Warning: main spoilers forward. So, you simply completed We Were Liars on Prime Video, and also you’re unsure whether or not you want extra tissues, a therapist or a rewatch. Completely legitimate. The eight-episode adaptation of E. Lockhart’s best-selling YA novel dropped simply in time for summer season, and it’s already grow to be a must-watch.
However it’s that ending—the one-two punch of emotional devastation and a brand-new twist (that was’t within the unique ebook!)—that’s left followers reeling. Let’s break all of it down.
Cadence’s Fact Comes Crashing Again
Cadence Sinclair Eastman (performed by Emily Alyn Lind) spends most of Summer season 17 making an attempt to piece collectively what precisely occurred the earlier yr, when a mysterious accident left her with migraines, reminiscence loss and a imprecise sense that one thing went very fallacious.
By means of fragmented reminiscences, surreal conversations and time along with her three closest companions—Johnny, Mirren, and Gat (aka “The Liars”)—Cadence slowly uncovers the reality. The group had set Harris Sinclair’s mansion, Clairmont, on hearth as a symbolic protest in opposition to their poisonous, money-obsessed household dynamics. They thought it might shake up the grown-ups’ inheritance drama and cleanse the Sinclair legacy. What really occurred? A tragedy.
Cadence made it out alive. Johnny, Mirren, and Gat didn’t.
Because it seems, Cadence has been hallucinating—or probably communing with—their ghosts all summer season. The Liars died within the hearth: Johnny and Mirren had been trapped upstairs, and Gat died making an attempt to avoid wasting Cadence after she delayed escaping to retrieve her grandmother’s black pearl necklace. The similar necklace that had lengthy symbolized the Sinclair girls’s twisted obsession with legacy and appearances.
So sure, Cadence’s reminiscence loss was defending her from the insufferable actuality: she was the one one who survived.
The Remaining Selection—and the New Twist
As soon as Cadence absolutely remembers, her grandfather Harris confronts her. He is aware of the reality concerning the hearth however needs to publicly blame defective wiring and title her his inheritor—on the situation that she retains her mouth shut. She declines. In a symbolic second, she tosses the black pearls into the ocean and tells a TIME reporter she’s “simply actually not into fairytales anymore.”
However then the present provides one final intestine punch that’s not within the unique ebook.
We bounce to Carrie (Mamie Gummer), Cadence’s aunt and Johnny’s mother, who’s alone at her home on the island, Crimson Gate. She pops a capsule after which—shock—sees Johnny’s ghost. “I assumed you left,” she says. “I don’t assume I can,” he solutions.
It’s a haunting second that not solely deepens the present’s emotional stakes but in addition teases what could be coming subsequent.
What It Units Up for Season 2
This ultimate scene is definitely a serious clue: it mirrors the start of Household of Liars, Lockhart’s 2022 prequel novel. That ebook takes us again to Beechwood within the Nineteen Eighties and facilities on a 17-year-old Carrie as she offers with love, loss, and the unique cracks within the Sinclair household basis. And now that Carrie can see ghosts, too? The door to the previous is huge open.
As Lockhart informed TVLine, “That ultimate scene with Carrie and Johnny could be very near the opening of my second ebook within the We Were Liars universe… it’s a tip ahead into Season 2.”
Showrunner Julie Plec confirmed that the sequence has already woven in components from Household of Liars, saying, “We’ve finished all of the foundational work with the grownup characters,” which units up the subsequent chapter completely—if it will get picked up.
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