‘Emily In Paris’ Stars Lily Collins & Ashley Park Compare Season 5 Cliffhangers; Dissect Emily & Mindy’s Friendship

SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils the entirety of Emily in Paris Season 5.

At the end of Season 5 of Netflix’s Emily in Paris, it’s Ashley Park’s Mindy Chen who finds herself in a gray area instead of Lily Collins’ Emily Cooper, who has weathered her own fair share of love triangles and other shapes.

The final moments of the latest season of the French comedy series find Mindy questioning the trajectory of her love life with a big engagement ring on her finger.

“Mindy’s never chosen the easier path for herself. She could just stay and be an heiress and make it up with her family and do whatever they want and live an easy life. In past seasons too she’s always picked the harder path for herself when she knows it’s the right path,” Park told Deadline. “I think because maybe this rift with Emily softened her, I don’t want to say weakened her, she kind of just wants to choose the easy path. And we see her make decisions in a spontaneous way that maybe she shouldn’t.”

Bouncing between from Rome to Paris to Venice, the firm friendship between the two women faces a big bump in the road when Mindy and Alfie (Lucien Laviscount) act on sparks they feel for each other without telling Emily. Emily ultimately finds out that her ex and Mindy were romantically involved, but not from either of her friends.

“It was really important, I think, in a friendship as strong as Mindy and Emily’s, to show cracks and to show the realistic nature of what a friendship is,” Lily Collins told Deadline. “Things aren’t always perfect, and what does that even mean, but it’s how to communicate through those hiccups and moments, and to not pass judgments on each other, and also to not assume you know how the other person is going to react.”

Mindy hesitates to tell Emily at a dinner that she and Alfie planned for their mutual American friend, but a surprise visit from Nicolas de Léon (Paul Forman) at Crazy Horse where Mindy is again performing in Paris throws Mindy off ahead of the get together, leading Alfie to call it quits ahead of any assumed fallout. It’s Thalia Besson’s Genevieve who drops the news on Emily when Emily is forced by Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) to fire Genevieve from Agence Grateau.

“You can get so close with someone that you think you know them and their responses to a certain degree, but you don’t give them grace to do it themselves,” Collins continued. “Had Mindy just allowed Emily to access the information and give her an opinion, we may not have gotten to that point.”

Luckily, all is resolved between Emily and Mindy when the pair experience a different crossover moment on a gondola ride with beaus Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini) and Nico in the Season 5 finale in Venice. Emily, who found an diamond ring in Marcello’s bag in Venice, freaks out when he pulls out the ring and starts to declare she can’t marry him, but the ring is actually Nico’s for Mindy.

“What we loved so much about that scene, I remember when we first read th scene, we were both like, ‘Oh no. Poor Emily! Oh Emily, no,’” Park said. “I think that in all of the tense moments of the show, this is what Darren and the writers do so beautifully, and we actually discuss [it] a lot off scene. What we try to infuse into every scene and the lines in particular is this sense of grand comedy even in the biggest fights.”

Mindy accepts Nico’s proposal in front of a heartbroken Emily and Marcello, who afterwards part ways with a tearful hug as Emily doubles down on the fact that she wants to go back to Paris. Later, back in France, Emily assures Mindy that she knows she made the right decision.

“She’s pretty stable,” notes Park. “I’m thinking about all the cliffhangers, because Darren and the writers [are] so good at cliffhangers. It’s the first time — I believe Mindy’s last line of the series is, ‘What am I even doing? Or ‘What am I doing?’ It’s usually [in] every other season, Emily’s in a dire straight and Mindy’s like ‘Yikes.’”

Mindy dreams out loud about her bachelorette party being in Mykonos, which coincidentally (wink wink) would be close to where Gabriel ends up in the finale.

“I hope we get to go to another season, and I hope I’m going to plan her bachelorette in Greece. I think, I think no matter where we go — I’m hoping it’s Greece, because that would be amazing. It would be with Mindy,” Collins added.

Gabriel’s postcard invites speculation as to whether the end game between him and Emily could finally be approaching, but Collins clarified that the uncertainty is more on his part than Emily’s.

“The thing that’s interesting about this season is, instead of it being open-ended for Emily, Emily is cool. She is fine. She is actually more concerned at work with what Princess Jane is bringing to the table,” the actress said. “She’s great with how she handled things with Gabriel and Marcello, it’s Gabriel that’s unsure, and I love that there’s a shift there. I think it’s really nice that Gabriel came to Rome, but [Emily] didn’t know it, and she was just fine. She’s fine right now, and Gabriel’s still thinking about her, so I don’t know what that means for the two of them. I just know that we’re ending Season Five with Emily being like, ‘Romantically, I’m good.’”