Endings are especially bittersweet in Phoebe Waller-Bridge's tragicomedy series Fleabag. The final episode of the first season, as adapted from her one-woman Edinburgh Fringe play, saw the blindside reveal that she was implicated in her best friend's suicide after sleeping with her boyfriend.

Despite the writer and lead actor's reservations about a second series, the follow-up has shown it not only has plenty left to say, but is arguably even more subversive and affecting than the first.

The final episode is the day of father's wedding, with Olivia Colman giving another gleefully wicked performance as her Godmother/Stepmother. And although there are ends to be tied up in the story of her sister's faltering marriage and a curveball moment where her father goes missing, the real cliffhanger here was whether Fleabag's curtain will see a happy ending for the protagonist herself.

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The romance between her and The Priest (Andrew Scott) has been teased throughout the season and shown in narrative techniques like him able to see her trademark breaking the fourth wall to speak to the camera. They first kiss during a moment which deftly walked the line between romance and abuse of power and then eventually sleep together when he turns up late at her door when we're expecting someone else.

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It comes to a head at a bus stop outside her father's house in the final scene. "It's God isn't it?" she asks, as if she was casually mentioning a rival lover. He tells her it is. "Damn" she laughs, and then says with heartbreaking sincerity: "You know the worst thing is, that I fucking love you."

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It's less the ending of Fleabag's nascent romance - as The Priest tells her tenderly, "it'll pass" - than this break from character that made the show's send off so affecting. Over two seasons we've enjoying watching Fleabag provide a running commentary to her own life, bottling her obvious grief in snide and self-deprecation. Instead, as she's left alone with her pain on a London bus stop, Fleabag looks to us with a smile and a shake of the head, not a one-liner or a stuck out tongue. It felt like a white flag to the audience: a sign she didn't have anything left to confess.

It was a reminder that Fleabag's journey was always about coming to terms with the double whammy of grief that was plaguing her. In the first season she obscured her pain with drinking and dating, in the second her finding true love was a prettier mask to hide it behind, but it was still just that. Despite the obvious metaphor of The Priest's holy status, Fleabag's salvation has always been in her own hands.

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In the closing minutes a fox wanders across the screen, a reference to The Priest's strange fear of the urban creatures, and a mystical moment which had echoes of the ethereal end of Netflix's Russian Doll, which also featured a woman coming to terms with grief and walking through a darkened city, finally at peace with her demons.

When Fleabag is nearly out of sight she turns and waves, the soothing sound of the Alabama Shakes like a refrain for her journey over the last two seasons singing: ‘See, I've been having me a real hard time / But it feels so nice to know I'm gonna be alright’.

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