Spoilers ahead for the Season 2 finale of The Irrational, available streaming now with a Peacock subscription.
NBC's The Irrational wrapped its second season in the 2025 TV schedule on March 25, and there's still plenty to process a week later. Called "The Exchange," the intense finale aired in the wake of the Little Shop of Horrors-esque musical episode that made the most of Karen David and Jesse L. Martin's singing skills, and everything seemed to point toward Rose and Alec going their separate ways so she could return to the spy life.
Instead, the episode subverted expectations, and showrunner Arika Lisanne Mittman's explanation for the choices lead me to suspect that the characters could have a fresh start in Season 3... assuming that The Irrational gets a Season 3, anyway!
What Happened For Alec And Rose In The Season 2 Finale
The Exchange" had to pick up on the cliffhanger from the musical episode in which Rose confessed to Alec that she'd gotten a call from her "husband," and the finale proved that the two were never married in the conventional sense. They were together while living the spy life, and neither seemed like they were yearning to get back together. In fact, Logan needed more of an assist from Alec than he did from Rose.
As we might expect from a finale, there was plenty of action over the course of the hour, with Rose having to choose between following her spy instincts or saving a life. That led to a bigger decision when she was given the opportunity to officially go back to being a spy despite being burned long ago. Fortunately for Alec (and for me, as a fan of Karen David going back to her Galavant days), Rose decided to stay with him and open her own agency rather than return to the espionage game with MI6.
Given that Karen David was never made a series regular, I spent much of the finale suspecting that Rose would indeed go back to the spy life and just drop in and out of Alec's life if they wanted to keep their romance going. Instead, she can enjoy a more normal life with Alec, and Season 2 would have officially come to an unambiguously happy ending if not for the cliffhanger reveal that somebody has been spying on Alec.
What Arika Lisanne Mittman Told Us About The Finale
Despite The Irrational still waiting on renewal news, "The Exchange" was planned as a season finale and not a series finale. That presumably means that Rose sticking around could be the beginning of a new era for Alec rather than a happily-ever-after, and the cliffhanger reveal that he's been followed could mean that they'll be working this mystery as her first case in Season 3. When I spoke with showrunner Arika Lisanne Mittman, I had to get her insight on leading Rose to the place of choosing Alec and her civilian life over going back to working with Logan as a spy. She shared:
Well, we wanted to test it. Episode 17 is such a high note with that musical, and I was just like, 'Okay, now we've kind of reached peak Rose and Alec. We've got to give them a challenge.' We gave them a little challenge in Episode 14 that they work through, but we were like, 'We gotta give them something big. We gotta give them something to overcome.' And for Rose, we're very conscious to not make this a love triangle, and not make it like, 'Oh, which man is she going to choose?' It's not about that. It's about the temptation of the spy life that we know from the things that we've planted earlier in the season [she loved].
Rose's choice was never between a romance with Alec or a romance with Logan, but rather about what she wanted her life to be in the long run. She didn't really have a choice about giving up her spy lifestyle the first time around, but she also had since found reasons why she might not want to go back to that status quo. The showrunner elaborated:
We know that Rose loved being a spy, that she only left because she was burned, because she was outed, that she did not leave of her own choice. We kind of got the feeling that if she had her druthers, she'd go back to spy life. So we dangled it in front of her. 'Here's your chance. Here's your chance to go back to that.' And at first she thinks, in a lot of ways, she would take that opportunity to go back. Not that she wants to leave Alec, but in terms of what she wanted to do with her life, she thought that that was what she wanted to do. And then we build to that moment where she's at the airport hangar and Logan's been shot, and she has to choose.
Once upon a time, Rose undoubtedly would have chosen to leave Logan to die if that meant completing the mission, but that's not who she is anymore. According to Arika Lisanne Mittman, a lot of that is due to Alec influencing her to embrace her more empathetic side. She explained:
Choose the mission, or choose the human being, and I think the idea is that with all this time that she has spent with Alec, she has become so much more human than spy. She realizes, 'I don't want to be that person who goes and puts the mission first. I don't think I am a spy anymore. I don't think that's what I want to do. I'm going to save the human being, because that's the right thing to do here. And that's who I am now.'
Knowing who she is certainly bodes well for a relationship with Alec, considering his tendency to see patterns in human behavior wherever he looks! Personally, I'm hoping that Rose's realizations from the finale means that we'll see more of her with the others in Alec's life, especially Kylie after her Season 2 journey. The showrunner concluded her thoughts on Rose making the choice she did:
That's kind of when her character makes the decision. It was a big decision moment for her, in my eyes. I think from that point on, she's like, 'I'm staying.' And so even when she gets the actual opportunity to be a spy, as much as it means to her that they want her back, she knows who she is now, and she's staying.
So, what does the future hold for The Irrational? Unfortunately, NBC did not renew Jesse L. Martin's post-Law & Order return to the network ahead of the Season 2 finale, nor in the week since. That's not necessarily a bad sign, though; the only two NBC shows that have been renewed at the time of writing are St. Denis Medical and Happy's Place.
Basically, The Irrational is certainly not the only drama waiting on news about whether or not there will be more episodes in the 2025-2026 TV schedule, so there's no need for even the most diehard fans to panic. For now, you can always revisit the first two seasons streaming on Peacock .
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