The Four Seasons Season 2 Episode 1 Review: "Hiking" — a bad mountain, a worse estate rumor, and the ashes Jack keeps dragging uphill
What happens — the short version (spoilers)
- Jack frames the hike as a tribute, but the group is already exhausted by the performance of it.
- Ginny and Anne's fight over Nick's money keeps leaking into everything else.
- The room shuffle makes Ginny the center of a house nobody knows how to manage.
- Jack's GoPro memorial is earnest and awkward in the way this group cannot really meet.
- The forgotten ashes and active manhunt end the day before anyone can salvage it.
Jack wants a Nick weekend to feel like meaning, but the hike, the room assignments, and the ash-scattering plan keep turning into fights over who is angry, who is hiding things, and who is too tired to pretend otherwise. Grief and logistics are the same job here, and the mountain just gives everyone a place to prove it.
Jack turns Nick’s memorial hike into a group project nobody can carry
Jack treats the day like a tribute because that is easier than admitting he just wants the feeling of one. He wants the mountain, the ashes, the marathon training, the matching energy, the whole package. Everyone else is just trying to survive the climb, and the first pushback already shows how little of the trip belongs to the people taking it.
Ginny is moving through the day like a machine, Kate is sniping from the side, and Claude is already done before the real trouble starts. Even Jack’s own optimism has that strained, overprepared quality that comes from wanting one clean ritual to do the work of a whole relationship.
Ginny’s money fight with Anne leaks into every conversation
Claude finally says what he has been sitting on: Ginny and Anne are fighting over Nick’s money, and neither woman can make the other feel reasonable. Anne does not want to look like a villain, Ginny does not want to look desperate, and the others want the problem to be simple enough that they can all get back to being a unit. It is not simple. It is money, history, and Nick’s absence all mixed together.
That fight keeps showing up in smaller forms. Anne’s administrative paralysis turns a legal binder into a freezer decoration, and Ginny’s side of things gets framed as need instead of greed, which is exactly why the conversation keeps hurting. Nobody is cleanly right, and nobody is fully lying either.
The room shuffle makes Ginny the center of a house nobody knows how to manage
Once they get to the rooms, the vacation starts behaving like a family spreadsheet. Danny and Claude get one room, Kate gets another, and Ginny gets pushed into the most loaded setup of all. The pillow, the blackout curtains, the baby in the room, and the extra sleep all turn into signs that nobody has any real boundary left.
That domestic clutter matters because it keeps showing how exhausted everybody is. An extra pillow becomes a problem. A borrowed room becomes a status change. A good night’s sleep becomes a flirting anecdote and a warning sign. The trip never gets past the logistics, and that is exactly why it keeps telling the truth.
Jack’s GoPro memorial starts sincere, then exposes the whole group
Jack’s little memorial video is earnest, overprepared, and awkward enough to show the loneliness under it. He wants the group to feel what he feels, and the GoPro is funny because it is also sad. He is trying to archive a feeling that everybody else is too busy fighting to share.
The forgotten ashes land because they undo the fantasy that a perfect ritual can solve what is still unfinished in the people. Jack has built a frame for the grief, but he still cannot keep the ashes in the same place as the sentiment. The mountain stays a mountain, and the emotion stays messy.
The hike collapses, the manhunt cuts in, and the day stops pretending to be a vacation
Jack wants one more hike and one more chance to make the trip mean something, but the lawsuit, the money, the GoPro, and the active manhunt order all say otherwise. The weekend is not becoming a legacy. It is just becoming a story the group will keep retelling because none of them handled it well in the moment.
That ending works because it refuses to turn the chaos into sentiment. The mountain is too far upstate, the ashes are forgotten, and everybody has already run out of ways to keep the performance going. That is enough of an ending for an hour like this.
Tiny details worth clocking
- Ginny gets called a machine early, and the episode keeps paying that off with how much invisible labor she is doing.
- Claude’s “Nose job, Claude” moment is a perfect example of how this group weaponizes gossip while pretending not to.
- Jack’s GoPro memorial is funny partly because nobody else is as emotionally scripted as he is.
- The “first annual Nick weekend” line is the exact kind of sentimental phrasing this show loves to puncture.
- The manhunt announcement at the end is the cleanest possible way to tell the audience the day is done.
Final verdict
This opener works because it treats grief as money, babysitting, old resentment, bed assignments, and one person trying to make a weekend stand in for love. Jack’s sincerity becomes its own kind of pressure, which is exactly why the episode works.
It is a good start to the season because it knows the hike is not the point. The people carrying the hike are.
Rating: 8.4/10 — a funny, prickly opener that uses one mountain to expose all the group’s unfinished business.
More episodes from The Four Seasons — Season 2 — Friend-group grief comedy, trips, holidays, and second chances. Jump to any episode in the season:
Where to go next
Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.