This article contains spoilers for the final season of Grace and Frankie.Grace and Frankie recently wrapped its seventh and final season. Theshow starred Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as friends, sometimes foes, and the ex-wives of Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston, and delivered plenty of plot twists, zany antics, and heartwarming scenes during its time on.
Fonda starred as Grace Hanson and Tomlin played Frankie Bergstein, two older women who become friends after their husbands reveal they are in love with each other and plan to get married.
The two couples were lifelong friends thanks to the friendship between their ex-husbands, two successful divorce attorneys working at the same firm.
Grace and Frankie are polar opposites (Grace is polished and poised, Frankie is messy and Bohemian), yet along the way the two women develop a deep if unlikely friendship that is the cornerstone of the series. Here's a look at the series, how it ended, and just how satisfactory that conclusion was.
Grace and Frankie Through The Years
Grace Hanson and Frankie Bergstein went through a lot throughout the trajectory of the show's storyline. Their husbands came out as gay and announced they were in love with each other. They had to learn to live together.
That wasn't easy, as Grace is a retired cosmetics executive who loves her designer clothes, vodka martinis, and insulting people, while Frankie is an artist and hippie who definitely does things her own way. Grace is standoffish, while Frankie loves deeply and is affectionate.
Despite their differences, they find common ground, friendship, and family along the way — oh, and they co-founded a company that makes vibrators for older women. Grace and Frankie are surrounded by their ex-husbands and their kids. Grace and Robert have two daughters - Brianna (June Diane Raphael) and Mallory (Brooklyn Decker). Frankie and Sol have two adopted sons - Coyote (Ethan Embry) and Bud (Baron Vaughn).
Season Seven's Main Plot Points
The four main characters in Grace and Frankie are all legitimately senior citizens, and season seven saw Frankie dealing with the mobility issues her arthritis is causing and Robert dealing with memory loss and the early stages of dementia.
Grace and Sol are there for their former partners and their current partners, and while Grace and Frankie are strictly Platonic friends, the storyline of season seven underscores that the two women are every bit as much life partners as their ex-husbands have become to each other.
During season seven, it is revealed that Frankie has a psychic on call when she contacts her to try to find a friend who has gone missing from the old folks home. During her call, Frankie learns that she only has three months to live. In typical Frankie fashion, she has big feelings about this.
As she says multiple times, "You can't spell funeral without fun," and she comes up with a plan to have her funeral while she's still alive to enjoy it. She also tries to rush her son Coyote's wedding to his girlfriend Jessica so that she can be there to see it. This is a theme of season seven — time is running out, and these characters are trying to get in all the good stuff they can.
Sol and Robert's Final Farewell
It was important for a show starring septuagenarians and octogenarians to deal with the issues people face as they get older. One of the big ones is memory loss, dementia, and Alzheimer's. Martin Sheen's Robert has one of the more heartfelt and heart-wrenching storylines of the final season -— memory loss.
Grace and Frankie adeptly handled the storyline from Robert's perspective and from Sol's perspective. Memory loss and its associated diseases do not just affect the person afflicted, but also their family and/or support system, perhaps even more so. The show portrays Sol's heartbreak and concern as he realizes his husband isn't going to recover from this.
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