Animal Kingdom season 2 finale spoilers: Can Smurf destroy from within?

With the Animal Kingdom season 2 finale airing on TNT August 29, there’s a lot of drama coming up across the board. That’s especially true for Ellen Barkin’s character of Smurf, who appears to have one thing on her mind more so than anything else: Vengeance.

We’ll start by giving the producers a little bit of credit here, given that we didn’t expect them to keep Smurf behind bars anywhere near as long as they have. This felt on the surface like the sort of storyline where it’s far more effective to tease it as something that could happen only to then release her a week or two later just to throw her back into the fire. Barkin is a fantastic performer, and with that, you do want to get her around the remainder of the cast as much as you can.

Beyond that, one of the other big questions that you do still have to wonder if this: What will her function be behind bars? There’s potential for the writers to do a wide array of different things, but for now one of the biggest ones is cause a stink and try to stir up some trouble. She may try to turn her sons on each other as a mode of revenge, and the results could be catastrophic. You can get a small sense of that in the promo below; at the same time, the synopsis below is a resource in its own right.

Animal Kingdom season 2 finale synopsis – “When Smurf (Ellen Barkin) realizes she may be in jail a lot longer than expected, she pits her sons against one another, the consequences be damned.”

Where are the ratings entering the finale?

Even if the show has already been renewed officially for a third season, this is still something we want to do our best to keep track of for the sake of analyzing the field and figuring out what we want some of the latest ratings are going to be.

The numbers for the August 15 episode are certainly solid and very much in line with what we’ve seen for the rest of the season. The show generated a 0.4 rating in the 18-49 demographic and around 1.16 million viewers. Both of these are up from this past week just a tick. This is worth noting mostly as a reminder that people who watch Animal Kingdom are sticking around to watch it live for the remainder of the season. If the goal here is for the show to be around in the long-term, this should help it tremendously.

Is there anything that you’re curious in seeing on the Animal Kingdom season 2 finale? Share in the comments below!

Also, click here in the event you want to snag some more news and information right now when it comes to the show. (Photo: TNT.)