🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

With the Emmy-nominated limited series BEEF, Steven Yeun (as Danny) and Ali Wong (as Amy) road-raged their way into nods in the leading acting categories. Young Mazino, Joseph Lee and Maria Bello also received recognition for their performances in the series about a grudge that spirals way out of control. People died! Buildings burned! Crows talked! But by the end of the series, the feud brought Danny and Amy closer to each other than anyone else in their lives. “There’s just something very freeing about these two characters who have seen each other at their very, very worst,” showrunner Lee Sung Jin said in March.

The season ends with Danny and Amy utterly alone, in the hospital, after being strung out on poisonous berries in the deserted Malibu hillside. But, for a brief moment, there’s connection and understanding as Amy hugs Danny and he embraces her back to the yearning tones of Smashing Pumpkins’ “Mayonaise.” “There’s a really good Ram Dass quote that says, ‘We’re all just walking each other home.’ And I think that feeling is probably something that we’re trying to capture,” Lee says in the video above.

Allow Lee, Yeun and Wong to take you inside the BEEF finale — and to really understand where Danny and Amy ended up, we have to reexamine who they were in the beginning, knowing what we know now.

So were Danny and Amy just sleepwalking through their lives before they met?

Yeun says that Danny and Amy were so set in their routines that “it would take a complete stranger –– like a meteor crashing into [their] reality –– to shake [them] awake.” Lee cites couples therapy for a comparison to Danny and Amy’s toxic dynamic. “A lot of couples get trapped into a fight because they develop these routines,” he says. “The reason a stranger has to be the one that snaps Danny and Amy out is because they are so entrenched in their pattern.”

OK, so was there sexual tension when Amy and Danny first met?

Even Yeun asks “what is it? Is it sexual?” Wong suggests that while BEEF is categorically a “dramedy/thriller,” she thinks it also “works as a romantic comedy.”

Steven Yeun and Ali Wong Break Down That Infamous BEEF SceneDid you catch Amy's subtle smile?

What were Danny and Amy doing before they met? What were their routines?

Lee says that successful plant entrepreneur Amy wants to be more open with her husband George (Joseph Lee) and her family, but she’s learned from an early age to keep things inside. “This show provides an opportunity for me to talk about and express all the things I haven’t been able to say on stage in my stand-up,” Wong says. “It’s been the best way for me to say how it feels to be angrily, seemingly together.” Similarly, Yeun sees struggling contractor Danny as someone engulfed in deep fear. “He’s coming from a place of insecurity,” he says. “It’s easy for him to understand his reality, as long as everything’s in the place it needs to be.” And that especially includes his younger brother Paul (Young Mazino). “Danny keeps Paul where Paul’s supposed to be,” says Yeun.

Why doesn’t Danny send in Paul’s college applications?

Danny doesn’t want to keep Paul down, Yeun says. But “that’s just what he knows now.” Danny’s short but powerful line to Paul that “you need to get away from me” in Episode 9 came from Yeun’s instinct on set. “The way that scene was scripted, there were just too many words,” Lee says, commending how Yeun knew the gist of what his character needed to say in that moment. 

Where did the idea for Jordan’s (Maria Bello) panic room come from?

According to Wong, Bello loved performing her character’s death scene. “She was so excited to die such an iconic death.” But that brutal, squelching death by panic room door was the direct result of Jordan hearing about the neighborhood road rage incident at the beginning of the series and feeling compelled to build one of her own. “And that’s actually the thing that is her demise,” Lee says. “A lot of that was Maria’s performance, honestly, and it was really good.”

OK, so why did Danny and Amy eat poisonous berries?

“We had to figure out a different way for these two people to be stuck together, so poison felt like the natural thing to do,” Lee says of marooning Danny and Amy together in the final episode. It’s especially funny to Wong and Lee how Amy has made a career out of being into plants and yet knows “nothing about them,” Wong says. 

Do Amy and Danny squash their beef?

When Lee started writing BEEF, he knew Amy and Danny would need to come together at the very end. “There’s nothing more intimate than fighting,” Yeun says. “When you get into a really bad beef like that, you’re closer by association through that type of vulnerability.” So to him, it felt like a real connection.

What did the hug on the hospital bed mean?

Lee was writing the finale in the midst of filming the season, and the hospital bed moment was actually Wong’s idea. “That scene, [Lee] was just like, ‘I want the feeling of two people coming home to each other,’ ” Wong says. “It’s what you see. It’s two people who have been through a lot holding each other.” Lee sees Danny and Amy’s embrace as a moment for the audience to lean in at the very end and get “just a little glimmer of hope,” he says. “It gets the people going.”

BEEF is now streaming on Netflix.

101 Seconds of Escalating Rage in BEEFFrom 0 to 101 real quick.