Week-to-Week: Never Have They Ever moved past the same love triangle (but that's okay)

A take on the cyclical romances and chaotic timelines of Netflix's Never Have I Ever's third season

Photo: Netflix

[Before delving into this analysis, warning that this will contain spoilers for the third season of Netflix’s Never Have I Ever. In addition, a reminder that I’m currently running a 20% off promotion on yearly subscriptions through 9/9, with everyone who subscribes entered to win a signed copy of my book Game of Thrones: A Guide to Westeros and Beyond. You can find more information here.]

Never Have I Ever began in its first season with a clearly positioned love triangle, as Devi was caught between the fantasy of Paxton and the frenemy of Ben. And then in its second season, it committed to the same triangle, trapping Devi between the two boys initially before then separating her from either…just for her to end up back in the same triangle by the time the finale rolled around. And in the third season, we begin with Devi in a relationship with Paxton, but by the end of the season you’ll never guess who’s back in the picture.

The cyclical nature of Never Have I Ever’s romantic storytelling is, in the abstract, a problem. It traps the characters in the same patterns, and pushes back against a traditional expectation of narrative progress. This is further exaggerated by the show’s complete disregard for the concept of time: the third season starts at the beginning of the year before hitting Valentine’s Day in the third episode, but then in the fourth episode they haphazardly fastforward to fall, entirely skipping over both the end and beginning of an entire school year, and everything in between. It’s a gap designed to ensure the show can get to Devi and her friends’ senior year in the upcoming fourth and final season, but it implies that months and months of these characters’ lives were immaterial to their larger journeys.

Photo: Netflix

But where these two concerns are damaging in other contexts, the central themes of Never Have I Ever are ultimately served by them, especially in the recently completed third season. Yes, the season begins with Devi in a relationship with Paxton, and it ends with her redeeming her “one free boink” coupon from Ben, but the show has stuck to its guns that Devi’s entanglements are rarely if ever about being in a relationship. The show is about her journey of self-discovery in the wake of the tragedy of her father’s death, and through three seasons it has never attempted to “move past” this trauma. Every time she cycles through her two main suitors—and, this season, a third to make it a proper Love Rhombus—it’s a test of her progress on figuring out her own issues, a choice she’s making not just because she wants to be in a relationship or have sex, but rather because she’s acting on an instinct on how to exist as a teenage girl.

When the relationship with Paxton ends, it reinforces this theme. The second season was all about Paxton becoming mature enough to be in a relationship with Devi, fighting against his instincts toward casual attachments. The second season finale framed this as a moment of triumph for Devi, but when the season starts it becomes clear that she may not be mature enough to understand how to exist in this relationship. She pushes herself into sexualizing things out of fear that’s all he wants in a relationship, and Paxton starts to realize that at her core she does not believe she is enough—popular enough, pretty enough, promiscuous enough—to be dating him. The way she projects out onto him makes him feel like all of the progress he made the previous year was being ignored, and he forces her to reassess her self-image when he breaks her heart and says they can’t keep dating.

Photo: Netflix

In the vague aftermath of this—seriously, I needed an onscreen calendar to figure out when they were or were not jumping in time—the relationship with Des is another source of self-reflection. She immediately presumes that the son of her mother’s Indian friend will be a total nerd, but when he turns out to be hot, Devi has to address something else: she is hot. It’s not just that Des’ private school has a different social hierarchy where the debate team are the jocks. It’s that Devi has so embedded her sense of self-worth in the way she was treated in the past, in particular during her time in a wheelchair, that when she hears Des’ compliments she simply does not believe them to be true. But she starts to believe them because Des doesn’t have the same baggage as Paxton did, a distance that gives her confidence she lacked earlier in the season.

When she starts to gain perspective, though, Never Have I Ever remains true to the reality of the grief and trauma she is experiencing. The relationship with Des is going fine up until his mother sees Devi in a vulnerable moment, struggling after seeing her father in the crowd at her orchestra concert. Devi is finally starting to be able to reconcile her identity in the wake of her grief, but when she allows her trauma to come to the surface this woman moves to protect her son from this “difficult” girl. The show has a very honest and sympathetic approach to the mental health struggles of all of its characters, but it doesn’t present a world that is equally understanding, leaving Devi to pick up the pieces after an adult looked at her trauma and decided that she was too broken to date her son. The fact that she manages to do so is a testament to what she’s learned over the course of three seasons, even if I have questions about what happened in the literal months of time we didn’t see onscreen.

This focus on mental health means that as the show cycles back through its different relationships, it’s always about how each of the characters has evolved in the process. The season suggests Devi and Paxton missed their moment, without a real push toward a possible reconciliation at the end of the school year—he might go back to a low-stakes relationship after they break up, but he’s a different person throughout, and the speech he gives at graduation reflects how Devi has changed him on his way to Arizona. And Devi realizes that Paxton was always just a dream to help her get through a difficult time, able to metabolize her experience over the past (indeterminate) amount of time into a path forward. 

Photo: Netflix

Ben, too, went through a journey in the season—after losing Aneesa to the intense schedule of his laser-focused goal of getting into an Ivy, he ends up burnt out and full of shit, and in the wake of this he finds a break in art, flirts with his tutor, and seems in a much better space even if he’s still teasing Devi in their frenemy way. But when Devi’s future potentially takes her away from Sherman Oaks, he does something he had struggled with earlier on in their relationship, and which he only let slip to a few people since—he cuts out the teasing, taps into his heartbreak that their relationship didn’t work out back then, and tells her that he’ll miss her. A lot. And to the show’s credit, it doesn’t feel like a sweeping romantic gesture of the show’s OTP—it feels like two characters who have gone on personal journeys who suddenly cross paths to realize that their respective growth has given them new perspective on one another.

It’s why the show’s repetitive romantic triangle doesn’t grate in the way it could, and why the huge gaps of time…okay, honestly, those still drove me insane during the season, but more because of their impact on the B- and C-stories than on Devi’s relationships. Because after the first season thrived in the surprise that it was her relationship with her mother and their shared grief that was allowed to be the emotional core of the story, the show has continued to hit that point home. While Devi knows that Ben and her friends don’t want her to go, the emotional centerpiece of her decision to say is her mother, because she realizes that her father’s death taught her to value the present, as complex as it can often be. And so when Devi submits her coupon for “one free boink” at episode’s end, it isn’t a triumphant moment for love or romance—it’s Devi living in the moment, setting up a new stage of her personal journey that will intersect with Ben’s and bring their connection into its next era, and Never Have I Ever into its final season.

Episodic Observations

• Maitreyi Ramakrishnan remains just absolutely fantastic in this role, and I just want to emphasize this in the wake of Iman Vellani’s debut in Ms. Marvel that the Toronto → Streaming pipeline for South Asian Canadian actresses is wild.

• The time gap really mostly hurt the supporting character arcs—whereas Devi’s inner monologue via John McEnroe can fill in some of those gaps, Eleanor’s relationship with Trent was more or less inexplicable with the time jumps, and Fabiola’s relationships were similarly damaged by the idea of these giant gaps of time between events. I just think it’s a bad way to tell the vast majority of stories, and the fact it works to tell Devi’s is kind of their cover for torturing my sense of temporality.

• I’m curious if they will follow Paxton to Arizona, send him back to Sherman Oaks, or choose to reduce him to a cameo. Personally, I’m not against removing the 30+ year-old from this high school show, and I thought this was a nice endnote for the character, so I vote that a cameo will be fine.

• As for other TV, I’ve finally made my way back to The Bear as I had a friend in town and some downtime for some TV viewing. We got halfway through the season, and I’m certainly finding more of the show’s appeal in the smaller stories about the kitchen crew, and how they measure themselves against the stress of the kitchen. Will definitely try to finish the season out sometime in the next week or so.

• I have also spent a fair bit of time with Junior Baking Show on Netflix, the kids spin-off of The Great British Baking Show, and…look, many of these kids are bad. It’s frankly cruel to have artists do renders of their designs for the showstoppers, because they almost never look like them, and listening to the judges try to avoid outright crapping on these kids makes me a little angry sometimes. The few that are really impressive are of course amazing, but I find the whole thing to be a bit hard to watch at times, and I wonder if I’m just misremembering how good the Masterchef Junior contestants were on average back when I watched that show?