[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Apples Never Fall finale.]
Apples Never Fall spent seven episodes unraveling the mystery of Joy Delaney’s (Annette Bening) disappearance, and as it turns out, no one’s theories about whodunnit were right. In fact, the explanation was overwhelmingly simple.
Each episode of the Peacock melodrama focused on a different member of the Delaney family. It featured flashbacks from “then” and “now” to show how the family’s rift happened, how it led to Joy going missing, and the aftermath. While her absence caused shockwaves and was splashed across the news, the truth was ultimately pretty anticlimactic. Joy wasn’t dead; she just left. Finding out why she left answered every lingering question the series posed.
By the time we got to Sam Neill‘s Stan-focused Episode 6, everyone in the family and the court of public opinion (including the West Palm Beach police) believed he was responsible for her disappearance. A lifetime of being unable to express any vulnerability, paired with mistreatment of his children (Jake Lacy‘s Troy, in particular), made Stan’s apparent guilt the natural conclusion. Neill tells TV Insider that Stan’s expectations of his athlete children were “brutal,” which sowed distrust in their relationships with him as adults.
“He’s been that kind of father that has always required nothing less than a hundred percent performance from his children, and that’s not a fair way to go about things,” Neill says. “That’s brutal.” Karma comes to bite him when his youngest child, Brooke (Essie Randles), finally caves and believes he killed his wife. “The most cruel thing is when Brooke, who’s his favorite if he has one, when she turns on him. That’s the last straw. And as he’s in jail! God, if it isn’t bad enough.”
Jasin Boland/Peacock
For years, Troy was wrongfully blamed for tennis all-star Harry Haddad (Giles Matthey) firing Stan as his coach. The later episodes revealed that was Joy’s doing, not Troy’s. But she didn’t come clean about that until just before she disappeared. This revelation caused her children (played by Lacy, Alison Brie, Conor Merrigan-Turner, and Randles) to give Joy the cold shoulder for weeks. When Joy had enough, she disappeared. She left her phone behind and set up camp at a bar, where she called the M.I.A. Savannah (Georgia Flood), and they left together.
Joy was getting away from the stress of it all in Savannah’s mountain cabin in Georgia for the entirety of her disappearance. Unbeknownst to her, Savannah cut the landline in an attempt to trap Joy there. When Savannah’s identity was revealed to be someone of close relation to the Delaneys, Joy tried to get back to her family. But Savannah had become obsessed with Joy while simultaneously resenting her for what she did to her family, the Haddads. She nearly crashed her car with both of them in it as retribution, but Joy made it back home safely.
Apples Never Fall ends on an “optimistic” note, as Neill describes, with the Delaneys reuniting and beginning to heal from long-term emotional wounds. Stan was so emotionally stunted that he never told Joy, his wife of several decades, that his father was alive and had been abusive in Stan’s youth. Neill says that part of the reason why he’s wracked with anxiety when the kids believe he’s guilty is because he deeply fears being like his own father. Hitting Troy across the face once when Troy was a teenager also caused this internal panic, and it was the reason Joy made Harry fire Stan.
Stan “is of a certain age and from a certain place” where men were “not encouraged to talk about things,” Neill tells TV Insider. He can relate. “My father fought throughout the Second World War and never ever spoke of it,” he adds, saying, “They didn’t talk about important stuff. And I think a lot of that passed on to my generation. Stan’s the same age as me, and he’s not given to talk about feelings. What the hell is that?”
Jasin Boland/Peacock
Stan’s emotional climax of the series came when he finally was able to express his desires. Back in their bedroom the night Joy returned, Stan made an emotional plea for her to stay with him. “She doesn’t seem to respond in that instant. She just leaves it there, which I think is a little cruel,” Neill says with a chuckle. The silence may be because she was too stunned to speak. Stan was never this kind of emotional with her, constantly making her feel like an “invisible” caretaker in their family, as Bening previously told TV Insider. But Neill says the finale serves as a reminder that this couple has been truly in love for a long time.
The series ends with the Delaneys walking out onto Stan and Joy’s tennis court to clean up debris left from a hurricane. Stan gives his wife a content, grateful smile, and the last shot shows Joy looking satisfied with the change she has witnessed in herself and her family. Neill believes this means that Joy stays with Stan moving forward.
“I’d like to think so,” he says. “I think it ends on an optimistic note. And I think there is room there for forgiveness and kindness, and there’s just that little spark that you see between them. There’s a little half smile that you think, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, remember that?’ The thing about Joy and Stan is that they were crazy about each other. That can get forgotten in the mundanity of bringing up children and of school runs and all that stuff. You can forget about that.”
“I think it was a love story,” Neill continues. “Love is one of the great things that run through this. For all the vicissitudes and the misfortunes and the crazy stuff that happens, at the end of the day, this is a family that loves each other and most particularly Joy and Stan. It’s an optimistic end, but there’s some ambivalence there. Nothing certain, is it?”
Ultimately, with its messiness and happiness coming together in the end, Neill feels the Apples Never Fall ending is nothing less than “realistic.”
Apples Never Fall, Available now, Peacock