SUPERSTORE Series Finale Post-Mortem: The EPs and Stars on Cloud 9’s Future, Jonah-Amy, Dina-Garrett, and That WTF-Worthy Moment

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the SUPERSTORE series finale.]

After 112 episodes, the woefully underrated SUPERSTORE wrapped up its run with a finale that flashed back to the employees’ first days at the store, saw Cloud 9 shut down, but also flashed forward to a hopeful future.

The show managed to do a lot in its final two episodes, and executive producers Justin Spitzer, Gabe Miller, and Jonathan Green, as well as stars Ben Feldman and Lauren Ash break down the biggest moments…

Farewell, Cloud 9.

Though Store #1217 gave it their all, there was nothing they could do to save their store. Instead, thanks to the layout and square footage, it was turned into a fulfillment center.

For a show that advocated for workers’ rights, from health care to the (botched) attempts to unionize, the decision was bittersweet.

“It felt like it wouldn’t feel like the show if it was completely upbeat, happy, almost fairytale ending,” co-showrunner Gabe Miller explained to reporters in the video below. “We like that the fulfillment center allowed us to have that note of reality and and basically a kind of a culmination of not only themes of the series, but specifically our COVID season, that’s put more pressure on retail. So we’d like that that was an element. But, at the same time, it’s the finale of this series that viewers love and we love and we want the characters to end in a good place and reassure people that they’re going to be okay after the series ends.”

“Fighting to save the store seemed like a good, natural way to get Amy back in St. Louis and back with her people,” added co-showrunner Jonathan Green. “But we felt like winning that fight wouldn’t feel like our show or like real life. [It’s not like] one store can band together and manage to change a big corporate decision like that. So it was a matter of finding a way for them to lose that battle, but still land in a good place.”

The move also prompted Amy to quit her corporate job at Zephra. “Amy leaving her Zephra job felt right for multiple reasons—coming back to St. Louis from California felt better than Jonah joining her out there, and after learning the truth about the fulfillment center conversion plan, and knowing what it meant for so many of her friends, it felt right for her to quit, out of principle,” Green and Miller said via email. “Even though she’d gone to the dark side, in the end, these are her people. But she’d worked hard to get to the level of success she had, so we liked showing that she was able to find another executive job.”

Jonah (Feldman) and Amy (America Ferrera) reunited—and a flash forward revealed they got married and had a kid.

“We decided early on that we would end the episode with Jonah and Amy getting together, but there was a lot of debate about how much conflict there should be up until that point,” SUPERSTORE creator Justin Spitzer, who returned to the series to help craft the end, said via email. “I kept shying away from it, because I wanted the last time we saw these two to be fun and to remind the audience of why they fell in love in the first place. For Ben and America (as well as some of the writers), it was crucial that we honor the history we’d set up between them, including the ugly break-up, rather than sweep it under the rug. It was a constructive debate, but one that we went back-and-forth on quite a bit, even through shooting and editing.”

“It definitely took some work to find the right balance between honoring the way we’d left things with Amy and Jonah—where Jonah was pretty hurt and angry, so Amy had some work to do—with the fact that it’s the series finale, so we didn’t want to spend too much of the time in tension and conflict,” Green and Miller added via email. “We liked the idea that fighting for the store together one last time would help them both feel some of that spark again, and help Jonah get past some of his resistance, but then when Amy came to him and said she knew what she wanted now, we liked that Jonah didn’t immediately jump at the chance to be with her, if only as a self-protective reflex. But we went through several different drafts of that scene, with different levels of how much Jonah was rejecting her, versus just wanting to take things slowly.”

In a different version of the finale, the duo’s reunion took a different turn. “Act Three had originally ended with the two of them putting the break-up behind them and deciding to go on a date,” Spitzer revealed. “We wanted the audience at that point to think, ‘I guess that’s an acceptable, if kinda disappointing, ending for them,’ so that they’d be truly surprised when, at the end of the episode, Amy decided not to wait for a date and rather to propose on the spot.”

“Yes, originally we saw her propose, but in a totally spontaneous way,” he continued. “There had been some pitches that she cover the ceiling in stars, but I much preferred the way we ended up using the stars in their children’s bedroom.”

Feldman, for one, is also happy with how things shook out. “I will say, without throwing anybody under the bus, or saying anything about earlier drafts, that the way that it ended up being was the way that I wanted and fought for from the beginning,” he says. “There was a lot of talk about [a] proposal. And for a while, I would look around with whoever it was that was talking about it, whether it was a writer, a producer, other actors, friends of mine, people bring up the proposal so much, [including this week] on that Instagram Live, [the fans] bring up a proposal so much, too. And I think it’s a very stan-ny, fan-thing, to fixate on the actual act of proposing.”

“To me, I thought it was much, much more important to show that it happened,” he continues. “A proposal, it’s just a question. And in the immediate aftermath, it’s interesting, and it’s a cool thing to watch. But it’s not a richer, fuller thing to kind of take in; I’d much rather see them together. I’d much rather know that they end up together without trying to crowbar a proposal into the happenings of the store. To me, personally, I wouldn’t, if I was Jonah [want it done there]—they have lives outside of the store. What we landed on, to me, was exactly what I was hoping for.”

But there is deleted footage of the moment. “We even shot, on the day of our scene, we improved a proposal, just because we improved a lot of stuff into these scenes, but also because you never know what is going to be needed when they’re cutting things together,” Feldman reveals. “And so we wanted to make sure we shot everything. But even on the day, I didn’t love it; I wasn’t happy with it. It felt incongruous with the rest of the scene in the story that we were telling. See them together, see the kid. For me, brilliant writing was in that montage accidentally seeing a honeymoon photo and that being enough; that’s great. That, to me, feels far more real. And I think when something feels real, then you can feel real emotion. And I don’t think a proposal in the middle of the episode would have felt real it would have felt forced and I don’t think we would have elicited any sort of real satisfying emotion from anybody watching.”

[For more from Feldman, here’s his take on the finale.]

Garrett (Colton Dunn) and Dina (Ash) finally committed to each other.

After seasons of being off-on—and insisting they were casual–it took Dina breaking up with her boyfriend and Cloud 9 closing for the duo to really commit to each other…including still being paired up when the Cloud 9ers got together in the final montage to hang out, sans work.

“I know it seems crazy, because there isn’t a ton of Dina-Garrett stuff in those last couple of episodes, but I was very active also in ensuring that there was at least some reference to their relationship,” Ash told reporters in the video below.

Who was leaving the feet around Cloud 9?!

As Cloud 9 tried to craft their perfect day, things were derailed when a bag of feet showed up—and eventually attracted a crowd, which led to the cops and the local news arriving.

“In preparing for the end of the series, we put up a lot of (virtual) cards on a (virtual) board of things we’d like to see, or questions we’d like to answer,” Miller and Green said via email about bringing back the long-running gag. “One of them was just ‘feet.’ Justin Spitzer was back working closely with us on breaking the stories for the last two episodes, and it was his idea that more feet being discovered jeopardizes their attempt to present themselves as a perfect store. It was a great surprising left turn for the episode that gave it a new energy halfway through, and felt organic to the series, since we’d used it as a running joke for many seasons.”

“The feet was just one of those loose threads out there, that we thought might be fun to tie up,” Spitzer added. “We originally established the first severed foot at the start of season 3, and it was just a way to help mislead the audience that Brett might actually have been killed in the tornado. And then it was a fun joke to call back now and again over the years. But at a certain point, once you’ve called something back that often, you create an expectation that you’re going to answer the question. I don’t think it’s something we absolutely needed to address, but it was a bonus.”

But it took until the final moments of the series when the show revealed that Elias (Danny Gura) was actually the one who had been scattering the limbs around the store.

“As far as revealing the identity of the person doing it, there was a fair amount of debate in the writers’ room about whether this was a mystery we needed to solve, and if so, whether having it be one of our people might tarnish how we think of them, especially with someone as lovable as Elias,” the showrunners said via email. “But we ended up deciding it was the funniest way to go — especially just to reveal it in an interstitial, without making a big deal of it. And Danny Gura, who plays Elias, actually said he felt honored to end up being that big a part of the lore of the show.”

However, Spitzer noted there is an element of the story that is open-ended: “As to whether he’s been leaving all the feet, or he’s a copy-cat killer and this was his first, I’ll leave to interpretation.”