Tuiskoms’ ending is a beautiful reminder that everything in life is a cycle, and every end is a new beginning. In Afrikaans, “Tuiskoms” means “Homecoming,” an appropriate title for the show, that gets a nod right at the end when Fleur finds her way home. In the show, Fleur is a young widow with a teenage daughter and a restaurant to run. The restaurant, which belonged to her dead husband, Andre, is hanging by a thread, and at the start of the show, this thread finally gets cut off. See, a customer finds something very inappropriate on his plate, which makes him cause a scene in front of the whole restaurant. Fleur, who doesn’t know what she can do to save her husband’s last memory, ends up licking the sauce on the plate, claiming there’s nothing there. This becomes a viral meme, and unlike the usual turn of events for the Smits, there’s no turning back from this moment. Fleur loses everything, the restaurant and her house, so she decides to move to her parents’ house in Wilderness with her daughter. What’s Fleur’s homecoming like, and will she finally find some happiness 2 years after her husband’s death?
Spoiler Alert
Why Does Fleur Consider Moving to Stellenbosch?
The real reason Fleur has been struggling to go out with other people since her husband’s death is because she sees him, almost like a ghost looming around her. In fact, she talks to him, and he helps her deal with difficult situations. This is her coping mechanism through the show, and every time she has to get intimate with someone, whether it’s Nick at first, or Werner later, she sees her husband’s death and has to stop midway. I guess, in a way, this is Fleur holding herself back from really feeling for other people. She is desperate to hold onto Andre’s memory, first with the restaurant and then with his ghost, so to speak. So, when she stops seeing Andre after finally breaking this cycle with Werner, she realizes she’s losing her last memory of Andre. This scares her, so when Melissa offers her a job at Stellenbosch, the town where she and Andre got married, she can’t help but choose it because she thinks she’ll be able to see Andre there again. She wants to hold on to the past so badly that she’s willing to jeopardize a great future for both her and Kelly in the process. But we know she’s a stubborn woman, and even when everyone around her is basically telling her she’s making a mistake, she chooses to stick to her decision until something very unexpected and sad happens.
What Happens With Abigail And Jonathan?
At the beginning of the show, we’re meant to believe that Fleur is close to her father but not so much to her absent mother. She feels no connection to her mother because she’s too focused on her writing, and Fleur feels like her mother was never around. However, Jonathan, Fleur’s dad, cheats on her mother, Abigail, and moves out of their house soon after Fleur moves back to Wilderness. This is another challenge for her, and at first, she and Abigail don’t get along very well at all. But soon enough, Fleur, Abigail, and Kelly try to fall into a rhythm, 3 generations of women just struggling with different things. Abigail knows she wasn’t around for Fleur since the beginning, but she wants to be close to her now, so she holds onto her and doesn’t let her move in with her dad and his new 30-year-old girlfriend.
Near the end of the show, Jonathan returns to Abigail because his girlfriend throws him out. All this time, we thought Abigail had the emotional intelligence of a goldfish, but Jonathan is worse than a stone. He’s a nuisance to Abigail, who has finally found her own rhythm with Nick (also a much younger man, who went after her first) and learnt how to be by herself. But Jonathan then tells her that his girlfriend wants to have a child, but he thinks he’s too old and it’s unfair to the kid. But when Abigail visits the younger woman (the other woman), she realizes she’s already pregnant, but she didn’t want to make Jonathan feel trapped, so she said she wanted to have children. It’s Abigail who then talks sense into her immature ex-husband and sends him packing back to her.
On the other hand, at the end of the show, Abigail decides to travel by herself. It seems Abigail spent almost all her life with Jonathan, and with Nick, she finally realized that she also wanted her own freedom. She wanted to explore the world by herself and experience the things she couldn’t with Jonathan. The experience she had with Nick will always be cherished, and he’ll be okay, too. It was never meant to be a long-term thing.
What Does Mari’s Death Symbolize For Fleur?
In Tuiskoms’ ending, we’re reminded yet again that death comes very unexpectedly. Mari’s death comes at a moment when Fleur and Werner are already terribly vulnerable because he’s just found out that she plans on leaving behind everything, including the shop, which he wanted her to have. Fleur changed so much after moving to Wilderness and started working at Werner’s shop so she could finally find her footing and eventually move out of her parents’ home (or rather, her mom’s home). But she learned how to do flower arrangements from Werner and how not to be controlling from the rest of the people she worked with there. So, it comes as a surprise to everyone that she would choose money over connection and passion, which leaves Werner sour.
When Mari dies, everything falls apart, and it’s almost like a goodbye for Fleur. Werner says he’ll work on the flowers for Mari’s funeral himself, and even Sean, Mari’s grandson, tells Fleur he can’t talk to her about his grandma because Fleur’s decision would’ve broken her heart. Kelly is also upset because she finally found friends and a home at Wilderness, but her mom is going to uproot her yet again for her own convenience. However, finally, Kelly realizes Fleur is doing it to see her dad again, and she agrees to move. But, by this time, Fleur has realized all of this was a mistake.
In the end, it’s Mari’s husband, Paul, who gives Fleur the advice she needed to get closure. Fleur always worried about her memories fading away, but Paul tells her that his memories of Mari will follow him wherever he goes. I suppose that is the true bond of love; it’s unforgettable. Fleur finally realizes that Andre will always be with her. There’s no need to be afraid of being alone because she now has Werner. She also has Kelly, Abigail, and everyone who works at the shop. A true homecoming, if you will. The shop goes from being called Bloom & Bean to Fleur, after her. Werner asks Fleur to marry him, and she says yes, so yeah, it’s a happy ending. Later, Fleur goes to the beach, and she sees Andre yet again in the ocean, surfing. Maybe Andre was really around to guide Fleur to find her happiness, or maybe he was a figment of her imagination. In the end, Fleur goes surfing; the thing she told her mother was truly the most liberating thing in the world.
