The fourth and final season cemented UnREAL’s Quinn and Rachel as the spiritual successors to Breaking Bad’s Walter and Jesse.
This article contains spoilers for season 4 of UnREAL.
Everlasting, the Bachelor-esque reality show featured in four seasons of UnREAL, ended its storied run by wiping itself clean of all its past wrongdoings in every way imaginable. UnREAL‘s last eight-episode arc couldn’t quite accomplish that same lofty feat, but it did its best.
The Lifetime-turned-Hulu drama had a strange run in terms of creative success, jumping out of the gate with a fantastic first season let down by a ludicrous sophomore outing and slightly redeemed by a more tightly plotted third season.
UnREAL‘s fourth season thankfully trended closer to three than two, though it continued the series’ tradition of stretching the limits of what these people are able to get away with without being sent to prison. Quinn, Rachel and anyone involved with Everlasting really should have been removed from civilized society a long time ago.
The clear inspiration for season 4 of UnREAL seems to be Breaking Bad. Comparing any show to a classic like Breaking Bad is setting it up for failure, but UnREAL‘s final season followed Vince Gilligan’s Walter-Jesse formula incredibly closely to varying degrees of success.
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The third season ended with Rachel Goldberg (Shiri Appleby) leaving her producing job at Everlasting for a quiet life in a remote cabin and Everlasting executive producer Quinn King (Constance Zimmer) rekindling her romance with showrunner Chet Wilton (Craig Bierko). Season 4 picked up with Rachel returning for Everlasting: All Stars, which is exactly what it sounds like.
When the series started, Quinn was clearly Walter White to Rachel’s Jesse Pinkman. Just like Walter and Jesse, Quinn and Rachel were both extremely good at their jobs and knew that their professional activities were shady as hell. And while Quinn reveled in Everlasting‘s trashiness (à la Walter), Rachel at least vaguely felt bad about it (à la Jesse).
Season 4 saw that facade come crashing down for Rachel and the roles in the Breaking Bad analogy reversed. This Rachel no longer had any qualms about manipulating the show’s participants and no longer seemed to feel guilty about her association with Everlasting.
“I am Everlasting,” she declared in the season premiere in a moment eerily reminiscent of Walter’s iconic “I am the danger” monologue.
Quinn very quickly figured out what the new Rachel’s goal really was: “To hell with being a producer. You’re the suitress.” She was 100 percent right. After years of Rachel sleeping with coworkers and contestants with no end game in mind, her mission now was to get someone to put a ring on it by the end of the season.
She even made a bet on just that with new producer Tommy Castelli (Francois Arnaud). While Rachel spent most of the season continually pushing the limits of what was acceptable on an already morally bankrupt reality show, she also found time to sleep with Tommy and two contestants and made one of them believe she had feelings for him. It was impressively evil stuff even for her.
It was telegraphed early on that Tommy would be her new Coleman Wasserman, and so of course he ended up being the one to propose to her and of course got his heart broken by the never-faithful Rachel. Note to men everywhere: Any woman who says yes after you propose to her by drawing a ring in sharpie on her finger doesn’t really mean it.
As Rachel descended further into Walter White territory, Quinn’s life went in a more Jesse Pinkman direction. She found out she was pregnant, though not with Chet’s baby. The father turned out to be August (Adam Demos), the contestant she had an affair with last season who also happened to be competing in All Stars. Soap opera-friendly fireworks ensued.
Everlasting‘s latest season resulted in the most injuries to contestants in the show’s history. Six episodes in, one had fractured his pelvis after falling off a greased pole, another was crippled by a go-cart crash and one was violently assaulted (more on that later).
A large chunk of the season involved Rachel pushing Maya (Natasha Wilson), a contestant who was raped by the suitor’s friend Roger (Tom Brittney) in UnREAL season 1, to take her revenge on the friend, who of course was brought onto All Stars for the drama.
When Maya had an opportunity to confront Roger on camera and refused to do so, Rachel had the world’s most selfish breakdown, yelling, “This is my moment! It’s mine!”
Rachel had officially become the one who knocks.
Not to be defeated so easily, Rachel manipulated Roger and fellow contestant Noel (Meagan Holder) into a situation where Roger was about to sexually assault the unconscious Noel. Before he could, Maya rushed in with a knife and mutilated Roger. Quinn and Jay (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) were horrified, while Rachel and Tommy seemed happy with her handiwork.
Those proved to be the battle lines for the rest of the season, as Quinn suddenly grew a conscience and decided she couldn’t stomach Rachel’s newfound callousness.
“This is not who you are Rachel,” Quinn tried to remind her at one point. But Rachel was at the “say my name” stage of her Walter White evolution, the point where she was feeling herself too much to care about who she was hurting along the way.
Rachel’s abhorrent behavior is eventually outed by Noel, who cuts a video of Rachel sleeping with contestants.
“We’re all told sluts get cut, but there’s a slut pulling the strings,” she told the world. If The Bachelor ever got that meta, it would probably be 10,000 times more popular than it already is.
The guilt Rachel still felt manifests in her hair falling out, and she eventually is forced to seek help from Quinn. Quinn, who had gone full Jesse Pinkman and just wanted out of the Everlasting bubble, refused and essentially asked Rachel to stop working her for like 10 seconds. “I am so sick and deeply tired of you pretending you’re a good person,” she rightly said of Rachel.
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In the end, their roles had to reverse again in order to save them both from some career-ending and potentially legally comprising information leaking out. Quinn came in truck-mounted machine guns blazing during the Everlasting season finale to save Rachel, and the two threw Tommy under the bus to save themselves because, as Quinn put it, “I could never do that to you Rachel. Never.”
The last shot of the series was Quinn cuddling with Rachel in her bed, a far cry from Jesse driving away from Walter at full speed forever. That’s the main way this analogy falters: While Walter and Jesse had a strong bond, Quinn and Rachel truly loved each other.
And thus ends UnREAL, a wildly uneven show whose final season was rightly described by Entertainment Weekly as a “Viking funeral of crazy.” It never quite reached Danny-Trejo’s-head-attached-to-a-tortoise levels of insanity, but it was a valiant if flawed attempt to replicate the buddy anti-hero highs of Breaking Bad with female protagonists.