SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the entire third season of Netflix’s ‘XO, Kitty.‘
Katherine “Kitty” Song Covey (Anna Cathcart) and her KISS classmates are growing up.
Season 3 of Netflix’s XO, Kitty which spins off of the To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy, brings several beloved pairs together after time apart, challenging friendships, love and familial bonds.
It all comes to a head midway through the show at what is supposed to be a celebratory Chuseok feast — like the one in Season 1 — where Kitty and her friends and family gather to honor their ancestors and celebrate those who came before them. However, secrets and drama looming at the edges of the dinner table spill over into conversation accidentally, dividing the friend group and causing certain friendships and relationships to get a closer look under the microscope.
Season 3 showrunner Valentina Garza pointed to episode five, titled “Off the List” as a boiling point for many characters, particularly the titular main heroine, her flame Min Ho (Sang Heon Lee) and her bestie Q (Anthony Keyvan).
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“At the end of the Chuseok episode, Kitty and Min Ho break up, and Kitty and Q break up as well. This was really where the kettle boils over in the season,” she said. “Everything falls apart for Kitty, which is why she has to send up that flare and call in the big dogs, meaning Lara Jean.”
Returning the favor Kitty did for her earlier in Season 3 by visiting her in New York during a turbulent time with her longtime boyfriend Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo), Kitty’s older sister Lara Jean (Lana Condor) fakes norovirus to fly to Seoul and take care of Kitty post-Chuseok chaos. LJ helps on the love front with some advice that also affects Kitty’s college applications, but the youngest Song Covey sister mends both her romantic relationship and that with her best friend, which was tenuous in Season 2 as well, on her own.
“Q is not being entirely honest with Kitty or with Jin or with himself this season. I think he is confused, and it’s just the messy and complex part of growing up and trying to have more mature relationships,” Garza said. “It’s not necessarily a straight line or easy, and so that’s all part of his growth, and unfortunately, it leads to a breakdown in their relationship, but they are each other’s ride or die, and so thankfully, they find their way back to one another.”
Garza expands on Kitty and Min Ho’s romance arc, Yuri’s path this season, the complex pregnancy plotline and more in the below interview.
DEADLINE: How did you want to make the romantic arc between Kitty and Min Ho feel earned, but also balanced, waiting for a little bit — in that first episode — before they finally kiss?
VALENTINA GARZA: Well, coming off the season two finale, we have left our fans leaning in with bated breath to find out how Min Ho is going to answer Kitty’s question, ‘Can I come with you?’ And we don’t really know what that means, and Kitty doesn’t really know what that means either.
We really wanted to reward our fans’ patience waiting for us with taking them on an exciting journey in Busan and continuing to live in that will-they-won’t-they tension, but surprising our fans, hopefully, by getting them to that first kiss much sooner than they probably expected. [Laughs.] We thought that would be an exciting way to start the season.
DEADLINE: With Yuri’s arc this season, there are a lot of class themes, as there have been in previous seasons, but Yuri’s situation and Dae coming into money were new for Season 3. How did you want to tackle that, and why was that needed for Yuri to find her new gig in fashion?
GARZA: This season, for Kitty, for Yuri, for all of our characters, is really about all of them being on the precipice of adulthood, and transitioning in this final year of being seniors in high school into being adults. For Yuri, that transition is more difficult than anybody else, because all the safety nets that she’s had in life are now gone, and she’s really relying on Kitty and her friends and the bonds of friendship to see her through and help her to find who she’s going to become in this moment. Hopefully, we were able to execute that in a satisfying way, but I think that for her and for all of our characters, it’s really a season of personal growth and learning. For Yuri, it’s about learning that she can be who she wants to be, with or without the money that she’s had and that her past doesn’t define her.
DEADLINE: The fashion show is so fun. How did that come together? Did it take a while to source everything? How did you go about building that sequence?
GARZA: I have to give all credit to our costume department for the incredible vision that they had for it, and they really brought everything together really quickly. For Yuri, she really does have an arc that plays out in her fashion as well, because she has to give away a lot of her signature pieces that we’ve seen throughout the other seasons, and she has to learn to rebuild her identity as a fashion icon as well.
She’s creating these new outfits from things that she’s thrifting and learning to creatively build her identity through her fashion. We see in the fashion show the culmination of that with this fashion line that I really think speaks to who she is as a queer woman as well. It’s all flowing out in her creativity, and so that’s a really exciting journey for her.
DEADLINE: How did you want to balance the previous romantic history and past relationships between a lot of these characters with new relationships being explored in Season 3? Particularly I’m thinking of Dae and Min Ho’s friendship.
GARZA: There is definitely some tension at the beginning of the season. But I think Dae is an incredibly gracious character, and he’s really more concerned at the beginning of the season with his relationship with Yuri, and how that’s been impacted by the reversal of fortune. [He wants] to be really wise with what’s happening with Min Ho and Kitty, but he and Kitty are in a really good place, and they have a strong friendship, and I think he’s in a position where he can actually really root for Min Ho and Kitty to be happy.
Of course he has his own things going on that nobody else knows about. So that also really helps.
DEADLINE: I loved the scene with him and Q, when he says, ‘Oh, you want to talk to me about feelings?’ I wanted to ask about having Lana Condor back in a couple appearances across episodes vs. Noah Centineo’s and Janelle Parish’s singular cameos in Season 2. How did you navigate weaving her back into the story?
GARZA: Lara Jean is such a beloved character. The To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before franchise was so meaningful to so many people. So it was very exciting to be able to bring Lana into the season, and we really wanted to allow her to have an impactful arc with Kitty.
We’re really grateful that we got more than just a cameo. At the beginning of the season, Kitty is on the precipice of a breakthrough with Min Ho when she gets this text from Lara Jean, who has gotten herself in this rough patch with Peter and really needs her sister. Of course, Kitty drops everything to be with her. And Lara Jean returns the favor when Kitty gets herself into some trouble in the middle of the season and is really able to take the emotional growth that she has been having in her own life and in her own relationship, and use that to impart her big sisterly wisdom to Kitty and to encourage Kitty to focus on herself and to bet on herself, which is something that she’s learned. At the end of the day, our fans can be relieved that Peter and Lara Jean are back together and all is good.
DEADLINE: You took a little bit of time to show she wants to be an author, and that she’s maturing too. All three of the sisters are so brave in their own ways and have gone all these different places.
GARZA: And Kitty and Lara Jean’s arcs are really interconnected. They’re both able to give to each other and learn and grow through each other. Kitty gives Lara Jean the courage to take that step to turn in her book to her publisher. So it’s a very mutual relationship.
DEADLINE: There’s the scene too where Lara Jean’s leaving and she sees Min Ho, and I’m curious about having him interact with these very important people in Kitty’s life. Does that mean he’s viewed as end game? In the post-credit scene, it’s hinted that he’s going to meet her dad. What can you say about that?
GARZA: I know that the fans are very invested in these relationships. It felt really exciting for these two worlds to intersect — the To All the Boys world with Lara Jean and Min Ho’s world. It would not have felt really complete, I think, if Laura Jean had been there and never really intersected with Min Ho, who is really what all of this was all about. I’m interested in hearing what [fans] think and how they ideate about where these characters and their relationships can go in the future. We just can’t wait to see and find out.
DEADLINE: They all have one more semester at KISS. Are you open to a Season 4? Could you see the show continuing after KISS with Kitty going to NYU? What are your thoughts there?
GARZA: I know that all of our fans would love to see that. We’re just gonna have to wait and see what happens. We’re very excited to continue to see our characters learn and grow.
DEADLINE: A super mature theme that was handled this season was pregnancy from Eunice’s thought-to-be one that turned out false and Jiwon’s positive test. How did that thread come about?
GARZA: As I said, this is a season where all of our characters are on the precipice of adulthood, so we were definitely thinking about having some slightly more adult themes in this season. That’s where that pregnancy scare came from. We thought it was also just a really interesting misdirect. We didn’t expect Dae to find himself in a situation where he might be a baby daddy, but yeah, I think it’s just really in keeping with wanting to have them deal with some more adult challenges this season.
The other thing that that storyline allowed us to do was to explore that Alex dynamic. It turns out that Dae isn’t the baby daddy, but it’s gonna be Alex, and it allows us to have this really sweet moment of closure and expansion between Alex and his dad. I think that was also something that was really satisfying for Kitty to continue to be a unifier in those relationships, not just her relationship with Jiwon and Soon-ja (Jung Hye Sun), but for Alex and his dad as well.
DEADLINE: What does using songs like Ashe’s “Moral of the Story” and Marina’s “About Love” as needle drops in the show add for you? And how did the original music like Min Ho’s song for Kitty come about?
GARZA: The To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before franchise is so beloved. So whenever we could think of a way to have an Easter egg and lay something in from the franchise and have a callback here, we’re able to do that. We really loved doing that through music.
We also have some original songs this season. We have two. The first is “EUNIQ,” which is Eunice’s first single as a K-pop artist. That was really exciting. It’s my first foray into writing a song, and Han-Bi Ryu performs it just beautifully. That’s gonna be really exciting for the fans to see as well. We really wanted the song to have this Baddie Boss Lady confident Jennie from Blackpink energy. In some ways it’s because I think that’s not really how Eunice is experiencing her debut. She’s feeling very vulnerable and not confident and not strong. So she’s able to hold the tension of the persona that she’s being asked to put on and what she’s really experiencing.
For Min Ho, we have “By My Side.” I knew that I wanted to call back to this idea of the sunrise. This is how we start our season with Kitty having what seems like this silly idea about having a sunrise with her friends, but it really becomes a very significant moment for Min Ho and their relationship. There’s so much light and so much warmth in that moment. I think, as Min Ho journeys throughout the season, he realizes that that’s what he’s really missing in his life, and something that he really wants, and the sun doesn’t rise without her in his life. It’s really a culmination of not only his arc with Kitty, but also his understanding of himself and what he wants in that moment. So it’s playing on a personal, relational level, and it’s a beautiful song that he produces with Dae. Saint Rene sings it beautifully, and so we’re really excited for our fans to hear that.
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