Global Heartbreak: How The Summer I Turned Pretty Episode 10 Became the World’s Soft-Power Beach Party

The Summer I Turned Pretty, Episode 10: A Dispatch from the End of the Empire’s Beach Towel
By Dave’s Locker’s Senior Correspondent for Soft Power and Coastal Melodrama

Geneva, 03:14 a.m. local time—while COP delegates in Bonn argue over half-degree Celsius increments and the Indian monsoon politely drowns another election cycle, the true geopolitical fault line shifts under a pastel-striped cabana somewhere on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. Episode 10 of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” has dropped, and the planet’s attention—what’s left of it after the TikTok hearings and the global fried-chicken sandwich arms race—has pivoted to Belly Conklin’s final beach bonfire. If you missed it, congratulations: you still possess the illusion that your choices matter.

Let’s zoom out. The series began as a nostalgic postcard about first love and SPF 50, but by Episode 10 it has metastasized into a soft-power treaty. Netflix, operating like a benevolent narcotics cartel, has exported 195 minutes of teen longing to 190 countries, subtitled in 37 languages, including Korean (where the show trended above the North’s latest missile test) and Ukrainian (where, rumor has it, trench soldiers binge it during generator curfew). Soft power used to mean jazz and blue jeans; now it means slow-motion shots of white boys in board shorts crying about their dead moms. Call it the Pax Americana of the algorithm.

Internationally, the finale functions as a kind of Rorschach test. Scandinavian viewers interpret it as a cautionary tale about seasonal affective disorder. Brazilian TikTokers have already green-screened themselves into the Cousins Beach house, replacing the Fisher boys with funk beats and caipirinhas. Meanwhile, Japanese message boards debate whether Jeremiah’s emotional constipation is a uniquely American pathology or a universal male crisis; consensus is split, but merch sales are up 400 percent in Harajuku. Somewhere in Lagos, a startup has cloned the soundtrack into an Afro-fusion lo-fi playlist titled “Coastal Heartbreak, But Make It Lagos Traffic.” Cultural imperialism has never smelled so much like reef-safe sunscreen.

The finale’s plot mechanics are, of course, absurd. A single beach party resolves three seasons of love-triangle calculus, a dead parent’s literary legacy, and at least one minor arson incident. If only the UN worked this efficiently. Belly picks—spoiler alert—Conrad, the brooding one who communicates chiefly through jaw clenches. This choice sends shockwaves through the global simp economy. Crypto traders in Singapore report a 12 percent dip in “Team Jeremiah” NFTs. A French philosopher live-tweets that Belly’s decision proves Sartre right: hell is other people’s playlists. Somewhere in Brussels, an EU cultural attaché drafts a memo titled “Subsidize European Brooders Before American Jawlines Conquer Gen Z.”

But the darker joke lies beneath the sand. While these photogenic teens debate promposals, the actual coastline they frolic on is eroding at 1.5 feet per year. The beach house that serves as narrative Switzerland will, scientists estimate, be underwater before the characters hit their ten-year reunion. The show’s fantasy—perpetual summer, inexhaustible parental real estate, infinite second chances—mirrors the broader fantasy sold to the planet since 1945: growth without decay, love without loss, carbon without consequence. The closing drone shot of fireworks over the Atlantic might as well be a heat map of melting ice caps.

Still, humanity watches, rapt, because what else is there? In Kyiv, a power-cut living room glows with the last 5 percent of a portable battery just to see if Belly wears the gold necklace or the silver. In São Paulo, an Uber driver idles in traffic, earbuds in, ignoring his passenger to watch the final kiss buffered at 144p. Even the Chinese censors, who trimmed three seconds of underage drinking, let the longing remain—perhaps recognizing that desire, unlike democracy, is reliably apolitical.

The episode ends with a sweeping montage set to a Phoebe Bridgers cover that sounds like the death rattle of the American dream, and yet every viewer, from Jakarta to Reykjavík, feels seen. That is the final, exquisite irony: in a world fracturing along every conceivable axis, we are united by the manufactured heartbreak of people who have never worried about a visa overstay. Globalization’s last gift is synchronized secondhand adolescence.

Fade out. Roll credits. Somewhere, a glacier calves into the sea, but it does so quietly—so as not to wake the binge-watchers.