Shrinking's Brett Goldstein and Jason Segel talk the 'inevitable' near-miss in season 2 finale

Warning: This article contains spoilers about the Shrinking season 2 finale, "The Last Thanksgiving."

Shrinking and its characters have a knack for towing the line between feel-good comedy and the drama of grief's challenges.

The season 2 finale is no exception, with the characters celebrating Thanksgiving. Jimmy (Jason Segel), Alice (Lukita Maxwelll), Gaby (Jessica Williams), Liz (Christa Miller), Derek (Ted McGinley) and Brian (Michael Urie) all gather at Gaby's for the holiday. Paul (Harrison Ford) hopes to have a restful Thanksgiving, just him and Julie (Wendie Malick), until Julie tricks him into also going to Gaby's house.

Sean (Luke Tennie), meanwhile, shows immense growth and spends the holiday cooking for his family, a plot point that might have been the hardest for the writers. "We wanted Sean with everyone else because we like people together," admits Brett Goldstein, who co-created the show. "But it's like, no, he has to be with his family because annoyingly, he's grown so much that we have to separate him. And it was sad."

The only person without a table full of turkey waiting for him is Louis (Goldstein), who is disinvited to his coworker's meal after they learn that his DUI resulted in someone's death. "There's so many things that were references, but one of them is Manchester by the Sea," Goldstein says of the harshness of this moment of rejection. "You can't shake this thing. It doesn't go away. We have these couple of episodes where it's like, maybe his life's going to be all right, but this thing is always going to be there. The thing that we've seen him go through with say, Alice, doesn't necessarily happen with everyone. People are judgmental, and it is a difficult thing."

Heartbroken, Louis goes to the train station, where he previously brought Alice and told her about sitting there with his ex-fiancée. Since his role in Tia's death, he's contemplated taking his own life by jumping in front of one of the trains.

After texting Alice that he needs a friend (who doesn't see his message thanks to Gaby's attempt to have an unplugged holiday), he edges closer and closer to the tracks, seemingly about to jump in his loneliness and despair. But Jimmy pops up in the nick of time, and the two finally have the heart-to-heart they've been building toward all season.

"For two seasons, it's been leading to this moment for Jimmy," says Segel, who co-created the series with Goldstein and Bill Lawrence. "He's been avoiding looking in the mirror, which is the same as looking Louis in the face. It is really, really hard, and also, it is time, if that makes sense. This moment between the two of them is inevitable. One of the ways that we wanted to highlight that is how Jimmy plays that game with Louis about making up the lives of the passengers on the other side of the tracks, but we never see Jimmy learn about that game. That was intentional. We wanted there to be this little hint of magic realism."

Goldstein notes that there was never any question in the writers' minds that they would bring Louis so close to an irreversible decision. "It was the whole thing of, 'We are doing this story so we've got to do it properly.' We've created this world and these characters and we're putting out this forgiveness experiment. As much as we hopefully always balance it out with laughs, lightness, and heart, it is also like, what is the reality?"

Most likely, audiences expect Alice to show up as Louis's guardian angel in those final moments. But surprisingly, it's Jimmy, even though we never see the conversation between father and daughter that gets him there. "Those were big story questions about what we show and what we don't show in order to pull off the magic trick of him showing up," Segel notes. "You want the audience to feel a certain way when Jimmy shows up behind him, so we chose to leave out the sausage making of how he gets there."

For Goldstein, however, it always had to be Jimmy, and not Alice, to complete the season 2 arc theme of forgiveness. "Alice had found peace in episode 6 where she forgives him and that sets her free," he explains. "The whole story from the end of episode 1 is Jimmy has to free himself and he is in denial the whole season that he's okay. It has to be him for there to be some peace."

"The anger you hold on to doesn't necessarily help anyone and only hurts yourself," Goldstein continues. "And that's Jimmy's story. Louis can punish himself. Louis can hate himself for the rest of his life very easily without the help of anyone else. He doesn't need Jimmy to hate him [in order to] to feel bad. If Jimmy never forgave this guy, we would not be angry at him as an audience. It's difficult, but by doing it, it will benefit his life as much as everyone around him because it doesn't serve him to hold onto it."

Thankfully, there was never a version where someone didn't reach Louis in time. "It would've been another failure for Jimmy," Segel reflects. "But I like to believe that it was never going to happen. Something larger was at play between the angel that Paul is in Jimmy's life, the angel that Tia is in Jimmy's life, and the fact that Jimmy and Alice are trying and that Louis is trying, that brought them to a perfect moment."

Of course, we know this isn't the first time that Louis has contemplated taking his own life. Goldstein posits that what has always stopped Louis before is this sense of needing to make amends, or at least, apologize with Jimmy and Alice. Now that he's made an effort to do so, without Jimmy's sudden appearance, he might've gone through with it.

"If we're going to be super, super real," Goldstein says. "If you speak to people who have been that low, it's always, 'If you can hang on one moment more, it will pass. And maybe there'll be some change, some resolution, some positivity, something.' And I think that's it. Just waiting one more day. There is, within him this need for — it's what Paul says to Jimmy about the act of revelation regardless of how it is received. He has needed this moment with Alice and Jimmy — even if they had just told him to f--- off, which they did — of needing to at least speak to them. That's something that kept him going."

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Now that Jimmy and Louis have had this heart-to-heart, what lies ahead? Will Jimmy strike up a friendship with Louis in the same way that Alice has? Goldstein says it's too early to say, noting, "I can't say if we'll even see Louis again." But Segel also notes how important it was to cast someone similar to his age as Louis, to emphasize the potential for friendship, even if it never comes to fruition.

"I don't think we quite know what season 3 has in store yet," Segel says. "But the reason that it was important to me that it be somebody who is a contemporary of Jimmy's is that I wanted looking at Lewis to be looking in the mirror. It's built into the storyline that these guys could have been friends." 

Regardless of what happens between them, Jimmy being willing to save Louis and offer him forgiveness marks a major milestone. "That was a very big step," says Segel.

There were other baby steps this season, including Jimmy flirting with Sofi (Cobie Smulders) after buying her used car. "You got to see these little sparks of what pre-accident Jimmy was probably like," Segel says of the tiny move toward opening Jimmy back up to the world outside his patients and friends. "With grief and depression, there's the acute stages of it where it's all you're talking about. But at some point, it becomes tiresome to keep talking to everybody about that. Then, you're living with an emotional sprained ankle where you're walking around and you're doing life, but you know that every time you put weight on it, it hurts. That's how Jimmy has been living since the accident."

So, having mastered the depths of his grief and depression and now moved to a place of forgiveness, what growth should Jimmy tackle next? "I would like to see him try to be happy," says Segel. "This is something I've only arrived at in the past couple of years for Jason — that's supposed to be part of the deal. You have so much ambition and drive and you want to make sure you're being there for other people that it's easy to realize like, Oh, I haven't really thought much about if I'm happy. For Jimmy, he does not feel like he deserves to be happy. So, it would be nice to see Jimmy get to a place where he puts himself first in a way of, 'What would make me happy after all this sadness?'"

Perhaps he'll find the answer in season 3.