Breaking Down the Big Questions From the <i>Wayward</i> Finale

Spoilers below.

There’s something weird happening in Tall Pines, Vermont. Of course, you could have figured that out just from watching the trailer for the new Netflix drama Wayward, let alone the limited series’ eight-episode run. Set in 2003, the show follows police officer Alex Dempsey (Mae Martin) and his pregnant wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon), as they move to the idyllic New England town where Laura once attended a corrective academic institution named Tall Pines Academy. The storied school for “wayward” teenagers is (and was) run by its legendary founder, Evelyn (Toni Collette), whose unorthodox “therapeutic” methods seem to have coaxed the entire town under her thumb. But as Alex begins to investigate what’s really going on at the charismatic leader’s Academy, he starts to realize that neither he nor his wife will escape Evelyn’s orbit unscathed.

Meanwhile, teenagers Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) and Abbie (Sydney Topliffe) find themselves unexpected (and unwilling) students at Tall Pines, where they plot an escape ahead of Leila’s so-called “Leap”: a treatment milestone in which Evelyn uses psychedelics (drawn from toad venom) to “cauterize” children’s trauma and emotional pain. The harrowing process involves a baptism-like drug trip in Tall Pines’ watery basement level. There, Evelyn uses the drugs, the water, and the projection of a door to (somehow) sever students’ emotional attachment to their parents—who, in Evelyn’s estimation, are the root cause of all children’s trauma. But destroying this connection between child and caregiver also destroys that child’s chance to develop deep bonds with their own children...thus why Alex’s wife, Laura, struggles to feel anything for her unborn baby.

In the finale episode, Leila and Abbie evade Leila’s “Leap” and successfully escape Tall Pines, while Alex and Laura evade Evelyn to successfully deliver their baby. But these triumphs aren’t without twists—or significant emotional toll. As Martin told Netflix’s Tudum in a post-finale interview, “I like the moral ambiguity and gray area of the finale. I hope people feel satisfied that they watched a really messed-up kind of fairy tale.”

Below, let’s break down some of the major remaining questions after that cliffhanger ending.

After fleeing the actual Academy with Abbie, Leila ultimately decides to remain in the broader town of Tall Pines. As Lind, who plays Leila, told Tudum, “Leila genuinely, deep down, believes that there’s community there for her.” The character has felt unloved and rudderless for many years of her childhood, and so the “love and unity” she feels amongst the other Tall Pines students is a significant draw. “Leila never really had that love and care [growing up],” Lind continued. “Even if it’s in a really messed-up and manipulative way, Leila is feeling those things for the first time.”

By the end of the episode, Leila is also feeling a lot of guilt...which might further clarify why she’d choose to stay within the Academy’s “healing” orbit. Having undergone significant portions of Evelyn’s “therapy,” Leila has recalled much of her past trauma, including a key moment during which her older sister, Jess, drowned in a pool on Leila’s watch.

During their sessions together, Evelyn manages to convince Leila that she pushed her sister into the pool, effectively murdering her. But Wayward leaves the truth intentionally ambiguous. It’s not ultimately clear how Jess actually died, nor do we learn which of Leila’s memories are influenced by Evelyn’s psychological conditioning. Personally, Lind seems to believe Evelyn is a liar. “I was like, ‘There’s no way that [Leila] could be at all redeemable if [she actually killed Jess],’” the actress told Tudum. “I think that it also makes it so much more messed-up that that’s what Evelyn is trying to make Leila believe happened.”

After Evelyn kidnaps Alex during the finale, it’s one of her own who ultimately betrays her. Rabbit (Tattiawna Jones), a former student and current Tall Pines employee, grows sick of her boss’s constant emotional abuse and decides to inject Evelyn with the psychedelic toad-venom “Leap” drugs rather than Alex. A newly freed Alex then sticks Evelyn with a needle-full of the drugs several more times, prompting Rabbit to shout, “That’s too much!”

Within moments, Evelyn drops into a subconscious fugue state, hallucinating a mirror version of herself and, in her own mouth, a progressing series of green doors. When the doors only lead to more and more endless doors, Evelyn realizes the mental trap in which she’s discovered herself, and she breaks down in tears.

So, is she dying? Or dead already? Martin initially told Tudum they would “let the viewers decide,” but in a separate interview with Variety, they confirmed that the school leader is “a vegetable.” Martin continued, “I’d be curious to see if she could ever come out of [the coma], but she’s definitely a vegetable.”

As for the symbolism of the doors, the actor-creator added, “Hopefully, that’s a memorable image that stays with people. It’s all about cycles and generations and looking internally. What she’s expecting to be on the other side of that door is total freedom and relief and euphoria. Of course, she’s just trapped in a sort of purgatorial hell of loneliness when you sever all attachment.”

Once Alex escapes Evelyn’s baptism-dungeon, he makes a run for home, where he knows Laura has gone into labor. When his police partner, officer Dwayne Andrews (Brandon Jay McLaren)—himself a loyal Evelyn acolyte—attempts to stop him, Alex responds by smashing his partner’s head in with a rock. (Dwayne’s death was officially confirmed by Wayward co-showrunner Ryan Scott in an interview with Variety.)

Alex makes it back to Laura in the nick of time, and Laura delivers the baby in an inflatable pool. But within moments of the infant’s arrival, Laura and Alex watch as the Tall Pines graduates surrounding them remove their shirts and bras, going topless so they each can conduct skin-to-skin contact with the newborn. “It’s everyone’s,” Laura tells Alex of their child. “It’s the only way to break the pattern.”

So, uh...what is that all about? Martin confirmed that the scene is intended as both a moment of “horror” for Alex and a confirmation that Laura is slipping into Evelyn’s cult-y tendencies. Alex “is realizing his life is not going to be the way he imagined—that he’s not going to have that nuclear family,” Martin told Tudum. “That’s such an important and emotional moment that everybody talks about when your baby’s born, and you’re connecting with it. So to have that taken away, he’s horrified.”

In the separate interview with Variety, Martin also added, “I think it’s such a jarring image and so deeply icky that he instantly knows he’s made a huge mistake. He’s so desperate for all those rites of passage of fatherhood and all the moments, but he doesn’t get to cut the umbilical cord and things like that. So tragic.”

It’s unclear. For the first handful of Wayward episodes, the audience believes what Laura herself believes about her long-lost parents: that they either abandoned her at Tall Pines as a child and never returned, or that they disappeared under mysterious circumstances soon after her drop-off. But Alex eventually discovers that, at one point, Laura’s parents actually tried to rescue their daughter from Tall Pines. The mystery around their death is only complicated further when we watch Laura take a swim in a pond near her house, where she sees her parents’ missing vehicle lurking in the water’s shadowy depths.

By the end of the finale, there seem to be two possibilities for what actually happened to Laura’s folks. One is that Evelyn herself killed Laura’s parents, either murdering them and hiding the car in the pond or driving them off the road. The other is that Laura killed her parents. This is the version of events that Evelyn wants Alex to believe. As the Academy leader slips into her psychedelic trance in the finale, Evelyn tells Alex that Laura murdered her parents with a rock (not unlike the one Alex used on Dwayne) and that Evelyn helped cover up the crime. In the traumatic aftermath, she then “Leaped” Laura, forever disconnecting the teenager’s emotional bond with her now-deceased parents.

Wayward doesn’t give us a straightforward answer in the end. And unless there’s a second season of the limited series, audiences might never learn what really happened. As Martin told Tudum, “I hope that people talk about it after they watch the show and maybe there will be some debate about how honest Evelyn is being.”

Ultimately, like Leila, Alex chooses to stay with his wife and baby—to stay in Tall Pines. He briefly envisions a fantasy sequence in which he escapes the creepy little town with Abbie, but this alternate future soon evaporates, revealing Alex as he (literally) shuts the door on any chance of escape.

“Alex stays because he cares more about his fantasy of this nuclear family and heteronormative life than he does about his moral compass,” Martin told Tudum. “He thinks he can turn things around. But I think it’s mainly that he just loves Laura.”

Short answer? Yes. Long answer? It’s complicated. Over the course of the last few episodes of Wayward, Laura begins to demonstrate many of the same practices and attitudes that she condemns in Evelyn. She accumulates a flock of ardent followers amongst fellow Tall Pines graduates, instructing them to help her build a new future for Tall Pines. “Laura is really in danger of going the same route as Evelyn, drunk on power,” Martin told Tudum. “But, like all cult leaders, Laura truly believes that she would do it differently. That she has empathy and wants the best for this community that she loves so much.”

Gadon, who plays Laura, added in the same interview: “Laura sees the potential of what a place like Tall Pines can really be. And I think she’s really trying to save it.’ But she’s so in it that when you zoom out, you’re like, ‘Honey, you’ve lost the plot.’”

In a separate conversation with Variety, Martin said that Laura’s newfound leadership is intended as a “solution” to the trauma Evelyn inflicted upon her graduates. They explained: “As Laura realizes what’s happened to her and that she has had this abuse enacted on her and been drugged and all of these things, it was important to us that she didn’t fall apart or say, “Well, what do we do?” She has a solution, and it’s rising to power and taking Evelyn down.”

Only Abbie escapes Tall Pines...and hopefully for good. Although Leila and Alex choose to remain in the town—and the other Academy students are forced to stay within the school’s walls—Abbie takes the wheel and drives like hell past the city limits.

Topliffe, who plays Abbie, confessed to Tudum that she isn’t certain where Abbie is headed. But the actress hopes some real therapy is in the teenager’s future. “Abbie has so many loose ends still attached to the school,” Topliffe told the outlet. “She’s smart and might be like, ‘Maybe I should get some help.’”

That remains to be seen. Martin seems satisfied with a short and finite run for the drama, having told Variety, “Hopefully it works as a mini-series.” Still, the creator-actor hasn’t ruled out a second chapter. They continued, joking, “It’s also obviously fun to imagine what would happen [next]. But I feel like the FBI would be in there pretty fast. There are so many dead people now.” What we don’t know is if any of those dead people include Evelyn or Laura’s parents! For that reason alone, perhaps we’ll need a trip back to Tall Pines for further digging.