Mare of Easttown Ending Explained: All the clues left by the series to discover the surprising murderer

Mare of Easttown Ending Explained: Have you been surprised by the latest episode of the series starring the titanic Kate Winslet? We tell you how its creator, Brad Ingelsby, has left everything tied and well-tied chapter by chapter.

[This article contains ALL Mare of Easttown spoilers that you should avoid if you haven’t started watching the series]

Did the ending of Mare of Easttown really throw you off? Or rather, deep down, did you know that the breakdown of innocence is one of the fundamental themes that run through the HBO miniseries?

The penultimate episode ended up generating serious doubts about the responsibility of the crime on the part of the poor devil with the filthy cap and the watery gaze, Billy Ross. But we were not fully conquered by the theory that his brother John bore the full burden (and motive) of the Erin McMenamin murder.

Rather, what our bearded cheater carried was with the full weight of guilt. Ay, the ‘guilt’ … and this fraternal struggle with the aftertaste of Cain and Abel … The references to the Catholic imagination come from under the stones in this fiction and are not exclusively anchored in the moments where the Eucharist is present as a unifying force for the community. The sacrament is precisely the title that this latest episode receives, which has finally given us the first and last name of the person who pulled the trigger, clumsily and with his soul shattered, trying to silence the familiar demons.

John and Lori’s eldest son, Ryan Ross, was the one who killed Erin with the Colt Detective Special who was in Glen Carroll’s shed, whom the boy cut the lawn every summer. Such a shocking reality to which, despite the signs, we have been clinging to disbelief. Perhaps unconsciously. To paraphrase Narciso Ibáñez Serrador: ‘Who can accuse a child (of murder)?’

Dosing the information that the viewers have been receiving throughout the series, playing with elegance to the distraction but without falling into too fuller strategies, is one of the keys that has turned Mare of Easttown into an unstoppable phenomenon week after week, returning to serial fiction the “pregnancy” (as Daniel de Partearroyo points out in this great analysis ) of its classic structure: allowing fans to play whodunit to the point of absurdity, savor each plot twist and experience each chapter of each episode with an almost nostalgic emotion. this tragedy about filial redemption from adult sins. A series that leaves a mark, without the need to become a cult reference or a generational hymn.

Mare of Easttown Ending Explained

Following the breadcrumbs in the middle of the forest …

In a recent interview with Slate, the creator of the series who has once again given Kate Winslet a well-deserved place in the serial universe recognized that one of the great challenges when it comes to putting the pieces of the puzzle together was, precisely, to deliver small pieces to the audience at the right moments: getting the viewers to know the character well enough to empathize with him and have him on their radar; maintaining a complex balance between not falling short or going overboard, given that either of these two extremes could wreck this police thriller with the pathological duel as an ulcer in the heart of its protagonist.

The clues have always been there, since the first episode, but perhaps the conclusion was too painful to face. In the words of a broken Lori Ross, (another unforgettable female face, the one Julianne Nicholson manages to inject us with ), Ryan “doesn’t even know how to pick up a gun.”

The meeting with Ryan in Mare of Easttown Ending Explained

Already in the first episode, the sequence that acts as a presentation of the character (it does not seem at all accidental that the first time we see Ryan on the screen is in an encounter with Mare) provides us with information that is as valuable as it is delicate. An overly responsible preteen, self-sacrificing demeanor, quietly doing homework on a Friday night. “I don’t want them to accumulate.” A child who does not want the slightest disturbance of family peace, avoiding any blemish in his file. You can see in Ryan that needs to keep control of the situation.

In Erin’s homily

In the second episode, during the homily for the death of Erin, a suggestive (but excessively subtle) shot shows us Ryan’s face, quickly out of focus to give way to that of his sister Moira and his mother later. We sense a slight emotional fracture in Ryan, unable to keep his gaze straight ahead.

News reports of Erin’s death

But it is in the fourth episode when a scene catches us and exerts a magnetism in us that, a priori, seems inexplicable to us. John and Lori are watching the news, where there is talk of the new disappearance of a young woman in the area, Missy Sager, which brings to three the number of teenage victims of some type of tragedy in the area. Of course, the name and image of the murdered Erin McMenamin appear on the screen. John’s look and body attitude are extremely suspicious. But then Ryan shows up in the room. And one shot upsets us slightly: something in this sequence (his own formal conception) tells us that Ryan has something darker inside him than a healthy concern for the safety of the young women of Easttown.

It’s our secret

The fifth episode, without a doubt, gives us several fundamental pieces of the gear. The first takes place at the beginning when Lori inadvertently overhears a suspicious conversation between her husband and their son: “It’s our secret, okay? Only ours. ”

The second we will find in the sequence of the school cafeteria when we reveal something that goes far beyond an older brother defending his little sister with Down syndrome. Ryan’s cruelty, a clean ‘tray’ against the bully who insults and vexes Moira, is a tremendously revealing explosion of violence. Ryan is a young man who hides and represses too many secrets, in a desperate rush to keep his family together, and who ends up exploding in anger.

But the creator and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby does not limit himself to giving us this moment (nor does he end up playing with the ambiguity here). Right after the incident, Lori picks up Ryan, who ends up shedding tears when his mother asks him about that “secret” that his father has asked him to keep: “Is your father doing it again?” “Is it with the same woman from the other time?”

Finally, at home and with a devastated Lori in another room, John tries to reassure his son: “Ryan, this is all my fault, and I’m going to fix it, I promise you. You just hang on, ok? ”

Ryan worried in the presence of Mare

Episode 6 briefly showed us a worried Ryan in the presence of Mare at his house to talk to his mother. But with the weight of the plot over John and Billy Ross’s haunting fishing trip, our senses were anesthetized to perceive nothing beyond.

Until episode seven exploded in our noses, closing the circle not only of the Ross family tragedy but intimately connecting the characters of Lori and Mare through the feeling of loss of their children. And finally allowing Mare to begin to digest the duel that for so many years has remained entrenched in his throat.

Guilt, redemption, forgiveness, reconciliation…. References to the narrative of Catholicism are underlined with an emphasis in this final touch (of course, the Eucharist, as a fundamental ‘sacrament’, had to be present), where a beam of healing light seems to sneak into Mare’s home and into her community.

Mare can, at last, go back up to the attic