Breaking Down Belly's Big Choice in the Series Finale of The Summer I Turned Pretty

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of The Summer I Turned Pretty. It’s been a long couple of months for Conrad Fisher fans. Ever since the third and final season of The Summer I Turned Pretty began on July 16, the brooding elder Fisher brother (played by Christopher Briney) has really been going through it. But Team Conrad loyalists who stuck it out until the series finale on Wednesday were at long last rewarded with seeing him win back the love of his life and get a happy ending. Based on creator and co-showrunner Jenny Han’s best-selling trilogy of young adult novels, The Summer I Turned Pretty has grown into a global TV phenomenon since the June 2022 debut of its first season. Having pivoted to a weekly release schedule, Season 3 opened with a two-episode premiere that brought in 25 million viewers across its first seven days of availability on Prime Video, a 40% increase from the Season 2 launch. Season 3 is also the streamer’s most-watched TV season ever among 18- to 34-year-old women and the fifth most-watched returning season on the platform overall (behind only Reacher Seasons 2 and 3, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2, and The Boys Season 4). Following last week’s penultimate episode, Ad Age reported that nearly 200,000 posts related to the show had been shared on TikTok in the past month alone, collectively generating 2.9 billion views. To put it in simpler terms, everyone and their summer beach house crush has been tuning in on a weekly basis to see if Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung) would choose Conrad, Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno), or a different path entirely when the 11-episode season came to a close on Sept. 17. After she called off her wedding to Jeremiah in Episode 8, the next two installments have seen Belly spreading her wings in Paris and even getting romantically involved with someone outside the Fisher family over the course of around nine months in the City of Love. But when Episode 10 ended with Conrad boarding a plane to Paris in pursuit of Belly, fans began gearing up for a dramatic—and possibly heartbreaking—finale. Who did Belly choose in the Season 3 finale? Just like in We’ll Always Have Summer, the third Summer I Turned Pretty novel, Belly reunited with Conrad and ultimately ended up with him before the show’s final credits rolled. However, some of the details of how the pair arrived at that place were changed from the book series, as Han had previously hinted might be the case. “I do love surprising people,” she told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published earlier this week. “I feel strongly about wanting the audience to have the experience of not knowing what’s going to happen next…even though I know that others are probably restless to see how it all ends.” In the books, the timing of everything was a bit different as Jeremiah and Belly were together for less than two years before he cheated on her and they subsequently got engaged, meaning Belly was only headed into her junior year of college when the wedding imploded. Belly left to study abroad in Spain rather than France, and started receiving letters from Conrad there. The two finally reconnected in person at Belly’s college graduation and got engaged around a year later. The brief epilogue then concluded with the newlyweds happily starting their life together. In the show, following Conrad’s surprise arrival in Paris the day before Belly’s 22nd birthday, the pair spent some time together sightseeing before heading to the party Belly’s Parisian friends were throwing her. That night, they ended up sleeping together and finally had it out about their feelings for one another. But while Conrad insisted his love for Belly was genuine and not just a result of the trauma they had endured together as a result of his mom’s death, Belly was still unsure. Thankfully, in the minutes after he left for the train station, Belly realized she was preventing herself from getting everything she’d ever wanted and sprinted out of her apartment in a mad-dash chase to catch up with him set to the tune of Taylor Swift’s “Out of the Woods.” A profession of love ensued, and while we learned that Belly still stayed in Paris for a while, #BellyConrad was revealed as officially endgame. Time to celebrate, Team Conrad.