This Summer's Hottest Show Ended Just as Messily as It Began. Good!
All Huda Mustafa and Chris Seeley had to do was get through their last full day in the villa. They had, against all odds, secured a spot as one of the remaining four couples in the Love Island USA Season 7 finale, an honor the show's voting audience had bestowed on them despite the obvious precariousness of their relationship. The tension between them was palpable, and their long-term prospects were looking less and less rosy by the day, but the obvious thing to do would have been to stick it out for a few more days—to see if they won, for one thing, but also for the chance to resolve things away from the pressures of filming. You have to hand it to the two of them for not taking the easy way out: Instead, Huda and Chris turned what was supposed to be their romantic final date into one of the most excruciating breakup scenes I've ever witnessed on TV. It was the perfect capstone to an anarchic season of Love Island USA .
This year, Islanders on Peacock's hit version of the UK reality dating show struggled to form the kind of strong connections that usually define a season of Love Island . The two strongest relationships were probably those between Ace and Chelley and Taylor and Clarke, but both couples were voted out by the audience in the episodes leading up to the finale, leaving behind four finalist couples who had only come together in the back half of the season. As tempting as it is to blame audiences for voting “wrong,” as well as the Islanders themselves for dumping decisions they made as a group earlier in the season, it's misguided to think that anything so simple might have significantly reshaped the season. I do think the Ace and Chelley dumping was a bit of a fluke that might be attributed to the show's popularity still being relatively new and viewers not having a strong gauge of how voting tends to go, rather than to a widespread desire to send the two home—basically, I think we might strongly benefit from polling and data and maybe ranked-choice voting. But more than that, I think we need to accept that messiness and unpredictability are part of the Love Island experience, and the series is, contrary to popular opinion, all the better for it.
After all, would you have preferred not to see that spectacular final-episode flameout of a date between Huda and Chris? If so, maybe we're just different kinds of reality television watchers. To me, that was cinema. Their argument was awkwardly interrupted, more or less mid-breakup, by a singer emerging to perform a rendition of “Moon River,” which they had to then sit through, sullen-faced. Chris had carried Huda to their table so she could avoid stepping in some scenic shallow water that surrounded them; most women would not ask, after breaking up with someone, for that person to then lift them up and carry them back across the water, but most women are not Huda Mustafa. Chris, understandably but not un-dickishly, said no, his carrying days were over. Huda resigned herself to taking off her heels and took an extra swig of champagne before going off on her own. Back at the villa, the two explained to their fellow Islanders that they'd ended things; the girls lavished praise on Huda for not resorting to screaming and making a scene, which shows how low their expectations for their friend's emotional maturity were. And yet, through it all, I was faintly team Huda. Chris had clearly been fed up with her for days, but did the cowardly guy move of forcing her to end it. Much has been made of Huda's redemption arc this season—in my view, its curvature was so unimpressive as to be nonexistent, but I will grant that she is an interestingly complex character, someone who has been difficult all season and who I expect will remain difficult all her life. When, on the night before their date, she whispered to a sleepy Chris in bed that, if he didn't speak to her on the count of three, there would be consequences, I both winced and felt a stirring of something like admiration—the indomitability of the human spirit, you know?
Was there a discussion about the timing of the breakup that audiences never saw? I wonder—Huda and Chris had to know that audiences had already voted for their winning couple, that their fate had been sealed whether they stayed together or not, but they still had to survive the final ritual of standing beside each other and delivering speeches about how much they meant to each other. They acquitted themselves well in those final moments; when Chris warned that his speech was long, I braced myself for shenanigans, for him to finally let loose a spew of bitterness about how he really feels about Huda, but he kept it blessedly positive instead. (The bitterness hasn't been completely avoided, sadly: The post-Island podcast tour is likely loading as we speak.) All along, the faint worry that they would somehow eke out a win hovered over them, a nightmare scenario in which we would all have to sit there and watch a couple who had just broken up beat out the intact pairs. Fortunately, that didn't happen. Exuberant, guileless Amaya and just-along-for-the-ride Bryan ended up taking it. In truth, their love story is similarly recent and not necessarily so much sturdier than Chris and Huda's, but at least the threat that a man was going to take the $100,000 prize money for himself and not share it with a single mother as a horrified viewing public looked on had been effectively neutralized. Can we really hope for much more than that? Love Island Season 7, I miss you already.
