What Comes Next for Marcus After <i>Ginny & Georgia</i> Season 3?

Spoilers below.

By the end of Ginny & Georgia season 3, it’s hard to predict exactly where Marcus Baker (Felix Mallard) is going.

Of course, I don’t mean that literally. We know exactly where he’s physically headed. G&G creator Sarah Lampert has made it clear that, as his mother’s car pulls away from the heart of Wellsbury in the season 3 finale, Marcus is bound for rehab. There, his family expects him to treat his worsening alcoholism, itself compounded by his worsening depression. He considers this directive “bullshit,” and calls it such. His mom, Ellen (Jennifer Robertson), refuses to argue with him.

Instead, she prepares for a long, silent drive, and Marcus turns away to read a poem that his friend and love interest, the titular Ginny (Antonia Gentry), has tucked into his bag. She calls it “Sunshine,” and through its words she strives to remind the depressed, struggling Marcus that he is in “there, somewhere,” like “sunshine in the dark.” In an interview with Screen Rant, Lampert said that she has had the text for the poem “kicking around for a few years now” and was only “waiting for the right moment to place it. To me, that really represents where [Ginny and Marcus] are at right now...and I think that it’s very much a place of hope.”

But hope for what, exactly? What comes next for Marcus, let alone for Marcus and Ginny as a couple? Rehab is only one step in a long process of recovery, and Lampert admits that there is also some “hopelessness” to the finale scene, given Marcus’s reluctance to seek treatment. (He “doesn’t feel he belongs” in rehab, as she puts it.) “I just don’t think, unless something changes while he’s there, that he is in a place to really confront what he’s struggling with and make progress and get better until he himself wants to do that,” she added.

Mallard, for his part, thinks Marcus will respond well to the “discipline and structure” of rehab, the actor told Netflix’s Tudum in a recent interview. But the return to Wellsbury might be a different story. “Going back into regular life, into these dynamics with these people he loves, and showing up for them in a meaningful way—that’ll be a challenge for him,” Mallard continued.

Ginny, of course, tops the list of “dynamics” that await Marcus back home. She’s had her own challenging journey with mental health, panic attacks, and self-harm, and she’s recently yanked out a page from her mother’s criminal playbook in order to keep Georgia (Brianne Howey) out of jail. She needs Marcus’s support if they’ll have any chance at a relationship that lasts. And Marcus can only give her that support if the ground beneath his own feet isn’t constantly shifting. As Gentry recently told The Wrap, “I love [Marcus and Ginny] both together and separately, but the protective actor in me, I want them to be in their best mental state they can be before they come together as a couple.”

Perhaps not knowing “what comes next” for Marcus is, in fact, the point. Ginny & Georgia—for all its soapy melodrama and absurdist murder plots—seems to understand a crucial point about mental health and addiction in the real world: Healing is messy work. Relapses are common; recovery is nonlinear. There’s no way to know if Marcus will return to Wellsbury in his “best mental state,” or if he’ll wind up back in a similar destructive cycle by the time season 4 draws to a close. His twin sister, Max (Sara Waisglass), has accurately determined that he needs an intervention. Rehab might be his lifeboat, but—if you’ll forgive the extended metaphor—he still has a treacherous trip to dry land ahead.

For that reason, I’m hopeful Ginny & Georgia season 4 won’t use his rehab stint as some sort of miracle plot device, shaping Marcus into the man Ginny “needs” off-camera. Thus far, the show has done surprisingly powerful work in depicting the turbulent realities of mental health on-screen, leaning into the contradictions that make “getting better” so fraught. There would be—and hopefully will be—enormous merit in showcasing the full arc of Marcus’s journey, even (and perhaps especially) if it includes stumbles and false starts that further delay his would-be happily ever after with Ginny. Because his story isn’t really about whether Ginny sees his “sunshine in the dark.” It’s about whether he can see it, too.