The hit Netflix show’s ending, explained.

Wayward, Netflix’s latest thriller-mystery series, jumped to the No. 1 spot on the platform over the weekend. The show, created by Canadian actor and comedian Mae Martin, is set in 2003 in the fictional town of Tall Pines, Vermont. It follows a group of characters as they arrive in Tall Pines and realize that something is amiss not just with the town but with the local boarding school for troubled youth, as well as its head teacher, Evelyn Wade (Toni Collette). As the mystery unfolds, things continue to get even more baffling for our characters, culminating in a finale that requires some serious untangling. Here’s my best attempt at breaking down the twists and turns of Tall Pines. Warning: This is a dense forest of spoilers! Traverse at your own risk.

So what’s actually going down in Tall Pines, Vermont? 

So much, dude. Too much, even. The best way to break down the Wayward finale would be to separate this into two explanations: what’s going on at Tall Pines Academy with newly enrolled teens Abbie (Sydney Topliffe) and Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind), and what’s going on in the town with its most recent citizens, Alex (Mae Martin) and Laura (Sarah Gadon). Though the two mysteries are intrinsically linked and there’s tons of crossover between the duos throughout the season, it’s easier to think of them as separate conundrums until they come together at the end.

Sure. Let’s start with the town. What are the evils lurking underneath the surface? 

The weirdness of Tall Pines is uncovered mostly through Alex and Laura’s story. As soon as the married couple move back to the pregnant Laura’s hometown of Tall Pines from Detroit—there’s a hint that Alex, a police officer, might have gotten in trouble back in Michigan for an incident that he claims “by no means” involved “excessive force”—it becomes clear that things are not what they seem.

A Tall Pines Academy student, Riley (Gage Munroe), escapes from the school and runs into an on-duty Alex. Riley is paranoid about whom he can trust and adamant that the school is a horrific place. Later on, Riley, a bit calmer, breaks into Alex’s home to seek help but gets frightened when Laura comes downstairs to check out the commotion. Riley charges at the couple with a kitchen knife, and Alex accidentally kills Riley in self-defense. To make matters worse, it turns that academy head teacher and top dog Tall Pines citizen Evelyn Wade (Collette) is not trustworthy and rather dangerous. Oddly enough, the townspeople spout pro-Evelyn propaganda whenever Alex asks about her.

In researching Evelyn and the academy, Alex finds files documenting the disappearance of 18 kids who, like Riley, had tried to run away from the school. Soon, Alex realizes that a significant reason Tall Pines feels surreal is that there are no children. Laura explains that the town is childless because of some “weird old hippies” in the ’70s who believed that they should allocate their entire resources into helping kids from the school instead of self-populating. Laura explains that, according to Evelyn, Tall Pines is changing, becoming more welcoming to children, and that Laura and Alex’s impending baby will be the first in decades. When Alex, not loving all this information, wants to leave, Evelyn threatens to blackmail the couple by using Riley’s death against them. Laura and Alex are trapped—unless they can dethrone Evelyn by getting her arrested. Laura stages a coup by alerting the townsfolk to the fact that Evelyn has played with their minds and taken a significant amount from them: their freedom, their sense of self, their memories. However, Laura’s vision isn’t to leave but to see what the future of Tall Pines could be without Evelyn, and with Laura installed as the new town honcho.

Well, that all sounds healthy. I love repeating the same actions and hoping for different results, myself. So what’s up with the school? 

The school plotline opens with the story of two teen besties, Leila and Abbie. The girls spend most of their screen time scheming how to break out of the academy, an institution that seems orchestrated with major inspiration from the Stanford prison experiment. The school is structured to give certain students the power to monitor and enforce the subjugation of others. If a student messes up, their roommate receives a heavy punishment. Then there are sessions called Hot Seat, in which students are forced to berate and belittle one another. Initially, these sessions are described as “a way of holding yourself accountable through radical honesty,” but it becomes apparent that they are meant to break the spirits of vulnerable youth.

The school is organized into “phases”; the better students do, the higher they climb and the more power they get. During the final phase, attendees undergo Evelyn’s “leap” therapy—a process that has broken some students to the point of being mentally unrecognizable. This is how Evelyn has turned the residents of Tall Pines into her own personal zombies.

What is this “leaping,” and is there a creepy mantra involved? 

Well, yes! How did you know? Leaping is Evelyn’s strongest form of torment and mental manipulation, and she claims that it helps students process their trauma. She drugs students, sits them in a small pool of water in the basement, and repeats one mantra over and over again: “You’re lying on your back, crying out for your mother. She is standing, facing the wall. She has her back to you. A bell rings. Your mother turns to face you. She is silent, but her mouth is open wide. In her mouth is a door.” Totally normal and not distressing at all.

By getting into their minds, Evelyn brainwashes a person into being “honest” about the horrible truths they were “hiding” from themself. It’s all very satanic panic. During some ritualistic therapy sessions with Evelyn, Leila tells the story of her sister’s death. At first, she recounts that her sister got high and drowned after swimming in a pool at night; she recalls that, being high herself, she conked out for a bit and woke up to find her sister dead in the water. At Evelyn’s consistent urging, a different version of the tale is unearthed, one in which Leila pushed her sister into the pool and let her drown. It’s unclear which memory is true.

Huh! That’s deeply concerning. Which is it? Did Leila intentionally kill her sister?

It’s unclear how her sister actually died, and I will say that this whole idea got complicated for me in the finale. There’s also a whole plotline about whether Laura killed her own parents. A large part of the finale casts doubt on literally everything you’ve watched thus far, with little to no resolution or solid ground to step on. Fun!

So how do things pan out? Do Leila and Abbie make it out? 

Throughout the season, Alex has been in contact with Abbie, trying to help the girls escape. He leaves a car for them to use for their getaway. Abbie, Leila, and Rory (John Daniel), Abbie’s love interest, orchestrate a plan to make a break for it. Surprisingly, it works, and they make it to downtown Tall Pines. However, Leila, convinced by Evelyn’s manipulation that the school can help her with her struggles, decides to stay. Soon after, Rory sacrifices himself to create a distraction so that Abbie can get away undetected, leaving Abbie to find the getaway car and speed away, alone.

Wait, what?! That’s so sad! I thought they’d stay together until the end. And poor Rory! So what happens to Alex and Laura?

Evelyn kidnaps Alex to leap him while Laura goes into labor.

What?!

But don’t worry—Alex escapes!

Throughout the season, Evelyn’s first in command, a former student named—yes, really—Rabbit (Tattiawna Jones) has been gradually souring on the idea of Evelyn as supreme leader. So when Evelyn takes Alex to leap him, Rabbit steps in and injects Evelyn with a dose of the psychedelic meant for Alex. Evelyn starts to metaphysically share a body with Laura, experiencing Laura’s labor pains while still remaining with Rabbit and Alex in the school’s torture dungeon.

And the show definitely explains what all of this metaphysical spirit–body swapping is about, right? … Right?

Of course not! Though the series has likely since the start been leading up to some sort of supernatural occurrence with Evelyn—an assumption on my part supported by nothing more than her vibe, the woo-woo-ness of the town, and the way these shows tend to go—this is still a left turn. Up until these final moments, everything about the show’s plot could be logically explained away. (Take the brainwashing of the students who then become townies. They were heavily medicated when Evelyn began to convince them of things that may or may not have been true!) This, though, is the first time something truly inexplicable has happened. It’s a surprising, and not necessarily fitting, change.

… OK, random. What happens next?

Alex stabs Evelyn with the remaining dose of the psychedelic, an amount that might be enough to kill her. He then rushes back to the house to be present for the birth of the baby.

What happens with Evelyn? Does she die? Does she get reincarnated as Laura’s baby? 

As Laura is finishing up delivering her baby, Evelyn enters a sort of trance in which her consciousness separates from her body while Rabbit recites the mantra—essentially, Evelyn is getting leaped. She is seemingly tortured by the mantra. She confronts herself standing in front of a door, with her mouth open wide and another door at the back of her throat. But when she reaches inside to open it, she is confronted with more doors and more visions of herself to reach through. In the end, Evelyn stares at the ceiling, blank-faced. It is unclear whether she has died.

Ah! So that ties up everything with Laura and Evelyn—

Sorry to break it to you, but no, not really. After the baby is born, Laura says that they need to do skin-to-skin contact with the infant. So Alex takes his shirt off to hold the baby to his chest, but so does … everyone else in the room, seemingly all the residents of Tall Pines. They each take turns holding the newborn while shirtless, much to Alex’s dismay. “It’s everyone’s. It’s the only way we break the pattern,” Laura explains. Alex is noticeably disturbed by this.

If a whole bunch of shirtless people wanted to cuddle my newborn, I would become very hostile very quickly. So, uh, getting back to Abbie: She has actually made it to the getaway car?

Yes! But … she’s not alone. Alex, baby in tow, has reached the car. He tells Abbie that she’s not a bad kid and she’ll be OK. However, it turns out that this is just a dream.

We still do that in 2025?

Instead of the nice ending in which Alex, Abbie, and the baby ride off together into the darkness, a horrified Alex instead has decided to stay with Laura in Tall Pines, closing the door to potential freedom. Abbie drives off into the night, away from Tall Pines, alone.

What the hell is up with the toads?! 

Toads are a prominent motif throughout the show. Alex sees one when the couple first arrive at their new home in Tall Pines, and Laura notices another when she’s struggling to build the crib and doubting her capabilities as a future mother. Characters often see or hear them when they’re struggling, doubting themselves, or confronting issues. It turns out that Evelyn’s hallucination-inducing leap drug is made from toad secretions. Don’t fuck with those.

Sorry, but I’m still having trouble adding this up. Am I the only one?

No, the ending is definitely confounding. This could be in part because the show is billed as a miniseries, but it’s clear to me that it’s angling for a second season. With no renewal announcement as of yet, we’re left to grapple with what we have. And what is it that we have, exactly? A rather confusing ending for a series that wasn’t that confusing for seven of its eight episodes. What started off as a fairly straightforward mystery ended up a quagmire of visions and dreams and out-of-body experiences. The audience is left with more questions than answers, the most trusty indicator of “Hey, can we get another season here?”

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Is this show worth seven or eight hours of my life?

Overall, Wayward is a sad story (though, notably, not at all scary in the traditional sense), and it makes a specific history of trauma (schools for troubled youths) palatable for binge-worthy consumption. The unfolding mystery, classic Netflix color grading, teen rebellion, and presence of the incredible Toni Collette all encourage viewers to keep going, even if the show ultimately seems somewhat out of place. Why make Wayward now? It’s a couple of years too late to capitalize on the trend of people finding out about these types of schools. Moreover, why cheapen the actual ill will of abusive adults with a confusing supernatural mess at the end? The answer could be simply to make these horrors watchable. But the show is at its best when it’s debunking myths of mysticism and faith, showing them to be nothing more than direct exploitation at the hands of troubled, power-hungry adults. It’s unclear whether this finale gets us closer to, or moves us further away from, that core mission.

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