Don’t Be Fooled — ‘Wicked: For Good’ Starts and Ends in an Ariana Grande-Obsessed Dystopia

Spoilers: Jon M. Chu mangles his musical's point with a discordant finale that's borderline depressing.

[Editor’s note: This story contains spoilers for the end of “Wicked: For Good.”]

The more you think about “Wicked: For Good,” the harder it gets to see the story’s conclusion as anything but depressing.

A de facto dictator perched on her own self-made bubble of lies, Glinda (Ariana Grande) begins and ends the two-film musical epic as an authoritarian ruler surrounded by sycophants who, knowing better or not, take zero issue with mocking a dead woman and treating animals like shit. Toss in Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) becoming a political prisoner to a pack of winged monkeys sans trial in her final scene, and the outlook for Glinda’s bright-pink morality doesn’t look so “good” either.

When director Jon M. Chu promoted the Oscar-winning first half of his blockbuster last year, the filmmaker underlined actresses Grande and Cynthia Erivo as the narrative’s guiding stars. Keeping focus on “the girls,” as Chu calls them, was key to building the emotional core of Oz that resonated so deeply with audiences then. Sure, Shiz University didn’t make much sense as a school — and yes, the mechanics of magic weren’t explained well at all. But none of that mattered when Elphaba and Glinda came on screen. It’s a wonder then that “For Good” leaves them and everyone else in this movie so spectacularly screwed.

The “Wicked” girls’ friendship — a white-hot platonic passion that could put even Jonathan Bailey and that sex cardigan(??) to shame — accounted for the world-building that Chu’s first film lacked through megawatt magnetism. And yet, with finality baked into its title, “For Good” had to take the friends’ connection somewhere, and the destination is ridiculously bleak. Even wielding the power of a wrap-around narrator, someone we knew would survive both films, Glinda winds up in a position so unenviable it’s a wonder she doesn’t bash one of her servants’ heads in with a bookend made of jade.

Blithely unaware that her best friend and love interest actually survived the events of the film, the Good Witch is left alone in a sea of poppies and propaganda — with no allies. Sure, she’s got Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James, but for all the pointless dialogue this bloated sequel script added, there isn’t a single scene implying those two have the values or knowledge needed to make anything other than a cult of personality. Even assuming Glinda’s pre-coronation socioeconomics training was left implied on the cutting room floor, any fan seriously invested in the “Wicked” universe will be hard-pressed to convince themselves a materialist with a perfection problem could create a stronger government from grief.

At the same time, Elphaba and the prince formerly known as Fiyero (now an anthropomorphic scarecrow we’re theoretically supposed to find sexy?) are left to aimlessly wander the liminal space surrounding Oz. You can still kiss wading through the sands of Arrakis from “Dune” or wherever, but denied the dignity once provided to her by that avant-garde hat (it must be left behind — as evidence!), Erivo’s Elphaba fares significantly worse than most heroines in modern memory. Contrasted with the snow queen the original Elphaba, Idina Menzel, voices for the “Frozen” movies, the Wicked Witch of the West exits Chu’s supposedly empowering fantasy as a defeated rebel with little more than a straw-man to show for it. There are too many problems here to take that particular critique to a gendered place, but light an academic match, and the barn burns itself.

That isn’t all on Chu, of course. The plot of “For Good” stays true to Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s musical to an extent, but this two-hander tragedy gets mucked up by countless original-to-the-movie moments that feel like the director, cast, and crew vamping ’til ready. That said, one key change makes the film version of Oz far more dire. On stage, Glinda knows Elphaba is gone — but not dead. She watches Fiyero help her bestie escape after Dorothy douses her, and Glinda only continues the myth of the Wicked Witch to protect Elphaba and Fiyero from the angry mob that’s still after them.

“For Good” confuses that series of events by showing Glinda’s earnest reaction to Elphaba’s death-by-bucket (what a lame way to go, huh?) in a striking beat that sees Grande elegantly cowering in a closet. The film never doubles back to properly clarify whether Glinda knew Elphaba’s death was a ruse or not, effectively implying she only chose to keep “secret” that the Wicked Witch was good to maintain power. If everyone’s favorite popular girl wasn’t evil already, that’s an impressively sinister starting block. Held captive by an electorate too callous to care about anything but public opinion, Glinda crafts her life in a gilded cage. She feeds the misinformation machine instead of stopping it, and like the infinite sparkles on her gowns, wears those barbed reminders of loss like an illusion of morality stitched on her sleeve.

Yes, Chu leaves the door for a third “Wicked” installment wide open. But if an extended version of this magical allegory about government corruption and political spin ever did come to theaters with the girls still in tow, then Glinda’s raw-nerve psychology would only scream antagonist the louder that lie went on. Suffice to say, her bizarre, “You dropped a house on my sister?!” slap-fight with Elphaba in “For Good” won’t have a thing on a frenemy face-off that’s predicated on Team Pink learning Team Green wasn’t dead years after the fact — effectively kicking off the second sequel by picking apart this one’s big lie.

Not since Ariana Grande first appeared as a playable character in Fortnite has a battle seemed so senseless, and the losers at the end of “For Good” are too many to count. Oz sucks, and the kingdom will get worse. The same can be said for Glinda, Elphaba, Fiyero, the Tinman/Boq (Ethan Slater), the Cowardly Lion (Colman Domingo), and even Dorothy — who, after the events of this movie, has at most some weird stories to tell Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and all those dirty hogs back home. At least she’ll be safe in the punishing thick of… the Dust Bowl and… Great Depression in early-20th-century Kansas.

In truth, the only character in “Wicked: For Good” with any semblance of a “happy ending” is the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) himself. Riding a fixed resolution afforded to him by 1939’s “Wizard of Oz” — one that’s considerably kinder than this pro-slavery carpetbagger with an absinthe problem deserves — the Wizard gets the hell out of Emerald City on a hot-air balloon, rising toward a real future.

Glinda doesn’t have the patience or pull needed to extradite a wealthy man from the United States. But if the Wizard cleans up his act with a few podcast appearances, and he picks just the right gerrymandered district to run for office, you can trust he’d find his rightful place in our real dystopia run by a shine-obsessed megalomaniac. Dare we say, Make America Good Again? Ask Glinda about the trademark.

“Wicked: For Good” is now in theaters.