Sweet Magnolias season 2, episode 9 recap - "Dear Heart" (2025)

This recap of Sweet Magnolias season 2, episode 9, “Dear Heart”, contains spoilers.

So, Miss Frances didn’t make it. Luckily, though, she had everything planned out and has provided instructions for basically the entire town to organize her funeral and the various festivities surrounding it. There’s no word on a will, yet, but maybe it’s just because what she really left behind for everyone was much more important than things. It’s a nice way of looking at death, and of celebrating the life that led to it.

This brings the idea of death, loss, and grieving to the fore in “Dear Heart”. Later, Maddie breaks into tears when her mother shares her own plans and arrangements for making sure everyone is taken good care of when she goes, and it’s a very nice scene.

Love isn’t exactly in the air for Dana Sue and Ronnie. Their marriage counseling does not go well, in part because Ronnie isn’t living up to the version of himself that Dana Sue has fixated on in her head. Part of the therapy is to read their wedding vows aloud, and when Dana Sue sees he hasn’t brought any paper, she smugly asserts that he couldn’t be bothered to fulfill the assignment. But he knows their vows by heart, and he says them aloud to her as if for the first time. Dana Sue doesn’t know how to handle that and angrily leaves.

What’s odd is that Dana Sue complains at cocktail night about how hard the process is, but leaves this bit out. She continues to struggle with the whole matter throughout the episode, and when Ronnie returns to her place to go through what his vows mean, which is also part of the assignment, Dana Sue flips out on him. She evidently never got over him being unfaithful to her, and now no matter what he says about his vows, she’ll always remember, first and foremost, that he broke them. It’s difficult to know where to come down on this thread, since I can’t but feel Ronnie is being very sincere and trying his best, but if trust has been broken, it’s remarkably difficult to fully repair.

Helen is more open with her issues, and the fact that IVF might not be the most viable solution for her, but friendship and togetherness seem a viable solution for perhaps not being able to have a child. But childrearing isn’t the only problem Helen runs into in “Dear Heart”. Ryan returns for Miss Frances’s funeral, and weirdly enough, Peggy has asked to speak with him. Is this going where we think it is? No, as it happens.

Anyway, let’s talk about Ty. The kid’s an idiot. He admittedly gets some bad news here about his physical therapy taking long enough to potentially stifle his lifelong baseball dreams and affect where he can go to school, but when it comes to CeCe, he’s so far off the mark it’s embarrassing. When Annie calls briefly, he can barely keep his eyes off her, yet when he talks to Helen about CeCe later, he acts like she didn’t give him a chance to apologize when in actual fact he demanded an apology from her for something that he did. It’s just bizarre. But it makes for a nice moment between him and Helen.

But the big news of this penultimate episode is that we find out who Isaac’s father is — it’s Bill! He and Peggy had a fling as kids and their parents decided together to keep her pregnancy from him. He had no idea that he had a child with Peggy, much less that it was Isaac. But he comes face to face with him at the end of the episode.

You can stream Sweet Magnolias season 2, episode 9, “Dear Heart”, exclusively on Netflix.