🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

In Ginny & Georgia, Georgia Miller (Brianne Howey) is a woman who knows what she wants and knows how to get it by any means necessary — even murder. 

But she didn’t start out that way. Once upon a time, she was just a teenage girl trying to escape an abusive home life. Back then, she wasn’t known as Georgia. She wasn’t Ginny’s (Antonia Gentry) or Austin’s (Diesel La Torraca) mom. She was just Mary.

“We’re all such a happy family,” Ginny (Antonia Gentry) says to Georgia (Brianne Howey), goading her mother with her past in Season 2, Episode 3. “You, me, Paul, Austin, Mary.”

That’s right. If you’ve been watching Ginny & Georgia but forgot who exactly this Mary is that Ginny brings up in Season 2 — which strikes fear into the heart of her mother — then we’ve got your answer. Mary is an identity that Georgia has left behind, like most of her past. As Howey tells Tudum, “She has to keep reinventing herself, create an even more tangled web of deception and keep it all together over and over again, ever since she was a child.”

Georgia wasn’t the only one her stepfather abused. Once she ran away, he started doing it to her younger sister — a fact she only learns as an adult.

As we learn in Season 1, Georgia’s dad was out of the picture but her mother was still around, albeit too drugged up to notice her new husband’s vile behavior. In Episode 7, “Happy Sweet Sixteen, Jerk,” Georgia painfully tells her daughter that she was abused by her stepfather her entire childhood. “He molested me most nights with my mom asleep in the next room,” she says.

And that all explains how we first find young 14-year-old Mary (played by Nikki Roumel) in the premiere, getting tossed around the room by her stepdad in their mobile home as he screams that he’s going to kill her. So she does what Georgia has mastered by the time we meet her as an adult: She runs. 

The first piece of advice Georgia gets from the Blood Eyes is, “You win more flies with honey. But if you get yourself a bee, sting first.”

This first time, she crosses paths with the Blood Eyes biker gang while trying to hitchhike. When they ask her name, she takes inspiration from the state sign nearby that reads “Georgia,” and so Georgia is born.

“What I admire about Georgia is that she hasn't let her past define her,” says Howey. “She's had so many devastating curve balls thrown her way, especially with her upbringing. And she truly has moved on. They did not hold her back, they didn't keep her down. She's able to transform her identity.”

And she does get her revenge on her mom’s husband. In the eighth episode of Season 2, we see Georgia revisit her mom and stepdad via flashback, and she shoots him through the hand. After all, it’s “an eye for an eye.” And doesn’t this Georgia Peach know it.

Season 2 of Ginny & Georgia is now streaming.

Ginny & Georgia Season 1 RecapCatch up on all the biggest moments before season 2.