While the The Great season 2 ending seemed prepared to provide a peaceful resolution, the final minutes add a complicated twist to the ending that needs to be explained. The sudden twist ending in The Great season 2’s conclusion is not entirely unexpected in retrospect as it follows a similar pattern to the closure of The Great season 1. The Great season 2 started four months after the events of the first season and concludes Catherine’s (Elle Fanning) coup against Peter (Nicholas Hoult) to take the Russian throne as she forces him to sign papers of abdication.
As Catherine works to keep a firm grasp on the throne, Peter attempts to make her fall in love with him. This plan is complicated when Peter ends up sleeping with, and accidentally killing, Catherine’s mother Joanna (Gillian Anderson). In The Great season 2 ending, Catherine appears to forgive Peter for his actions. However, in the final minutes, almost no lines are spoken as Velementov (Douglas Hodge) moves to arrest the Russian nobles that are loyal to Peter — presumably on Catherine’s orders. The Great season 2 ends with Catherine attempting to stab Peter, accidentally attacking Peter’s double, Pugachev, instead. After the peaceful reconciliation, this raised a lot of questions that The Great still has to answer.
What Peter And Catherine’s Visions Mean Explained
In The Great season 2, episode 10 “The Wedding,” Catherine’s confrontation with Peter is forestalled by a need to meet with the Ottomans and the fact that he is holding Paul. As they are then apart for a long time, The Great gives both of the characters’ visions of the other, which adds a shade of confusion to The Great season 2 ending. These visions are a little esoteric but clarify how and why they each make their decisions in the final moments of the season. Additionally, while most of the show is told from Catherine’s point of view, Peter’s vision gives The Great a chance to show another interpretation.
By exploring the imaginary event of Peter eating a whale, Catherine’s vision in The Great season 2 ending explained several key parts of her complex final decision through parallels. While she knows that Peter has negative impulses and that is part of who he is, she admonishes him for following them and suggests that his actions must have consequences. The version of Peter that she has imagined points out that she similarly acts on dangerous impulses, they are just different types of impulses, suggesting that she is not entirely in a position to throw stones.
And finally, the vision shows her desire to not have to kill him. As Peter kisses her, Catherine says that that is not enough, but she also knows that she has the power to make the decision to not kill him if she chose to. Most importantly, Catherine has acknowledged that Peter is perhaps the only person who truly knows her, and when the audience sees how Peter sees Catherine in his vision it is as a beautiful but bloody and ruthless figure. He loves her in part because of this ruthlessness, which is why he is ultimately able to forgive her for her actions against him.
Why Marial Was Arrested At The End Of The Great Season 2 (And George Wasn’t)
The Great season 2 ending sees Velementov leading troops to arrest several of the Russian nobles who had plotted to kill Catherine and reinstate Peter, including Grigor (Gwilym Lee), Arkady (Bayo Gbadamosi), and Tatyana (Florence Keith-Roach). Two odd choices appear to happen here: Marial was arrested along with the others, while George, Grigor’s husband, was told she wasn’t being arrested. Marial was one of Catherine’s first friends in Russia when she was assigned as Catherine’s maid, while George was a longtime supporter of Peter.
The decisions for who to arrest in The Great season 2 ending were presumably made by Catherine when she formed a plan after Archie (Adam Godley) informed her that Peter knew that she had learned of her mother’s death. While Marial has been a long-term friend to Catherine, at the end of The Great season 1 she betrayed them and informed Peter of Catherine’s planned coup. While she has maintained it was part of a plan to save Catherine’s life, Catherine is clearly unsure as to where Marial’s loyalties lie so having her arrested to be safe makes sense.
Georgina’s fate is wholly different in The Great season 2 ending. As The Great season 2 ending explained that Georgina, on the other hand, requested to be exiled to France and returned with false claims of having seen the light of what Catherine is trying to do in Russia, wanting to help. Catherine appears to have been taken in by this so doesn’t have her arrested, which will leave Peter’s followers with an ally outside of prison in The Great season 3.
Why Catherine Still Tries To Kill Peter In The Great Season 2 Finale
After a public argument, emotional speeches, and a gentle reconciliation with Peter at Marial’s wedding during The Great season 2 ending, Catherine enters his apartments and attempts to stab him to death, attacking Pugachev by mistake. With little to no speech over this scene, the attack can appear to come out of nowhere. However, it appears that Catherine deliberately staged a false reconciliation with Peter to defuse the situation with the court and put them on their back foot.
She then tells Peter that she will meet him in his apartment after Paul is asleep. As The Great season 2 ending explained, all of this is a calculated move that speaks to Catherine’s ruthlessness and her new savvy for battle. By using the staged emotional reconciliation, she is able to get Peter alone to kill him without risk to her child or having to face the chance of being killed by his supporters. However, Catherine’s plan essentially backfires, as Pugachev is on the receiving end of the knife instead, and even he manages to walk away somehow alive.
Why Catherine Hugs Peter After Trying To Kill Him
After seemingly stabbing Pugachev to death while thinking that it is Peter in The Great season 2 ending, Peter himself enters the room, and she runs to hug him. Ultimately, across The Great season 2, Catherine has fallen in love with Peter. When she attacks Pugachev, she does so with his back turned to ensure that she doesn’t have to see the face of the man that she loves as she kills him. The moment that the deed is done, Catherine begins to wail because she fundamentally didn’t want to have to kill him but saw no alternative.
As The Great season 2 ending explained, when Peter enters, and she realizes what has happened she is actually relieved that she has a second chance, so she embraces him. While this posed complications for Russia in The Great season 3, their expressions show that Catherine is aware of the complex awkwardness of the situation, and Peter’s beliefs that she is both ruthless and fundamentally loves him have been confirmed.
How Pugachev Survived Catherine’s Attack At The End Of The Great Season 2 Explained
The biggest question left by The Great season 2 ending is how Pugachev is able to survive Catherine’s attack. She stabs him violently and repeatedly in the back, and he falls to the floor. However, when Catherine and Peter are embracing, Pugachev gets up and leaves grumbling about it having hurt. While people can and have survived some surprising wounds to their torsos, it seems unlikely that The Great is simply saying that he might have survived by luck or chance.
There are several possible explanations for how Pugachev, Peter’s doppelganger (both played by the X-Men franchise’s Beast, Nicholas Hoult), survived Catherine’s attack. It is likely that Peter thought that Catherine might still plan to kill him after their reconciliation and Pugachev’s presence with his back turned was set up by him. If this is the case then Pugachev would likely have worn some form of padding in an attempt to save his own life as he had seen multiple doubles die throughout The Great season 2.
This would allow him to still be stabbed and bleed in The Great season 2 ending but mean that the wounds were not deep enough to actually kill him. It is also possible that this is intended as a setup to introduce a version of the Pugachev Rebellion in The Great season 3. Alternatively, it could have been intended primarily as a joke to help break the tension at the end of the season, playing off the idea that Pugachev is Peter’s best double and had managed to survive multiple times where others had died.
How The Great Season 2 Ending Set Up Season 3
The Great season 2 ending set up season 3 quite well, and even foreshadowed a major character death that will change the course of the series forever. The third installment picks up the day after The Great season 2 ending, and Catherine still feels immense guilt over attempting to assassinate her husband. Stabbing Pugachev turned out to be a great way to make him the antagonist of The Great season 3, as his abilities for impersonating the former ruler begin to extend outside the circle of nobility. In addition, Catherine maintains to Marial that they are no longer friends after her betrayal, and Marial tries to win her friendship back.
The Great season 3 sees a number of power shifts thanks to the events of season 2, with Marial and Catherine no longer friends and Georgina, who was once Catherine’s biggest detractor, now on her side. A huge character death in the middle of season 3 was foreshadowed by The Great season 2 ending, and this character’s death may have been the best thing for The Great going forward. Before this, Peter and Catherine attempt to work out the kinks in their marriage after she tried to murder him, but this doesn’t go too swimmingly. The Great season 3 ends with Pugachev’s Rebellion, a real historical event, being a failure.
