Each season of NBC’s Superstore had a doozy of a finale that shook the series to its core. Season 1 ended with Glenn getting fired and the entire staff walking out, while Season 4 ended with Mateo being taken away by ICE. However, Season 2 had an incredibly devastating finale that saw the store utterly demolished by a tornado, one that the series spent a lot of time foreshadowing before it struck.
Cloud 9 is a massive discount store chain that gets its employees to do as much work as possible for as least amount of money and benefits. At the same time, it’s impossible for Cloud 9 to ignore the realities of the world, which it cannot control. When a company has stores in an area like St. Louis, Missouri, that means making preparations for any tornado that might wander through the region.
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That’s exactly what happened at the end of Season 2. In Episode 22, a massive storm was bearing down on St. Louis that kept getting worse and worse. No matter how bad the weather got, that didn’t stop the legendary Brett from trying to collect loose shopping carts in the parking lot, but the tornado struck the store, completely destroying the building and leaving Brett presumed dead.
While this shook everything up, it was an almost expected accident, as tornadoes were mentioned multiple times throughout Season 2. On more than one occasion, Glenn tried to have emergency tornado drills or at least institute some sort of plan, but in Episode 9, everyone cut him off when he tried to talk about it. The same thing happened in Episode 18 when he tried to set up a tornado drill and was all but ignored.
Meanwhile, Episode 8 should have been one of the biggest wake up calls for everyone at the store. Amy and Jonah went to talk to Glenn about election related issues when he asked them if they had read his recent memo about safety. It was obvious they hadn’t as they were mildly shocked when he pointed out that the store had recently gotten an F for tornado preparedness and that the building would fall like a house of cards in one, which is exactly what happened.
However, the biggest moment of foreshadowing went down all the way back in Season 2, Episode 3. When trying to find a tub of guacamole that contained Marcus’ missing thumb, Amy got the staff together. When Glenn and Jeff walked in on the conversation, she covered it up by pretending to talk to them about what to do in case of a tornado. Her advice was terrible, but the irony of the moment wasn’t lost as the staff could have used real tornado safety training.
When the tornado did happen, Dina attempted to claim that she was the one who wanted the drills when it was Glenn calling for them all along. Regardless, the store reopened in Season 3, Episode 1 after being rebuilt with a brand new tornado shelter. While it was nice to have, it was definitely a too little, too late type of situation. On the upside, it turned out that Brett got home and didn’t die in the tornado.
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