🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
Mike Valentine (Edgar Ramírez) and Delly West (Abbey Lee) are both characters torn between two lives in Florida Man. She’s a mobster’s girlfriend looking for an escape. He’s an ex-cop that can’t resist the pull of risk and money. In the end, Mike and Delly reunite on his dad Sonny’s (Anthony LaPaglia) boat after Mike’s lost everything and she’s killed her ex-boyfriend, Moss (Emory Cohen). Neither know where the swampy waters of Florida will take them next, so we let showrunner Donald Todd — a Floridian himself — guide us through.
In Todd’s head, Delly and Mike have recognized that they’re right for each other. That final scene is an homage to the ending of Romancing the Stone (1984) where Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner share a similar moment on a boat. “We think it’s sad, and then it’s not sad,” Todd says. He especially loved when Delly squeezes Mike’s hand. “It means, ‘We’re in this now, so let’s commit. No bulls**t, no back and forth.’ ”
This question was debated on set! Lines were cut that would’ve explained when she found the gold, when she knew she had it or if she even intended to have it. “Did she work him all along and did she know she had the gold? In my version, no,” Todd says. At one point, there was a line in the script asking when she found out, and she responds with, “I had to pee. I came down here, here’s the gold.” But letting the audience ask, “When did she know?” felt more fitting to Todd.
“He went for her,” Todd says. Mike never knew there was gold on the boat. “When he saw the gold piece, he thought, ‘Goddamit, she f**ked me. She got the gold. I’ve been an idiot.’ ” The metaphor for the Florida Man team was always that Delly was the gold.
He picks up the 10 of Swords, the same card Delly pulls in Episode 4. The card — which represents finality, the end of something — would have meant to her that they were about to get what they wanted or that she and Mike were about to be over. (They do split by the end of the episode.) “When Mike finds the card at the end on the boat, it means he’s reached the end,” Todd says. “It could mean the waiting and wondering are over. There’s no more ambiguity. You can move on, no more to be done.” Fun fact: Delly learning tarot was Lee’s idea.
Sonny won’t be an inmate for long. “He’s too smart and knows too many people,” Todd says. That’s why Sonny is cocky when Mike comes to visit him in the finale. “He knows where enough bodies are buried — literally and otherwise — to get himself out.”
Delly did come to love Moss, despite initially thinking his father killed hers when they got together. But in the first episode, when she hears that they’ve been together a year, it’s a shock for her. “We all know what that’s like,” Todd says. “Something happens, especially a trauma, you shut down and go day-to-day till you look up and you’re in the same life.” She loves him, but not enough to stay there forever. She gives him the benefit of “you’re not your father,” since she isn’t her father either. But when she finds out it’s Moss that killed her dad, that’s a dealbreaker. So she bolts for Florida.
Originally, Iris didn’t know why the job was offered. But now that she has it, Todd says she’s thinking, “Mike’s going down” and won’t get away with this. “It’s important to her morally that there are no more second chances for Mike.”
In Todd’s eyes, yes. There’s a longer version of Delly’s “heroic” finale speech where she says, “It’s always been my story, and you were all in it.” Delly knows she put her ear to the floor and listened to Gil Franco (Nick Basta) tell Moss about the gold, and she went to find it in Florida (because growing up with a con-woman mother, she was attuned to lies and knew Gil was telling the truth). Yes, she needed Mike’s help to find the gold — but he wouldn’t even be there without her.
She tells this to Mike, but “Mike, of course, wasn’t listening, because as a man, and a self-involved one… he always believes he’s the center of every story,” says Todd. The audience doesn’t expect Delly to be the hero, just as she says Mike doesn’t. “But if we’re paying attention to the lady, and listening to her, she always has [been].”
Florida Man is now streaming on Netflix.
