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This article contains spoilers for His & Hers.
Netflix’s latest thriller series, His & Hers, has one hell of a final twist. Based on Alice Feeney’s 2020 novel of the same name, the adaptation has received mixed reviews from critics, but it’s hard not to be impressed by its shocking ending, which arrives after everything in the story seems to be tied up in a neat bow.
The show has, until that point, hit all the main beats of a standard whodunit. We’ve been following Detective Jack Harper (Jon Bernthal) as he investigates the murders of several local women while trying not to implicate himself in the crimes. His estranged wife Anna (Tessa Thompson) has been hiding a secret from him for a long time: a traumatic event from her childhood that seems to have kick-started the killer’s motivations, as she and the victims were part of the same friend group at school.
Anna’s voice narrates the start of each episode, unraveling these motivations rather obliquely. It’s a weird narration, though. Anna is a TV news reporter, but her narration seems more like a diary entry or a letter. Definitely not the kind of script you would expect to accompany a news report on the murders. This narration, it turns out, is sewing the seeds of the show’s final twist.
His & Hers Ending Explained
It’s revealed that the murder victims – Rachel, Helen, and Zoe – once conspired to lead Anna and another girl, Catherine, into the woods on Anna’s 16th birthday. Unbeknownst to them, the trio had sent photos of Anna and Catherine to a group of men, who appeared from the trees and attacked Catherine. Now grown up and having changed her name and looks, Catherine seems to be hell-bent on vengeance. We also find out that she cruelly killed her own sister at one point in response to some family bullying.
A showdown between Anna, Catherine (now Lexy), Jack, and his partner Priya leaves Lexy dead. We then jump forward a year, where we see that Jack and Anna have healed their broken relationship and Anna is pregnant. They have adopted Zoe’s baby, and Anna is discussing million-dollar contracts at work. Everything seems to have worked out well since the town of Dahlonega, Georgia, disposed of its pesky serial killer!
Except it didn’t. The killer is very much still at large, and we’ve been utterly fooled. As Anna roams her childhood home, taking in bittersweet memories, she finds a letter in her room. She begins reading it, and we hear the familiar narration from previous episodes. It’s immediately confusing. Anna wouldn’t have written herself a letter to read, would she?
As we hear the words written on the pages, the narrating voice suddenly changes from Anna’s to her mother’s. This is Alice’s confession. We discover that when Anna fled Dahlonega following the crib death of her baby, Alice was lost in grief and didn’t know how to find her. She started watching old videotapes of Anna, which soothed her while Anna was away.
The final videotape showed the full incident that took place in the woods on Anna’s 16th birthday, which we’d only partly witnessed. Alice saw Catherine actually escape the men’s attack that night, but Anna was not so lucky. It’s revealed that Anna was raped, and it was all caught on camera. Alice decided to kill the girls responsible for luring Anna into the attack, pretending to be suffering from dementia so that no one would suspect her of the crimes. She admits that Lexy’s death wasn’t part of the plan, though. She’d hoped that Lexy would just take the fall and go to jail, since she had only abandoned Anna in the woods and not been part of setting up the attack all those years ago.
At first, Anna seems horrified by these revelations, but then she looks over at her mother and smiles, seemingly appreciative of her mother’s love, protection, and vengeance.
A Shocking Twist That Packs a Punch
Unless you’d read the book that the series is based on, it would be very hard to see this ludicrous twist coming.
The six-episode show has a few suspects to direct our suspicion at before its final installment, including Jack, who had been having an affair with the first victim, Rachel. Rachel’s husband seemed to be involved in her death at one point. Richard, Anna’s cameraman, also seemed sus. But poor Alice, whose dementia symptoms seem to be escalating rapidly, is never anything but a sad subplot in Anna’s life until those final moments.
Though the twist is certainly shocking and unexpected, you may have felt quite short-changed without it. The rest of the new Netflix show is watchable but middling, with Jack and Anna’s central loss deferred until they finally decide to talk, and other characters feeling quite two-dimensional. Alice’s revelations about seeing the incident in the woods and how she responded to it are a lot to unpack in just a few minutes, while Anna’s feelings about what went down that night are never fully explored.
In fact, it takes a long time for His & Hers to be content with making its story about Anna’s trauma. Whether this seems like too little, too late, is up to you, but the final twist is so utterly shocking and preposterous that it feels worth waiting for. These days, murder-mystery shows are abundant – it honestly seems like a new one drops every few days. It’s certainly nice to have one that truly surprises us, even if the rest of its story feels a little hollow.
All six episodes of His & Hers are available to stream on Netflix now.
The post His & Hers: The Final Twist of This Netflix Show Is Worth Waiting For appeared first on Den of Geek.
