Inside Dead to Me Season 3

Dead to Me season 3 has finally arrived after having been delayed while Christina Applegate battled through her devastating diagnosis with MS. We’ve followed the friendship of Judy Hale (Linda Cardellini) and Jen Harding (Applegate) throughout many tumultuous ups and downs across three seasons, and now the end is here.

The first episode of season 3 picks up in the shocking aftermath of the second season finale, where Jen and Judy got into a car accident caused by Ben who was driving drunk after learning Steve had died. Season 3 picks up; Jen is being wheeled to the hospital while Ben has little memory of what occurred the night before.

While Jen and Judy are at the hospital, Charlie reads through the letter Jen left him in the event she went to prison. He’s interrupted by Ben (James Marsden) who shows up looking like a bloody wreck after the car accident. Ben still doesn’t know who he hit, his memory is fuzzy from the booze, and neither Jen nor Judy knows that it was Ben in the other car.

Charlie drives Ben to the hospital to get checked out. In the car, Ben tells the teen that the last thing he remembers is finding out Steve died, and the cops found his body, thus triggering his drunken spiral. Charlie promises Ben he won’t tell anyone about this incident.

Before the doctor will let Jen or Judy leave, he strongly recommends they get a CT scan to ensure they don’t have anything more serious happening internally. Jen and Judy get their CT scans. Judy steals some drugs for Jen in the process and then runs right into Ben. When she tells him what they’re there for, Ben suddenly remembers hitting Jen and Judy. He’s horrified to know that Jen is hurt because of him.

After Jen’s CT scan, the doctor comes to give her the results. They’ve found a few suspicious masses on the scan, and she needs to follow up with an oncologist. But there’s a twist. Jen was sitting in Judy’s bed because she spilled water on hers. The test results aren’t Jen’s, they’re Judy’s, and now Jen has the difficult task of telling Judy the news herself.

Episode 2 centers on Jen having a meltdown in the bathroom as she tries to drum up the courage to tell Judy the truth. But before she can say anything, they’re interrupted by Charlie, eager to confront his mother about the contents of her goodbye letters. The language Jen used is vague enough that Charlie doesn’t entirely understand what happened that made Jen need to “forgive” Judy. He assumes that Judy had an affair with his dad and instead of denying it, Jen goes along with the lie because she thinks it’s better than him hearing the truth.

The day only gets progressively worse as Detective Perez and Detective Prager show up at Jen’s house to tell them they found Steve’s body and to follow up on their hit-and-run accident. Jen talks to Perez in the kitchen while Judy answers some of Nick’s questions. Perez and Nick are not going to be handling the investigation into Steve’s murder. It turns out that the spot where Jen and Judy buried Steve was on national parkland, meaning the case now falls under federal jurisdiction and will be taken over by an FBI agent named Glenn Moranis.

While chatting with Nick, Judy learns that the cops are considering a connection to the Greeks. If she and Jen can convince them that’s true, they can escape blame for the whole thing. Judy is optimistic when she talks to Jen again, telling her they can maybe pin this whole thing on the Greeks.

Later, Ben pays Jen a visit with a gift basket, and to check on her. Just like Jen and Judy, Ben has his own little bathroom breakdown as he considers telling them that he was the one who hit them. He’s also tormented by Steve’s death, seeing his twin’s reflection in the mirror. The last time they saw each other they got in a nasty fight and now Ben is feeling guilty.

Sensing Jen is in pain, Judy goes to get her pain pills and finds a few brochures for cancer in her purse. Thinking Jen has cancer, Judy confronts her about it and Jen is forced to tell her the truth. The reveal is just as heartbreaking as you’d expect, with both Jen and Judy caring more about the other than themselves. Judy is scared, but she’s also happy that Jen is okay. Jen reassures her that everything is going to be okay.

When we catch up with Ben again, he’s drinking his troubles away at the bar with the wooden bird in tow. Once his Uber arrives, Ben leaves the bird behind, and it ends up in Nick’s possession by episode’s end.

Episode 3 begins with Judy and Jen attending an oncologist appointment together. While in the waiting room, Judy reveals that she had an abnormal pap smear the previous year when she had her pregnancy scare, but she never followed up.

At his mom’s house, Ben pulls a tarp over his damaged car just in time for Nick to arrive and return the wooden bird. He mentions that without a car, there is no case, regarding the hit-and-run. Ben looks guilty as he shifts closer to the car hidden behind him.

Jen meets with Perez again in a parking lot. Perez shows Jen the photo of a piece of wood they found lodged in Steve’s skull. It’s the tail broken off of the wooden bird. Jen knows what it is, and Perez is pissed when she finds out Jen doesn’t have the bird in her possession at the moment.

Back at the precinct, Nick asks Perez if he can look through Steve’s file. She reluctantly lets him since she has no real reason to say no. He takes a look at the photo showing the tail broken off of the wooden bird.

Ben returns to Jen and Judy’s house while Judy is counting the cash from Steve’s painting. She quickly hides it and makes space for a lot more wooden birds. Ben visited the craft store to get supplies so that Judy can fix the one Henry lent him since it means so much to him. Judy is obviously overjoyed to have the bird back in their possession.

Judy gets the results back from the doctor. It’s official, she has cancer. When Jen gets home, Judy can’t bring herself to tell Jen the truth, so she lies and says her test results came back clean. Jen admits she prayed for her and that’s “kind of pissed it worked.”

In the final moments of the episode, Jen and Judy finally burn the wooden bird and dispose of the remnants in the trash. Then the camera pans across the street to a car watching the house…inside is Agent Moranis.

Before Steve’s funeral in episode 4, Judy goes to the doctor to get the full results of her scans. She has stage four cervical cancer; it’s already spread to her liver. She’ll need to start several treatments of chemotherapy right away. The funeral is awkward for both Jen and Judy, especially because it’s an open casket. But it turns out Steve’s body isn’t in the coffin, just his suit.

Jen returns home with Ben during the wake and finds herself stuck inside a creepy room filled with old Victorian dolls. Ben has to come to rescue her. Ben finally comes clean about the hit-and-run accident. He confesses to Jen that he was the one who hit her and Judy. Surprisingly, Jen is totally okay with it and kisses him. Maybe it’s not too surprising since Ben’s admission probably alleviates a tiny bit of the guilt Jen feels for keeping him in the dark about Steve’s death.

In episode 5, Jen and Ben wake up in bed together, too. Ben asks Jen if it would be weird for him to take a bath. It’s totally weird, but she tells him to go for it. And then Charlie walks into the room to tell Jen the ceiling is leaking and catches them together. Ben volunteers to help Jen fix the leak, which appears to be coming from the bathtub. While he’s examining the pipes, Ben apologizes to Charlie for showing up drunk at the house and everything.

At the doctor’s office, Judy learns what her chemotherapy will entail. her doctor recommends she tell a friend or family member because going through treatment alone will be extremely difficult. Judy thinks she can do it since she doesn’t want to become a burden to Jen. Instead of telling Jen the truth, Judy tells her that she’s going to Sonoma with Michelle for a few months.

Judy returns home just in time to catch Jen freaking out about the leak so telling her about Sonoma just compounds her stress. Then there’s Ben, who is on a full-scale grief spiral over Steve’s death still. Jen and Judy take him with them to a grief support group meeting.

Ben shows up to the party completely drunk. While talking to Jen, he reveals that he learned Steve drowned. he didn’t die from the blow to the head, but from being left in the water. Jen is rattled when she hears this since it means she technically let Steve drown in the pool. And then Ben accidentally throws a bottle of wine into the pool and dives in after it, making the entire incident a frightening deja vu moment for Jen.

In the aftermath of everything, Jen tells Judy her feelings regarding everything with Ben and her guilt over Steve drowning. Judy finally tells Jen the truth about her cancer and of course, Jen promises to be there for her. The next morning, Jen prints out a schedule to keep track of all of Judy’s appointments and they go over it together at the breakfast table. And then the bathtub falls through the ceiling, crushing everything in its path.

Episode 6 begins with Jen telling her kids how things are going to change now that Judy is undergoing treatment with the kitchen/bathroom repairs going on in the background. Judy is going to be staying in Charlie’s room for the time being while Charlie relocates to the guesthouse. Jen assures the boy that it’s going to be okay. Medicine has come a long way since Jen’s mom had cancer and was in treatment.

At the hospital, Jen is all set to stay by Judy’s side as she undergoes treatment, but when she observes a young girl (Rachelle Henry) sitting with her sick mother, it triggers some difficult memories of the time she spent with her mom experiencing the same thing as a kid. While sitting there, Jen intends to start folding the 1,000 origami cranes she agreed to do for Henry’s recital. But she gives up pretty fast and lets Judy take over.

At the police station, Nick brings a bunch of those wooden birds from the craft stores to Perez. He, rightfully, figured out that the piece of wood lodged in Steve’s skull was broken off from the bird. Perez tries to get him off the trail and tells him she’ll bring the bird, and his theory, to Glenn.

When Perez and Jen meet up again, Jen ends up telling Perez about Judy having cancer, which does earn her some sympathy. Back home, Judy is struggling to celebrate after her chemo is complete because Francine’s death has seriously unnerved her. To calm her down, Jen takes some of her psychedelic mushrooms and they both start tripping out in a hilarious montage. As she starts coming down from her trip, Jen freaks out and panics that she’s having a heart attack, convincing Charlie to drive her to the hospital since Judy is in no condition to do so.

Judy stays home with Henry and they bond, with Henry even calling Judy his “second mom,” and tells her he wants to use his 1,000 cranes wish on her. It clearly means a lot to her that he thinks that since Judy has never been able to have children of her own and she thinks of Jen’s kids as hers. Jen then learns that she’s pregnant with Ben’s baby!

In episode 7, Jen feels guilty that she’s pregnant while Judy cannot get pregnant. It’s a complicated situation and Jen doesn’t know how to break the news to Judy. Instead of telling the truth, Jen buys a big poncho to hide her stomach, since the doctor points out that she has, actually, started showing.

At the police precinct, Nick has discovered CCTV footage of Charlie in the wrong place at the wrong time and believes he could be a suspect. When Perez takes this to Jen, she’s forced to tell her the truth about Ben. She also tells Perez she’s pregnant with his kid.

Jen finally tells Judy that she’s pregnant and Judy takes it about as well as you’d expect. She walks outside and jumps in the pool. All Judy has ever wanted to be is a mother and she’s gotten dealt a poor hand by fate. But she does come around eventually and she and Jen discuss the news. Jen obviously wants Judy to be there with her to help her with the baby.

That night, Judy Googles her illness. The internet reveals that her survival odds are very low, even with the chemotherapy. In her bedroom, Jen submits Judy for a cancer clinical trial. Knowing that her chances of survival are so slim, Judy starts to take action to make life better for Jen after she’s gone, starting with convincing Ben to come back and tell Jen the truth about what happened to her husband.

We find out that the night Jen and Steve hit Ted, they were actually driving Ben home. Ben was drunk in the backseat and Ben thinks it was his fault that they hit Ted. Before Jen can really process this new reveal, Perez and Nick show up to arrest Ben for the hit-and-run.

The first thing Jen does in episode 8 after Ben gets arrested is drive to the police station to yell at Perez. Even though Jen doesn’t want to press charges against Ben, they still had to arrest him. But Perez argues that he’ll be out in no time on bail.

When she gets home, a frantic Jen tells Judy that she’s planning to confess. Judy advises her against it since they still don’t know exactly what Glenn knows. Plus, Judy thinks they should go on vacation first, maybe to Mexico where Steve had a vacation home. Jen agrees and then returns to Karen’s for the open house. There, she asks Christopher if he can watch the boys for a few days while Jen and Judy are away.

Glenn wants to know the nature of Jen’s relationship with Steve. He knows she was his realtor but he’s curious if they had any communication after that. Jen says she can’t remember for sure. Then Judy comes in and tells Glenn she has cancer and that Jen is pregnant in an attempt to earn some sympathy from him.

Once Glenn leaves, Jen freaks out as she thinks Glenn took her #1 Mom mug to test her DNA against Steve’s body. Jen thinks they need to kill Glenn by baking pain pills into some scones. But before they can put that plan into action Judy finds the mug in the sink. It’s all good, right?

Next, they need to get an alibi for the weekend they were near the forest where they buried Steve’s body. They go meet with Jeff and agree that they’ll all be each other’s alibi for that weekend.

Of course, Jen and Judy don’t tell Jeff that, but they play along with his fear that Karen had him followed that weekend and took pictures of him cheating and using methamphetamines to bring up during their divorce proceedings. They tell Jeff they can be his alibi so he can tell everyone he was with them that weekend and vice versa.

During their chat, Jeff also admits that he never deleted the security footage Jen asked him to delete back in season 2. So now they have another stop to make, back to Karen’s. Jen and Judy convince Karen to delete the last year of her photos, footage, and everything else to start getting over Jeff. Then they take her hard drive for good measure.

Karen visits Jen later that night to warn her that a strange man has been lurking around their house and going through their trash. When Karen shows Jen the video, we see that it’s Glenn! He went through Jen’s trash at some point and takes something out, probably to test her DNA, just as Jen feared.

Episode 9 begins with Jen and Judy both going to an important meeting. Jen visits Glenn at his motel. She tells him that she was having an affair with Steve and that she’s pregnant with his baby, hoping that if they do find her DNA on Steve’s body, they’ll think that’s why.

Meanwhile, Judy returns to the oncology center for her follow-up. It’s bad news. She’s terminal and tells Jen as much. But Jen isn’t ready to give up. She continues trying to get Judy into a clinical trial. Ben calls her while he’s in jail to tell her he loves her and Jen loves him too, but their time runs out before she can tell him.

Once Judy knows that she’s dying and only has a limited time remaining, she starts getting her affairs in order. That starts with meeting up with her mom, Eleanor Hale (Katey Sagal) at the halfway house where she’s been staying since she got out of prison. Judy uses the Sonoma excuse to tell her mom where she’s going and gives her a bunch of money from Steve’s painting before saying goodbye.

But Eleanor isn’t so easily fooled and she shows up at Jen’s house. Eleanor thinks Judy is just pulling some elaborate ruse on Jen so Jen finally blurts out that Judy has cancer. Not knowing where Judy is, Jen calls her phone and hears it ringing upstairs. She follows the sound and finds that Judy has painted a gorgeous mural of cranes on the wall.

It doesn’t take long for Jen to realize what Judy has done. She’s gone to the police station to confess to Steve’s murder. Jen shows up and convinces Nick to give her a few minutes with her. Jen has gotten her into the clinical trial thanks to one of the women at Henry’s church.

But Judy doesn’t want to do a clinical trial. If she’s going to die, she wants to do it on her terms and spend her limited remaining time with the people she loves and ensure they will be taken care of when she’s gone, hence the confession. After talking to Judy, Jen begs Nick to let her take Judy home so she can go to a clinical trial for a few weeks.

Nick tells Perez what he did, admitting that he couldn’t let Judy die in prison. Given what Perez has been doing for Jen, she’s obviously understanding of his choice. Plus, they get interrupted by a phone call. Agent Glenn Moranis is dead.

The episode ends with a shot of Judy’s mom driving and we see she has Judy’s house arrest bracelet on her ankle. It looks like her parting gift to her daughter is setting her free and letting Judy and Jen finally take their vacation to Mexico. We also see Perez putting a bottle of lighter fluid and a lighter next to Steve’s file after taking it from Glenn’s motel room. It seems like she’s going to get rid of that file and close the case once and for all.

The final episode of Dead to Me finds Jen and Judy headed to Mexico but on the way there they come face-to-face with the Greeks. They stop on the side of the road to pee and Stavros and his buddy confront them, demanding the money that Steve stole.

Judy pretends that she needs her cancer medicine so she returns the car and pulls a gun out of the glove department, using it to threaten the Greeks and allow her and Jen to escape. After that, Jen and Judy finally make it to Steve’s old vacation home and find a cat inside that Judy immediately befriends.

They spend several blissful days enjoying their vacation in a way that is eerily similar to the dream Jen had at the very beginning of the season. Judy eventually forces Jen to go out on a boat with her, but when they open the garage they find the old mustang that hit Ted! Both of them are shocked to see it there since they took it apart, but Judy supposes that Steve must have put it back together. She recalls finding a random key in one of Steve’s paintings and realizes it must be to the car.

Jen is obviously a little shaken up seeing the vehicle that killed her husband. Judy lets her just sit on the shore inside the boat and talks about how when she was a kid, her mom had a boyfriend who would take her on the water and she always loved it out there and felt truly free. She also wonders if that boyfriend or “uncle” as she referred to him at the time, might have been her biological father.

They also talk about just staying in Mexico for now. They can bring the kids and Jen can do real estate from anywhere. But then they notice that Jen is bleeding and they rush her to a hospital. Thankfully, there is nothing seriously wrong with her and actually, the baby is very healthy. And it’s a girl! Jen gets emotional at this and is thrilled to be having a daughter.

That night, Jen and Judy go to a taqueria and enjoy a beautiful dinner outside. Judy feels the baby kicking and Ben calls again from jail. Jen finally tells him that she’s pregnant and he’s thrilled. When they get back to the house that night, Jen realizes how much pain Judy is in. She’s been trying to hide it but it’s clear she’s getting increasingly sick. Judy tells Jen that she’s not going back to Laguna with her. Jen says she’ll come to visit her.

But the next morning, Judy is gone and she’s left a message and her bracelet behind for Jen. Jen races downstairs and notices the cat, Sammy, scratching at the door. As she steps outside and sees the boat on the water, Jen knows that Judy is gone.

The next time we see her, Jen is driving home in Steve’s mustang with Sammy in the backseat. Jen sees a vision of Judy beside her, who tells her she’s happy that the car is Jen’s now.

Jen makes it back home in time for Henry’s concert. They’ve strung up all of Judy’s paper cranes above. Jen gets emotional as she sits in the pew with Charlie and then Ben shows up! He got out early on good behavior and he comforts Jen as she tells him that Judy died.

Jen has her baby, a little girl named Joey. She takes her to the grief support group and some of them comment on the name “Joey” wondering why Jen didn’t name her Judy. In typical Jen fashion, she says this isn’t a Hallmark movie! “No, I named her Joey because what if one day she’s gender-fluid?”

The series ends with a happy scene of Jen and Ben hanging out by the pool while Charlie and Henry are swimming. And finally, Jen turns to Ben and says,  “Ben, I have to tell you something.” It looks like Jen is finally ready to tell the truth about Steve! But the episode ends before we can see what happens next.

Borrowed content courtesy of Netflixlife.com

by Mads Lennon