This piece discusses all of Fleabag, including the ending of series two. Content note: the show contains frank sexual content, strong language, and sustained treatment of grief and suicide, and this piece touches on all of them.

She is at a dinner table, and it is going badly, and she does what she always does. She turns to us.

It has been the show's grammar since the first minute of series one: something becomes too much, and she steps sideways out of it to tell us a joke about it instead. Nobody at the table notices. Nobody has ever noticed.

Then the priest — sitting across from her, mid-sentence — stops. And says: "Where did you just go?"

The Device Was Never a Device

The fourth-wall break is usually a comic tool. Here it turns out to be a symptom, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge has been laying that groundwork for twelve episodes before she cashes it.

Watch when it happens. It is not random. Fleabag leaves the room, into the camera, at precisely the moments intimacy becomes unmanageable: grief about her mother, guilt about Boo, anything her sister says that lands. The camera is where she keeps the version of herself that has already made the experience into an anecdote. It is a way of watching your own life from slightly outside it so that it cannot get you.

Which means the running gag of series one is, on rewatch, a portrait of dissociation. The funniest formal trick on television is a woman describing her life rather than living in it, because describing it is survivable.

And for two series, it works perfectly. Nobody catches her. Her father does not. Claire does not. The audience is her accomplice — we are the hiding place.

Being Seen Is the Thing She Cannot Survive

So when the priest says "where did you just go," the show does something genuinely frightening. It removes the exit.

He keeps doing it. He clocks it again and again, and each time he does, she is more exposed, because the one place she could always retreat to has someone standing in it. At one point she tries it and he follows her eyeline and asks what it is, and she has no answer. There is no answer. That is the point.

This is the show's theology, and it arrives without a single line of doctrine.

The psalmist writes: "You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar... Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?" (Psalm 139:1–2, 7). That is usually read as comfort, and it is comfort. It is also, read honestly, a description of having nowhere to hide — which is why the psalm has to keep insisting it is good news.

Fleabag experiences exactly that, and her first reaction is not consolation. It is panic. Being fully known is the thing she has organised her entire personality to prevent.

The Confession

The best scene in the series is the one in the confessional, and it works because she goes in with a plan and it stops being a plan.

She is trying to seduce him. He is drinking. It is funny for a while. And then he says "kneel," and she does, and the register changes so fast the audience does not get to prepare either, and what comes out of her is not a seduction:

"I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning... I want someone to tell me what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for and who to love and how to tell them... I think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I've been getting it wrong."

That is not a woman asking for religion. It is a woman asking to be relieved of herself.

And the show is too smart to call it faith. What she wants is an authority to hand her life to, which is a real hunger and not the same thing as belief. The priest — who has actual faith, and actual problems, and a drinking habit and a hideous family portrait — cannot give her that, and does not try.

He kisses her instead. The painting falls off the wall. Whatever you make of the timing.

What He Chooses, and Why the Show Respects It

He chooses God. She asks him to choose her, and he does not, and the series does not treat that as cowardice or repression or a joke.

That is remarkable restraint. Every incentive in the form points toward making the priest a hypocrite — his celibacy an obstacle to be overcome, his faith a costume. Waller-Bridge declines. His vocation is real, he is genuinely good at it, and his best moment is the wedding homily, where he says the truest thing anyone in the show says about love:

"Love is awful. It's awful. It's painful. It's frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself... It takes strength to know what's right. And love isn't something that weak people do."

He is describing his own situation and hers at the same time, in front of a congregation, and neither of them can do anything about it.

"It'll Pass"

At the bus stop she says "I love you," and he says: "It'll pass."

It is the cruelest and kindest line in the series, and both at once. It is a refusal. It is also the only honest thing available — he is a man who has staked his life on the belief that some loves are meant to be endured rather than acted on, and he will not lie to her to soften it.

Then he walks away. And the fox appears again, the way it has all series, and she points it after him.

And she turns to the camera one last time — and shakes her head. And walks off, and the camera does not follow.

That is the ending. She dismisses us. The place she has been hiding for two series, she closes, and she goes into her life without narration.

Whether that is grace is a question the show leaves entirely alone. What it shows is that it took someone seeing her to make it possible, and the someone was a priest, and he doesn't get her either.

Questions Worth Sitting With

  • Fleabag's escape hatch was making her life into a story rather than living in it. What is yours?
  • Psalm 139 says there is nowhere to flee from God's presence, and calls that good news. Does it land that way for you, or does it land the way it lands on her?
  • She asks to be told what to believe and how to live. Where is the line between wanting faith and wanting to be relieved of yourself?
  • "It'll pass." Was that a kindness?

Sources: Fleabag, written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, series two directed by Harry Bradbeer (Two Brothers Pictures / BBC, 2019), adapted from Waller-Bridge's 2013 one-woman stage play, which has no priest and no second series. Scripture quotations are NIV. Dialogue is quoted from the broadcast episodes; the homily is lightly trimmed for length, marked with ellipses, and not otherwise altered.