Here it is, readers, viewers, graduating seniors of Ewen High, consumers using Prime to get the cheapest AAA batteries and therefore blessed with Carrie: the finale. And not the series finale, if we’re lucky, but merely the conclusion of the first season. The end of the beginning.

Speaking of which, let’s go back to the beginning of the show. We learn the filmed interviews are not for a documentary or an investigatory committee, but for far more interesting and mysterious purposes. We finally see that the woman asking the questions is indeed Kate Siegel, who, across the season, has been narrating the history of psychically powered women. Working with her behind the camera is someone named Caitlin (Delainey Hayles)—the same person who felt Carrie’s locker-room scream from who knows how far away in Episode 1. (“I just got hit hard, I mean hard. … And whoever she is: wow,” Caitlin told her…boss? Leader?) 

The interviewer tells Sue she’s not there to push back against her story. “All I wanna do is understand.” When Sue asks what she wants to know, Siegel’s character replies, “Every single thing.” She’s bringing an unsettling brew of kind, frank, and blunt. (“If it’s Vicky’s footage, you should talk to Vicky.” “Vicky’s dead, we found her tangled in the rafters.” Yikes! Take it easy!)

“I felt like I was looking at a child, like my little sister,” Sue recalls of Carrie’s first day at school. “She was fucked, I could tell right away, because she was kind.” I mentioned in my first recap that Sue’s “we were kids” dialogue was very book-accurate. Now that you’re seeing it again, go ahead and compare:

Intro complete. Back to the prom, Sue sprinting into the gym, Chris dumping several gallons of pig’s blood onto Ewen’s new prom queen, Billy giggling, an entire crowd short-circuiting — then laughing. Carrie’s dead stare. Carrie closing her eyes.

Her eyes open, and so does hell. She flicks her dripping wrist and dozens of upraised phones shatter into dozens of faces. Tina Blake’s in bad shape, confirmed when we jump to her interview. A long bandage covers half of her face; her eye’s still full of blood from the glass that flew into it. With both Sue and Tina, Siegel’s interviewer is fixated on what sensations the girls felt, what specific physical effects Carrie’s telekinesis might have conveyed. “It was a fucking nightmare, lady,” Tina says. “That’s what I remember.”

After Carrie detonates those instruments of daily torment, she looks up to see who’s behind this fresh new torture, who has — to quote Stephen King’s text — “drenched her in the very secretness of blood.” Chris and Billy bolt as Carrie tears the catwalk down, guiding it away from hitting her but lethally whomping Tommy in the face. Much more brutal than the traditional bucket-to-the-head death. Her prom king’s reign has ended. A stage light falls, conking Principal Grayle on the noggin and catching the stage’s backdrop aflame. “Stars…” Tommy murmurs as blood pours from his skull. Yes, the gym’s covered in decorative ones, but it’s also a devastating callback to the moment outside the party where he and Carrie stargazed from the grass. Sue rushes the stage to be with him.

A sprinkler goes off; Carrie stops it. As she takes in the chaos, that stone cold look has turned to panic, agony. Emaline appears with a smile. “Hey, let me help. Let me take the wheel, okay?” Carrie does. Remember Episode 5, Emaline in the cafeteria: “Do you wanna keep pretending to be one of them, or do you wanna be something better? Because you and me, we could go rogue.” Recall her very first scene: “You’re right, I’m a spy, and you’re my mission. I’m just surprised that you caught me, that’s all.”

In the book and every adaptation, Carrie’s awareness of what she’s doing is up for debate. King writes that, once she’s already commanded quite a bit of carnage, her “head throbbed thickly, and conscious thought was lost.” Summer H. Howell’s Carrie rises like a phoenix, giving us a jaw-dropping rendition of that classic image: Carrietta onstage as the backdrop turns to an inferno. 

Sue is surveying the terror when Siegel’s voice echoes in her mind: “Stop here. Look around.” Everything freezes except a confused Sue, who does as told. “You saw something behind Carrie,” the interviewer prods. “You said something in your deposition that I’d like you to clarify, about a shadow. … What did the shadow do?”

“The shadow exploded,” Sue says. A real Leo-pointing-at-TV moment for readers of the novel, which is peppered with excerpts from The Shadow Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived from the Case of Carrietta White. The human-shaped shadow sends a black shockwave across the gym, toppling tables, chaperones, students, and even the fellow telekinetics in the room. Stones begin to rain outside. Inside: folks go up in flames; Principal Grayle’s electrocuted by a thick cable, sending blue bolts of lightning hither and yon; escapes are thwarted, doors sealed shut; bloody Carrie floats down to the floor, her shoes sliding off. That moment of horror she showed when Tommy took his fatal blow? That’s gone. We might be sad to see Matthew Lillard go out like that, but she’s not. She strolls toward the doors, flinging peers and chaperones through the air without moving a finger. The bleachers look like a dragon belched fire. 

The lovely, blameless Miss Desjardin tries to get a hold of Carrie just as Amanda fires a pistol at her. Carrie whips around and sends Amanda flying — but Rita as well, launched a hundred feet through the air, straight into the burning stage. RIP to a real one, dispensed of unceremoniously. Applause for Amber Midthunder’s work — you’re the best Miss D we’ve ever seen. The slightest look of doubt crosses Carrie’s face, enough to lose her focus on keeping the doors shut. A handful of people escape; Carrie follows, closing the doors again, trapping the final batch of victims. The sprinklers gush, the floor floods, a live cable inevitably touches down, and dozens of kids and a few grown-ups, dressed in their best, jitter and jolt in their final dance as Carrie watches impassively from safe ground. Two of three mystery-telekinetics — when did Caitlin appear? — save themselves by jumping on a table; the third doesn’t make it off the floor in time. Sue’s safe on the stage, frozen by the scale of death before her.

Back in the interview, we get Sue’s line that closed the premiere, about how it “wasn’t just Carrie,” how nobody’s asking about “the other people who were there, the strangers.” Now we see her interviewer’s follow-up, as a new coldness comes over her. “You’re not sure, though, are you? I’d say if you really think about it, you’re not sure that you saw anyone else there at all.” Her voice turns hypnotic, something happens to Sue’s face, and we understand this woman’s got a secret agenda: she’s mopping up, nipping loose ends. Go back to Tina’s interview — was her memory being altered at the end, too?

Prom night again: Billy and Chris pull over after making their escape. It’s dawning on her that they set off a nuclear bomb. Billy’s rattled for the first time ever, and crying. “They fucking deserved it. All of ’em,” he rationalizes. And here’s Carrie walking down the road. Billy makes his canonically required attempt to run her down; she plays her part by flinging the car off the road, although Chris made an attempt to grab the wheel and veer away. The yellow losermobile rolls and rolls, just like it did in theaters in 1976, even down to the shot of Chris and Billy spinning inside. Carrie walks up; Emaline emerges to spit, “Good. Fucking karma.” She sneers at Billy’s death cries and Carrie flattens him under the roof. Now there’s only Chris. She gets as far as “I’m s—” before she’s pancaked too.

And this, the murder of her tormentor, the death of Carrie Red, brings Carrie White back to herself, gasping, screaming no, no, no. Emaline can’t abide this. “You did nothing wrong, okay? Nothing. … All you wanted was to exist. Say it: I exist. Get up. Say fuck you, I exist.” Carrie embraces it. And here, one of the show’s biggest capital-C Choices: Emaline invites Carrie to dance. It’s the last of many Haute & Fredy needle drops, “Shy Girl,” and the girls jump and twirl down the blazing streets of Chamberlain. It’s an actual music video — they’re singing along: “It’s staring you in the eyes every night/You wanna kiss it all goodbye/And just live your life/Stop pretending you’re a shy, shy, shy, shy girl/When you gonna run the wholе wide world?/I do recall therе was madness in your eyes/Let it come out tonight.” (The Newman Brothers have been using the “Shy Girl” melody in their score across the season.)

Like I said, it’s a big swing, and chances are 50/50, at best, that you didn’t like it. What I’ll offer is that in the book, a witness says there was joy — of a sort — on Carrie’s face: “She was wearing some kind of party dress, what was left of it, and she was all wet from that hydrant and covered with blood. … But she was grinning. I never saw such a grin. It was like a death’s head.”

A gunshot, provenance unknown, abruptly turns Emaline to smoke. She’s gone, the dance is done, Carrie looks lost again as she surveys the apocalyptic scene. (On a movie marquee: “Brian De Palma Retrospective in 35mm.”) A crack runs down the asphalt; a sinkhole opens; Carrie heads home. Her neighbor Stella implores her to evacuate. All Carrie can do is dazedly thank her for the books.

Margaret, who heard the destruction from her front yard, is waiting at the table with some knitting. She’s definitely been mulling Amanda’s words: “The key is to make sure they don’t have a chance to retaliate. … But if your hand shakes, if you hesitate, if it doesn’t put them down, anything that gives them just the slightest bit of consciousness, they can kill you with a thought.” There’s so much woven into Margaret’s final embrace of Carrie. She sponge-bathes her shell-shocked child, mulling Carrie’s end while reminiscing on her beginning. “Your first night in this world, I cleaned the blood from your brand new little self.” 

Now it’s time to pray, though Margaret’s still got some storytime left in her, remembering Carrie as “my little shadow” and “so pure, so innocent and unspoiled.” Carrie asks if she can even receive the lord’s forgiveness after tonight. Margaret assures her — somewhat. “And if he can’t, well, I forgive you.” Margaret asks for and receives Carrie’s own forgiveness. Begs her to repeat it. (Career-best work from Samantha Sloyan here.) Then goes to ram a knitting needle straight into her brain. Carrie senses it at the last millisecond and flings the murder weapon away. Margaret doesn’t miss a beat, grabbing heavy scissors off the table and pounding them into Carrie’s shoulder. Carrie hurls Momma across the room, then sends the scissors into her back. “Why?!” Carrie screams. The knife block is right there, and we all know how Margaret got taken out in the original film. But as soon as Margaret grabs one, a desolate Carrie brings the roof down on their heads.

And here’s the reason Flanagan & Co. have made headlines talking about multiple seasons of Carrie: our girl ain’t dead. (Heather Graham actually tipped their hand way back in March, for some reason.) Margaret’s not finished either. She’s discovered her own telekinetic power and is using it to stop a chunk of the house from crushing her. Carrie crawls from the rubble in time to witness it, and to see Margaret’s strength give out. Carrie collapses on her back, the stars winking at her amid the smoke. She flashes back to a time when she and her father watched the night sky from the grass. She’s ready to let go, even when Emaline shows up to rescue her. “Let me die,” Carrie begs. No such luck, as her non-imaginary friend bundles her into a car. 

Margaret witnesses this, survives the whole ordeal, and sits down for her own interview, bruised and bloodied. Margaret and the interviewer — who IMDb and Flanagan have confirmed is named Adelaide — spar over Emaline’s identity and whereabouts. Margaret is told that Carrie is “alive, certainly — I guess that’s not the same thing as safe.” Asked if she has children, Adelaide says “in a way.” It’s all riling Margaret up. Pressed about whether Emaline’s dangerous, she gets an affirmative. “Yes. She’s an AP. Astral projector,” Adelaide confides. Margaret’s got her work cut out for her and heads to leave. The interviewer’s abilities, hinted at with Sue, are fully declared: she forces Margaret to sit back down.

Adelaide wants to know if Margaret ever displayed powers before prom night. She remembers making a cross move as a child, though she “thought it was God.” Adelaide gives us a crash course on “the TK gene,” discussed at several points in the novel, “primarily dormant and recessive.” She tells the story of the mother and the car, the exact lines we heard in Episode 2, and wants to know if Margaret could tap into her ability again. She says no.

“It’s fine,” Adelaide tells Margaret. “Lot of people have a little bit of shine and they don’t even know it.” Dun dun dunnn — the shine! When Margaret begins to weep and express how she only wanted the best for her daughter, she’s told, “You could have never, ever given her what she needs. But you have a good heart. You have a good, fine heart.”

And here’s our book-accurate Margaret death: a slow, telekinetic-stopping of the heart, only at the hands of the interviewer instead of Carrie’s. She uses almost all of Book-Carrie’s words — “I’m going to give you a present” — building to “what you’ve always wanted, Margaret: darkness. And whatever God lives there.” Ending on, “Full stop.” Only one prior adaptation, the 2002 TV movie with Patricia Clarkson as a far too subdued Margaret, took this coronary-shutdown route. (Siegel also mentioned a telekinetic stopping a frog’s heart in Episode 3.)

Joining the party are those other superpowered ladies we’ve seen. Ruth Codd evidently lost a leg in the prom catastrophe by failing to get off the floor in time. They’re told to bring the body back to a hotel, where someone will deduce that “Margaret White died in her sleep.”

Our final scene: Carrie wakes on the open road, in a car with Emaline, patched up and confused. Emaline says the knitting needle “barely got in” her ear, and reveals she’s a fellow member of the Parent Tried to Kill Me club. (Way back in Episode 5: “I don’t really fuck with parents, they don’t like me. Even my own.”) It feels like Amanda is her mom. Carrie chafes at Emaline’s refusal to answer some simple questions. “Ideally, if I don’t tell you, it means that you can’t think it, which is good, in case anyone is tracking you.” 

“Why does everybody treat me like I can’t handle a single thing?” Carrie seethes.

Emaline thinks quite the opposite:

“You’re a god. You’re a fucking hurricane. And I am not stealing you away, or keeping you in the dark. I am escorting you to safety, from the monsters on our heels, and it is my fucking honor. Who am I? I am your friend. And where are we? That’s the world. That’s what you always wanted, right? And it belongs to you, Carrie. And I know that you feel guilty, and we’re gonna work on that, too, because you didn’t break anything but shackles.”

Carrie: “It’s my world?” Then again, as a statement. Asked where she wants to go, she smiles, the same way she did when the outside world opened the door to that darkened prayer closet and asked her name. 

Odds & Ends

• Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, titled “AP Physics.” Took me a while to realize that’s a reference to Emaline being an astral projector, or “an AP,” per Adelaide. (Wild to me that the interviewer has this cool name and it’s never revealed on the show itself.)
• On the astral projection tip: Flanafans are in relative agreement that the sickest sequence in Doctor Sleep is when Rebecca Ferguson’s Rose the Hat astral projects to spy on Abra. (It’s me, I’m the Flanafan.)

• The team spent 10 days shooting the prom. “For Fimognari and I, it’s the most elaborate and difficult technical sequence of our careers,” Flanagan said, referring to his go-to cinematographer since 2013’s Oculus, Michael Fimognari.
• When was Adelaide conducting these interviews, what was the pitch, how’d she get people in front of a camera so soon? Tina and Margaret look like they’ve only been out of the hospital for a couple days.

Stephen King Trivia Corner

• Kate Siegel’s wearing King’s most-written-about garment: the blue chambray shirt.
• The final scene surprisingly follows in the footsteps of Bryan Fuller’s 2002 rendition: Carrie fleeing Chamberlain, riding shotgun next to her rescuer. In that case it was Sue Snell, and the notion was to make the TV movie a backdoor pilot for a show following the girls’ continuing adventures. Flanagan told Collider, “In my dream scenario, I think it’s three seasons. In my dream scenario, I think Carrie has a wonderful three-step arc. It’s a trilogy, really.” 
• While Carrie will have her own brand-new adventures we know nothing about, she’s also bound to be—already is—on the road to Flanagan’s gestating The Dark Tower adaptation. I wrote a whole lot about that for you here, if you want to dig into questions like: What role could she, and Adelaide, play in the Tower mythos? What’s that mansion from the premiere? What are Breakers?
• Many of Flanagan’s radical changes are in keeping with the spirit of the novel. “Carrie ends in two ways. The epilogue implies the beginning of a new cycle of events, in which it could all happen again,” Tabitha King wrote in her intro to the 1991 edition of Carrie. (Thank you Julia Kastner for supplying me with that artifact.) The novel’s last passage is from a woman writing a letter about her telekinetic 2-year-old, ending with, “I bet she’ll be a world-beeter someday.”
• Something no adaptation has ever honored, including this one: Carrie walks outside right after getting blood-bucketed at prom, collects herself a bit, and decides to go back in and turn on the sprinklers as a funny, harmless way to get back at her peers and bullies…at first.
• Margaret’s grandmother was telekinetic in the book:

Emaline wondered in Episode 5, when Carrie wonders how Margaret knows what she’s up to: “Maybe that’s her power. Holy shit, do you think it runs in the family?”

• Re: Emaline’s “You are a god.” On Book-Carrie’s walk home, she enters a church, prays to God, and is shaken to think, “No one was there—or if there was, He/It was cowering from her.” In an earlier draft, detailed by Caroline Bicks in Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King, she took the night’s events to mean that she wasn’t a god, but the God:

Another line that King cut? Carrie thinking, during the prom mayhem, “I AM GOD.”

Hell of a season of TV. Thank you for reading, I hope you had fun. Long days and pleasant nights to you and yours.

Zach Dionne writes Decider’s Streamin’ King column and makes King things on Patreon, including The Dark Tower Mixtape.