The season 2 finale of Ginny and Georgia finally saw the Millers' family secrets catch up with them at the worst possible time.
Throughout the show's second season, both Ginny and the audience learned the whole truth of Georgia's past, as the teen struggled with processing that her mother murdered her lecherous stepfather Kenny to protect her. By the penultimate episode, both Ginny and her brother Austin have to hold on to secrets to protect their mom, involving Austin's formerly-incarcerated father Gil and Cynthia Fuller's husband Tom (more on that later).
Episode 10, "I'm No Cinderella," starts the morning after the kids saw Gil abusing Georgia, which ended with Austin shooting his dad in the arm. The entire family is shaken after the confrontation; while the kids are sullen and jumpy after the fight, Georgia has decided to cut and run, even cancelling her wedding venue without telling Paul. In a flashback, we see that Georgia had once puled a gun on Gil herself, but she couldn't bring herself to kill him. Instead, she embezzled from his company and framed him, which she knew how to do because he'd already told her he'd been embezzling himself. That's how he ended up in jail, and now that he's out, Gil is blackmailing her to pay for his life with Paul's family money once they're married.
While Georgia is planning the Millers' escape from Gil and Wellsbury, Ginny is doing what she does best: being preoccupied with Marcus. She's going through the day on a sulky auto-pilot, with her dad and Joe both noticing and trying to cheer her up. Maxine is also in prime cheery friend mode, but Ginny feels understandably hurt, not comprehending the extent of Marcus' depressive episode. However, when Max reveals that Marcus is resuming his medication, adding how worried the whole family is, Ginny starts to understand that the boy needs a friend more than a girlfriend right now.
While MANG's attempts to cheer up Ginny involve pre-gaming and hanging in Brodie's basement, Georgia tried to soothe her daughter with a description of Lake Powell's gorgeous sunsets. It takes a while for the teen to recognize that her mom's planting the idea of their next move, but eventually she recognizes that Georgia's ready to run again. She calls the Mount, Georgia and Paul's treasured wedding venue, and learns that Georgia's cancelled the wedding.
Ginny then confronts her mom about the Mount, in a scene where Georgia finally speaks on her biggest fear. "I’m a damaged, unlovable, trailer-park teen mom murderer. I don’t belong here," she says, voicing her insecurities about not fitting in in Wellsbury, or maybe anywhere. With the wisdom gained from a season of therapy, Ginny urges Georgia to tell Paul the truth and let him decide whether he wants to marry her. Surprisingly, Georgia listens and tells him everything (but not everything, of course).
Unassuming Paul arrives home to an anxious Georgia really to unload all of her baggage (minus Kenny). It's a lot—framing Gil for embezzlement, actual embezzlement from the mayor's office, Gil's blackmail, Nick's boyfriend being a P.I., the credit card fraud, the motorcycle gang, jail, shoplifting—and Paul is pissed by the end, as he storms out for a night of thinking. The next morning, he calls Georgia to the mayor's office, where his lawyer and a cop are waiting. It seems like he'll actually have her arrested, but then Gil shows up, and Paul says that his lawyer is ready for a custody battle, and that he'll put Gil back in jail if he continues to harass his wife.
Though Paul is still furious, and there's a lot that the couple has to work through, he still wants to marry Georgia. In her excitement, Georgia makes it all the way from the office back home to tell Ginny before she remembers that she cancelled the venue. Thankfully, Ginny is apparently an amateur wedding planner, and seemingly moment's later, she's pulled together a beautifully-decorated ceremony at city hall and a horse-drawn carriage to escort the bride. (How long did it take the teenager to pull this off? Where did Georgia get that gorgeous cape and gown? Just chalk it all up to the magic of television.)
The lovely ceremony goes off without a hitch, with Paul and Georgia exchanging their unheard vows as "Until I Found You" plays. (I must admit, the song got me.) Unfortunately, not everyone made it to the wedding. While the couple's co-worker Nick was preparing leave, his boyfriend "Jesse" revealed his true identity, imploring that Georgia's not who everyone this she is. The confession came with some rough timing, but it arrived after the investigator finally found the dirt that could put the bride behind bars. Georgia's fairytale wedding ends when, during the first dance, cops come in to arrest her for murder.
Who did Georgia kill?
By the finale, we know that Georgia is a murderer. She poisoned two of her ex-husbands: Kenny, who she poisoned after he got inappropriate with Ginny, and Anthony Greene, who owned the hotel that employed her when Ginny was a baby. Georgia helped Anthony run illegal gambling tournaments, and when she got caught, she married him so Ginny wouldn't go into foster care. The grown man then became abusive, so Georgia spiked his drink with pills and got the Blood Eyes biker gang to cover it up.
Cordova didn't have enough evidence to come after Georgia for either of those crimes, even after months of digging, but he did learn that Georgia was present when Cynthia Fuller's sick husband Tom began flatlining a few nights ago. Nick told him ahead of the wedding that Georgia in the room with Tom Fuller when he passed out, and later he died. The P.I. thought that was enough to get Georgia arrested on suspicion, and unfortunately, his instincts were correct.
Near the beginning of Episode 9, "Kill Gill," Cynthia saw Gil assault Georgia at Austin's school. Though they were adversaries in Season 1, the two moms had slowly become friendly throughout the season. After helping Georgia get away from Gil, the realtor takes it upon herself to get Gil blacklisted from renting any apartment in Wellsbury. Georgia is touched, and she wants to return the favor and help Cynthia in some way. Unfortunately, she decides to help her friend by suffocating her husband Tom, who has been in a vegetative state and on hospice care throughout the season.
How does Austin know that Georgia killed someone?
The final scene of the finale shows Georgia being put into the back of a cop car as Paul, her kids, and the wedding guests watch. As "Going to the Chapel" plays, Ginny grips her little brother's shoulders, and he reveals his own secret, saying, "I didn’t tell anyone," before he races out of the cop car. The night that Tom died, Austin had been playing hide and seek in the Fuller house and hid in the father's closet. He was still in there when Georgia came into the room and smothered the man with a pillow, and he saw everything.
At the beginning on the finale, all of the Millers were holding onto one huge secret, as they covered up Gil's shooting from Paul. With that final scene, as Ginny digested what Austin said and the cop car rolled down Main Street in parallel to the family's arrival in Wellsbury, viewers are left wondering whether the family of three can (or should) keep the new crime from coming to light.
