A season full of chaos and drama ends just as it should: with the two beautiful, goofy weirdos everyone is rooting for finally falling in love.
Photo: Peacock
Well, as “Still the One,” the song soundtracking Melanie and Sincere’s “epic” finale date goes, looks like we made it. The Love Island USA season eight finale has finally arrived and, in my opinion, turned out exactly as it should. Much as we are here for the drama, it’s nice to end on an episode that is completely conflict-free from start to finish. Even if the finale night did include one too many filler sequences for my personal taste. Did we really need, in a two-hour episode, a video compilation of both messages from home and well-wishes from a lineup of random celebrities? Like, what is this 5-second clip of Lizzo really adding to the finale experience? It’s like the “Imagine” video, but instead of singing, it’s Demi Lovato and Alex Warren making jokes about French fries.
But I suppose the Islanders must have something to do in between learning the final results and going on their last “epic” dates, which is where the real heart of the episode lies.
While they lounge around the villa waiting to be whisked away on their own fantasy outings, the Islanders are feeling nostalgic. Zach begins a sentence with, “Who would have thought,” the most romantic phrase in his personal vocabulary, at least three times that I counted. In their final shared moments on the daybeds, we’re still learning new facts about the Islanders, such as the fact that Aniya had a casino-themed 16th birthday party for which her parents hired professional dancers. Trinity is just thrilled that there are “four beautiful Black women in the final four.” Hear, hear.
As for the dates themselves, the quality of each set-up corresponds directly to the couples’ final rankings, which provides this finale with a neat sense of symmetry, don’t you think?
In fourth place are Kayda and Zach. Their “epic” date is a zooming boat ride (which is wildly inconsiderate of Kayda’s hair) to a small picnic of sandwiches (Pret-a-Manger?) next to a muddy stream. Luckily, Kayda is a good sport and squeals with delight anyway. They discuss future plans — Kayda wants to bring Zach to her family’s lake house in New Hampshire and throw him off the jetski, and Zach wants to bring Kayda to Birmingham for Sunday roast with his family — but Zach stops short of saying anything definitive. Instead, in typical Zach fashion, he says that he can see himself saying “those three words” to Kayda down the line, but they have to experience life in the outside world first.
Unsurprisingly, Kayda and Zach finish in fourth place. Because it is hard to root for a love story that ends with the hero saying, “I can see myself saying ‘I love you’ to you down the road sometime and not as a joke.”
Third-place finishers Melanie and Sincere get the third-best date, with their monogrammed boat taking them to what looks like an abandoned floating mini-resort in the middle of the sea. There is a single massage table waiting for them, but no massage therapist, which I interpret as a test for Sincere. He does give Melanie the massage, but he made her “rock, paper, scissors” for it, so it’s still a fail. Their next activity is making pizzas, and they have what I would think was their first-ever conversation if I didn’t know better. “What’s your favorite pizza order?” is not the kind of question I imagine a person asking six weeks into a relationship. In any case, Melanie takes the opportunity to tell him about getting ham and corn on her pizza when she goes to the Dominican Republic and gets to visit her mom’s 13 siblings. Sincere grins and compliments Mela on her “resilience” while “Still the One” plays in the background. Sure, it’s a little on-the-nose (this is the song that goes, “They said, I’ll bet they’ll never make it”), but even a hint of ambiguity is dangerous in Sincere’s hands.
Back at the villa, Melanie gushes to the other Islanders that she’s never had a date this perfect. “He was saying the kindest words to me,” she tells the girls, which is precisely what got her into this toxic situationship to begin with.
When Ariana Madix announces that they have come in third place at the end of the night, the next day, Sincere’s grin does not waver, and Melanie declares, “This is the prize.” But since it’s the last episode, I’ll borrow a phrase from Trinity: If you like it, I love it.
Aniya and Carl’s date is almost exactly what I imagine Taylor Swift’s wedding looked like. They are brought to a garden with a long table covered in flowers and fairy lights, with books hanging from the trees as decoration. The centerpiece of the date is an illustrated book with Aniya, and Carl’s Love Island journey told in verse as if it were a fairytale. The first fairytale to include an illustration of the princess twerking on a handstand with the prince holding her ankles, I imagine.
Carl and Aniya’s relationship has, slowly but surely, gotten both cuddlier and sexier by the day. Now, even while they’re laughing at phrases like “Princess Aniya pounced on Prince Carl,” they are also brought to genuine tears, because they’re just a couple of cornballs at the end of the day. As the theme music from Love Actually swells in the background, Carl tells Aniya, “You are without a doubt the one that I choose. Like every day.” Then they put on Kenzie and Dylan’s discarded plastic karaoke night crowns and waltz around their personal secret garden. It is somehow genuinely touching.
These two! I would argue that the most exciting moment of this finale episode was not when Bryce and Trinity are named the winners — which they absolutely deserve — but when Bryce tells Trinity, “I love you,” and she says she loves him too. With all this talk about who’s doing Love Island right and who’s closing off too early or exploring too much, we can forget that the true point of Love Island is to watch people fall in love, however it happens. This villa turned these two beautiful, goofy weirdos into sappy lovers, and that is the magic of Love Island.
On their date they are served a dinner of what looks like grapes and crackers, but the decor is fantastic, with lots of fire and tropical flowers. They talk about their moms and their feelings, and then finally you watch Bryce gear himself up to say it and he goes, “I love you.” And you just can’t bottle the feeling that creates in a viewer like me. Especially when it is followed immediately by a bunch of Polynesian dancers leaping from behind the bushes to entertain Bryce and Trinity with a private dance. “I literally have a boyfriend and he loves me, and I love him,” Trinity says to the beach hut with a squeal. It would have been a gross miscarriage of justice if anyone else had won after this.
Fortunately, on occasion, Love Island ends exactly as it should. Trinity and Bryce are named the winners, and Trinity, normally so stoic, cannot stop the happy tears. She and Bryce exchange more “I love you”s, everyone jumps in the pool and does another choreographed dance, fireworks pop overhead, and all is right in the Love Island villa.
