‘We Were Liars' Season 1 Ending Explained
Those who read E. Lockhart's sensational novel We Were Liars before it was adapted by Julie Plec for Prime Video are probably feeling pretty smug right now. The show, just like its source material, is keeping a major secret that isn't revealed until mid-way through the final episode. If you haven't read the book and are feeling majorly WTF, or want to skip to the proverbial last page and get spoiled, here's what you need to know about the ending of We Were Liars.
At the beginning of the season, seventeen year old Cadence Sinclair, played by Emily Alyn Lind, returns to her family's private island after sustaining a head injury and post-traumatic amnesia the previous year. Cadence has been struggling to remember what happened during Summer 16–the label that "the liars" she and her cousin Mirren, her cousin Johnny, and her boyfriend (and Johnny's future stepbrother) Gat give to the summer when they were all sixteen years old. She thinks that returning to the island will jog her memory, but everything feels off.
Why did her grandfather rebuild their island mansion into an early modern monstrosity? Why didn't her cousins or Gat call her all year while she was recovering? Her mother tells her that every time anyone tells her what happened, she has a mental episode, blacks out and forgets again. This feels a bit convenient, given that the Sinclair family way is to pretend that bad things never happened. In the We Were Liars finale, Cadence works with her cousins and Gat to remember what happened without triggering herself so bad that she forgets it all over again. Leading into the finale, Cadence remembers one key thing: fire.
In the penultimate episode, Cadence at least remembers that the liars burned down Clairmont, the family mansion, as a symbolic "fuck you" to decades of family rivalry and expectations. They decide that the Sinclairs need a clean slate. The four liars thought they had a good plan. They split up spreading boat fuel around the house. Gat prepares a getaway vehicle. They were all supposed to light their matches and run out of the house at the stroke of midnight. But the drunk, wealthy teenagers made some crucial, and deadly miscalculations.
The first thing that Cadence remembers is that all four of them forgot that there were two drugged-up dogs sleeping in the basement!! The moment Cadence, who was on the ground floor, ran outside she heard their cries. She heads back inside to get them, and sustained a head injury, but it was too late. She ran back outside, bleeding and burning.
Cadence demands that Johnny, Gat, and Mirren tell her the rest. What else didn't go to plan? They didn't think about how fast fire spreads and smoke rises. Creating a safe exit by avoiding the main staircase was not enough. Mirren hesitated to save one of her paintings that her mom kept–proving to her in that moment that her mom really did care about her. Johnny hesitated looking at childhood photos and smashing things with a golf club. They were trapped. When nobody showed up, Gat left the boat and followed them inside the burning house.
They also forgot about the gas main line. Once the fire spread far enough to hit it, the house exploded. This is what catapulted Cadence into the ocean where she was found. She was the only survivor. Gat, Johnny, Mirren, and the dogs all died in the fire.
Yup! For all of the Summer 17 timeline, a.k.a. the scenes where Cadence has brown hair, she has been talking and hanging out and arguing with their ghosts. You may have noticed throughout that while they might try to talk to the rest of them family, nobody else talks to them or sees them. In the final episode, it becomes more and more apparent that they're not just ghosts they like... represent Cadence's trauma and suppressed memories.
They are ghosts, though, and ghosts who were afraid of moving on once Cadence didn't need them anymore. So they do it together. They hold hands, jump off the dock, and vanish...
One of the final things that Cadence remembers about Summer 16 is that, before she ran out of the house, she hesitated too. Greed took over and she ran upstairs to steal her grandmother's black pearl necklace. She thinks this is why Gat didn't see her outside when they planned and ran into the fire. She blames herself for his death. Ghost Gat absolves her of that guilt. He could have saved himself. He also went against the plan. (Since Cadence ran back inside the house seconds later for the dogs, I personally don't think running upstairs made a huge difference. Gat would have seen her go back inside. He would have seen that Johnny and Mirren didn't make it out and gone to help regardless. Speaking of the dogs, that's the guilt she should be feeling. The four liars made some stupid mistakes that got them killed–the dogs didn't do anything! Go apologize to their ghosts!!)
Harris, who somehow escaped the hospital and found Cadence on the beach, kind of softly blackmails his granddaughter. He knows that she's guilty of arson, animal cruelty, and involuntary manslaughter. He urges her to tell the version of the story he has been telling for a year: the fire was an accident and Cadence got hurt trying to save the others. Keeping her family's horrible secrets is her burden now. At the end of the show, Harris asks Cadence to talk to a reporter doing a profile on their family, played by We Were Liars author E. Lockhart herself. Cadence refuses, telling Harris and the family that she's not interested in fairy tales anymore, and takes off in a boat by herself. She tosses Tipper's necklace into the ocean like it's Titanic. This is a triumphant moment and all; I'm so happy that Cadence came to that realization, but... surely that doesn't mean she's going to turn herself in to the police, or come clean to her mom, Ed, and her aunts about how the other liars died? It's fair to assume that Harris won't actually do it himself and voluntarily hurt his legacy like that. But Cadence is experiencing a moment of freedom at the end of We Were Liars, not a lifetime of it. She's ultimately trapped too.
The We Were Liars finale leaves things open for at least one other season in two different ways. In one of the rare moments we see the Sinclair sisters actually deal with the loss of their children, Bess tells Carrie that she thinks the fire was punishment for what happened on her Summer 16 when they were teenagers. Bess says that there's just one caveat: if the Sinclair sisters are being punished for what they did, why was Penny spared? Mysterious! (There is a prequel novel, titled Family of Liars, that was published in 2022...)
Then, in an even more harrowing moment, we see Carrie secretly take pills while packing up to leave the island. She's off the wagon and hiding it from Ed. She can also see Johnny's ghost, who tells her he can't leave just yet. The way she says "I thought you'd left" lowkey implies that she's been seeing his ghost, like Cadence, the whole time during Summer 17 too. That's enough unfinished business for a We Were Liars Season 2, don't you think?
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