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Walt Disney films have spanned generations and come in all shapes and sizes, from classic animation to family-friendly sports dramas, computer-generated comedies and bold live-action musicals. Despite their unique qualities, one consistency runs true throughout the bulk of all Disney productions: a “happily ever after” ending. (Think: Cinderella, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Beauty and The Beast, Mulan, Tangled, Frozen. The list goes on.) While Disney films can still carry drama and tension in their plots, there’s a strong guarantee that the prince finds his princess, families are reunited, and true love conquers all.

One Disney film departs significantly from the classic formula: Teen Beach 2 (2015) doesn’t carry this tradition with its final act, an ending that has left many viewers confused and surprised. Teen Beach 2, and its predecessor Teen Beach Movie (2013), follow the relationship of Mack (Maia Mitchell) and Brady (Ross Lynch) as they navigate the hurdles of teenage love and get entangled with fictional characters from a 1960s beach movie.

If you’re not familiar with the Teen Beach narrative or the ending of the second film, this is the nutshell:

Over the course of the first film, Mack and Brady are magically sucked into Brady’s favorite beach movie, Wet Side Story. While inside the film, the two solidify their relationship, and Mack discovers aspects of herself and who she wants to be as a person. The sequel picks up a few months later at the start of school. Now a determined and focused student, Mack finds her relationship with Brady again under stress, as the two have different aspirations and outlooks on academics. When their fictional pals from the first film somehow get transported into present day, the sequel becomes a reversal of the original film. The drama this time around (instead of an actual villain of any sort) is that the movie characters, having entered the “real” world where they don’t belong, keep disappearing. The narrative becomes a race against time to return them to the fictional world; not only so they stop disappearing, but because we learn Mack and Brady met each other when she crossed paths with him during a beachside viewing of Wet Side Story. Mack’s logic is that if the characters all disappear and the film ceases to exist, then that day won’t have happened and the two of them will never have met.

Whew. It sounds completely whacky - and it is - but it’s good Disney fun.

Towards the end of Teen Beach 2, only two characters from Wet Side Story haven’t disappeared - its leads, Lela (Grace Phipps) and Tanner (Garrett Clayton). At the last possible moment, Mack and Brady send them back to the fictional world (through a plot device we won’t worry about explaining) and the result is revealed: Brady and Mack don’t know each other anymore. Brady walks past her on the beach as if she’s a total stranger. Does that mean returning Lela and Tanner to the realm of fiction didn’t work?

Not exactly.

Before everyone from Wet Side Story started poofing out of existence, Lela and Tanner were attempting to live like real people in Mack and Brady’s world. Lela got really excited about being able to make her own choices and not be dictated by the pages of a script. Mack talked to her about how she should return to her fictional existence, but that she should do what she wants there, and not worry about the script.

The film’s closing sequence attempts to explain why Mack and Brady are strangers. Brady comes across a beach party hosted by Mack, where she’s screening a movie called Lela: Queen of the Beach. It looks like Lela and Tanner did get back, but taking Mack’s advice, Lela rewrote Wet Side Story and made herself the focus. As such, Wet Side Story technically doesn’t exist, and Brady therefore wasn’t watching it on the beach the day he originally met Mack, so the two never met. Teen Beach 2 still cheeses up this ending by having Mack and Brady engage in the same conversation at the Lela: Queen of the Beach screening that they supposedly had over Wet Side Story in the original version of their narrative, but it’s not exactly a happy Disney ending.

In fact, it’s kind of a bummer. While it’s nice that Mack empowered Lela to follow her own path, doing so ruined everything the story had built. Everything we watched develop between Mack and Brady during the first film and the sequel is thrown out the window, destroying any payoff the narrative had been building over four hours of film. They have to start back at their first hello.

Granted, this is a teen Disney movie. The point is to have fun, watch some exciting and fun dance numbers, and not worry too much about the logic of what is being shown. But Mack and Brady had a genuine chemistry, and despite the goofiness and bubblegum nature of the films, the foundation of the films is their relationship.

Garrett Clayton told TVLine “We didn’t wrap it up in a nice little bow. We’re not a normal movie franchise, and I don’t think we ever have been. I like the message it sends: You make your own choices in life. A lot of people struggle with that, and I love that Grace’s character represents choosing your own path. You might not know where you’re going, but you know you’ll be happy in the end because it’s your decision.”

That’s true, but it could have been done in a way that didn’t nullify viewers’ investment in the film’s core narrative.