clear why she did these things. She never really seemed that into Luke at all, so could she really have been that jealous that he chose Megan over her? We know she was angry at Luke over the sex tape situation, but was she truly angry enough to murder him? No motive would have justified her actions, of course, but any hint about what she was thinking would have been welcome.
Season 1 ended on a similarly dark note, but in that case, Jeanette’s reasoning for hiding the truth about Kate seemed pretty clear. With Kate gone, she could have it all the social status, the friends, and the boyfriend. It was brutal but logical, and it added an extra layer of intrigue to all of Jeanette’s previous actions.
The Season 2 twist can’t accomplish this, though, because it raises infinitely more questions than it answers. If Isabella was lying about Luke’s murder for six months, then what else was she lying about? Are her parents really diplomats? Does she even have parents? The final few minutes show her telling a new friend that her name is Lisa, so it becomes hard not to wonder whether Isabella is her real name. Is she really a teenager, or is she some sort of young adult scam artist going from town to town outrun her crimes?
It felt especially odd that Isabella remained such an enigma when so many other plot lines did get wrapped up so neatly. I wondered after episode 9 whether Luke was really so evil as to play a sex tape of his own girlfriend at a family Christmas party, and it turns out he wasn’t. Shortly before his dip in the lake, he confessed to Brent that he thought the tape was one of Brent’s. (One could argue that it’s also evil to play your brother’s sex tape at a family party, especially given that the women on the tapes never gave consent, but Luke was doing what he could with an extremely broken moral compass.)
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Even the Ned Faunce mess kind of got wrapped up. He helped Megan get a job after she lost her scholarship, and it’s presumably his security camera that caught the real murder, meaning his intense misanthropy finally paid off. And while Steve—known enemy of Ned—didn’t actually kill Luke, the fact that he tried to protect the person he thought did it can’t be good for his future development projects. Alexa, play “Vindicated” by Dashboard Confessional.
“Endgame” also finally included a nod to Season 1, in the form of a memoir that someone in Megan’s house was reading. As Megan stepped out at one point, the camera focused on a copy of Out of the Basement: The Kate Wallis Story lying on a table. I hoped that the book would be revealed as belonging to Isabella, who in my personal rewrite had pored over the Kate and Jeanette case for inspiration or something. Maybe she’d even been in touch with Jeanette about how to lie to everyone you’ve ever met?
But no—Out of the Basement was never seen or mentioned again, and Isabella remained a murderous mystery. That brief book scene ended up being a great metaphor for the season as a whole: intriguing and full of potential but ultimately hollow.
