Note: Spoilers for the final episode of “The Midnight Club” Season 1 are below.
Fans of filmmaker Mike Flanagan’s other Netflix series may be shocked to learn that, when it came to the Season 1 finale of “The Midnight Club,” there were some big plot threads hanging around. In fact, it is the first series from “Hunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass” creators designed as an ongoing show rather than a limited series, and the “Midnight Club” finale in this regard has a lot to offer. The big cliffhanger is introduced.
The first season of the Christopher Pike adaptation concluded with Ilonka (Iman Benson) and Kevin (Igby Rigney) playing the lead. eventually There has been some degree of acceptance in relation to the death of Anya (Ruth Codd) kissing as children of Midnight Club and the miraculous recovery of Sandra (Annara Simone).
Julia Jane (Samantha Sloane), meanwhile, plays Dr. Stanton (Heather Langenkamp), who explains to Ilonka that Julia had previously had a recovery like Sandra and is sick again, thinking that the Paragon ritual would “heal” her. She throws water on the whole thing. There is nothing to see here. Nothing supernatural is going on.
But at the last moment of the episode, we see Dr. Stanton’s apartment, where a newspaper clipping shown on the wall reveals the original builders/owners of Brightcliff – and they are the elderly couple Ilonka and Kevin have been seeing throughout the season. Then Huge Revealed – Stanton removes a wig from his head, revealing a Paragon Society tattoo on his neck.
And thus ends the season.
So who are the old couple, who exactly is Dr. Stanton and what can we expect from Season 2? We had the same questions, and we put them to Flanagan himself, who said there’s a major clue to Stanton’s identity elsewhere in the season.
Who really is Dr. Stanton?
“We wanted people to reconsider the assumptions they might have made about Dr. Stanton,” Flanagan said. “It’s a very pike-ian moment. There’s a major clue, I think it shouldn’t be too hard — given the weather — to figure out why Tattoo is there and who she really could be.” I don’t think we tried very hard to hide it. For Vig, it’s a huge deal and is it indicating that something sinister is happening to her or something, which we have for the second season to reveal I’m too early.”
In fact, we think Flanagan is hinting at Julia’s sacrifice at Stanton’s surprise arrival, where he reveals that the room had a back staircase. How would she know this? Well, maybe she’s been there before – intimately. Perhaps she is Athena, the daughter of Aiso, who was the first to start the Paragon Society. And of course, this would mean that she is the one who stopped Aso from performing the ritual all those years ago and according to Joe Aso in a flashback of his first meeting with young Julia, now on speaking terms with his mother. Not there.
Who are the ghosts?
But this is just our guess. As for the elderly couple, if you’ve read Pike’s book you know that “The Midnight Club” has a lot to say about past lives. Our guess is that Ilonka’s body is inhabited by the old man and Kevin’s old woman as they wander the halls of their former home.
“It remains to be disclosed, but we are very much aligned in our reading of Pike’s source material and the importance of that particular idea for Midnight Club,” Flanagan responded. “There’s a lot of knot in that, so you’re absolutely doing something there.”
What happens in season 2?
While Netflix has yet to order “Midnight Club” Season 2, Flanagan says an outline for the season exists and he hopes to continue the story, including providing concrete answers to these two key questions.
“I have a rough outline for the season. It just depends,” he said. “Netflix will have to tell us if they want it. But we know who in the original cast is still alive by the end of the season and we know where we were going to reveal two huge truths about the show’s central secrets, the elderly couple and Stanton. We’ve got a really good idea that other Pike stories will take center stage for a potential second season, and that’s some of the more exciting things to do as a Pike fan. We were about to get into some of his very famous titles and try to get him to go beyond just 25 minutes of B story in episode one, we were going to have like a secondary long storyline running through the season. That would be pretty awesome. But we’ll see, you know, we’ll find out in a month, I guess. We will see if the audience likes it or not. It will be up to them.”
Flanagan said he expects the show to last “for quite a long time,” especially since a changing ensemble is intrinsic to the story they’re telling. But if the show is canceled for some reason, Flanagan promised to respond. His Twitter account,
“It’s the first thing I’ve worked on that was designed to continue. I don’t know if that will happen, we’ll have to wait and see, but if it doesn’t, I told everyone at Comic Con yesterday.” promised that I would put all the answers to Central Secrets on Twitter, which I would respect,” the “Bleu Manor” producer said. “But yeah, the show was designed to move forward and we made the decision not to reveal our two big existential secrets of the show in the writers’ room, so that we have something to say in the second season. It’s a gamble. I’ve never had to act like this before.”
fingers crossed. This YA-tinged horror is a wonderfully emotional (and, yes, creepy) meditation on mortality, and it would be great to see these characters’ stories continue adding new members as they progress.
‘The Midnight Club’ is now streaming on Netflix.