‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: “Love Fest”

When the only house that’s ever felt like home slips from your hands, there’s really only one thing to do: throw a party. That’s exactly what the crew does in “Love Fest” (The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 2, Episode 6) as a farewell to Susannah’s house and a way to keep her memory alive at Cousins Beach. 

Of course, a party-focused episode where alcohol is heavily involved cannot go off without a hitch, and there are many hitches. As is usually the case, the lead-up to the party — planning the playlist, making the invites, getting the party favors — is more fun than the actual thing, and each set of love duos or triangles get to have innocent flirtations before the bomb goes off. (Also as a millennial, I’m slightly upset that their “retro” themed party features artists from our heyday like Sublime and Blink-182, but such is getting old.)

Belly, of course, goes on an alcohol run with Conrad and Jeremiah. After she impresses them with her ability to convince the clerk to just give her alcohol (a likely story but we’ll let it pass) after both Conrad and Jeremiah fail, she buys Jeremiah and herself Slurpees. When Conrad questions why she didn’t buy him one, she reminds him that he always found them too sweet. But he flirtatiously takes a sip from her straw and compliments the drink, and when she replies saying it’s her specialty he says, “I thought cocoa was your specialty” — a manipulative callback to the first night they hooked up at the beach house. 

All season long, it’s been clear that Belly would still go back to Conrad if he gave her the chance and she seizes a silly moment in the aisle of a party store to apologize for their blow up at the funeral. He admits that he was having a panic attack and that his friend Aubrey was just the one who found him during his lowest moments — he says he wishes it were Belly who found him. As they share a meaningful look, Jeremiah appears at the other side of the aisle and sensing the energy between them, he suggests they get a move on. 

But that doesn’t mean that Jeremiah is necessarily backing off of Belly. The childhood friends flirt in the pool (soundtracked by Taylor Swift’s “Delicate” — a likely confirmation that “Reputation (Taylor’s Version)” is coming soon!), and later at the party, he catches her when she almost falls while roller skating around the party. “You don’t have to hurt yourself to get my attention,” he whispers seductively in her ear. Belly continues to not really know what she wants and clearly looks back on her romance with Jeremiah fondly — when Skye asks for kissing advice, she remembers that her kiss with Jeremiah was “really hot” — but she is still clearly smitten with Conrad at the same time. With only six weeks having passed since Susannah’s death, she’s playing a very very messy game with the grieving brothers. 

By episode’s end, things are precarious. Conrad scoops a drunk Belly from the ocean’s tide and she yells at him about the fact that he went to Jeremiah to ask for his blessing. This part didn’t entirely track for me as I assumed that’s both what she wanted and something that was already known amongst the trio, but it seems that’s not the case. Crying, she tells him that if she had known that he was fighting for her, she would’ve done the same and been there for him through the tougher moments. Again, this feels like an odd thing to balance the entire fate of the relationship on, but it clearly triggered something within Belly. 

When they get back to the house, Conrad and Jeremiah finally have their big blow out fight. Jeremiah accuses Conrad of always quitting when things get tough, calls him a coward, and says he’s “not someone he wants to know.” It’s all pretty rough to witness, especially knowing that Susannah’s last wish was that nothing ever tear the brothers apart. Feeling like she is that wedge coming between them, Belly does the only thing that feels right: she drunk dials her mom crying and asks her to come fix everything. Heartbreaking. Hopefully the next episode will have the mother-daughter moment that Laurel has been dancing around all season.

The episode wasn’t a total bummer though — Steven finally makes a proper move on Taylor and confesses his feelings, and tells her that she’s his favorite person. The moment is almost ruined when her boyfriend Milo arrives and starts a fight with Steven, but she ultimately chooses Steven (her bar is somewhat low and she determines who loves her most based on who knows her middle name, but I guess that’s huge for a high school romance). They finally kiss at the end of the episode in one of the few bright spots in “Love Fest” (soundtracked by another Taylor Swift jam “Snow on the Beach”), the other being Skye opening up to their cousins. After asking for kissing advice, they decide to immediately put it into practice and kiss Cam by the pool. It’s a sweet moment for tertiary characters, and finally gives Elsie Fisher something to do. 

Kyra Sedgwick continues to have very little screentime, though we do get a glimpse of the infamous “Shitmas” after Julia and Susannah’s father died. The beach house was his, and Julia has unresolved feelings about being his daughter from a previous marriage and where she fit into the tapestry of their family. But in the flashback, Susannah is nothing but kind and inclusive, so there’s certainly more to uncover in that storyline with only two episodes left. 

On the house front, Aunt Julia doesn’t budge on her decision to sell, even after Skye pleads with her. Skye continues to reason with their mom throughout the night and comes to the group with a compromise: the family buying the home agreed to allow them to rent the house for one week each summer, an offer that Conrad immediately refuses. But with the physical state of the house by episode’s end — there’s vomit on the floor, graffiti on the walls, and at least one broken window — we’ll see if the sale still goes through. 

Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Vulture, Teen Vogue, Paste Magazine, and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.