- Alex Dempsey decides to make a difficult decision for his family.
- Best friends Leila and Abbie go their separate ways.
- Evelyn gets dethroned and gets a taste of her own literal medicine.
You would think that the end of a mysterious psychological thriller would give you the answers to all your burning questions. But the last episode of Netflix limited series Wayward leaves audiences with even more questions—in the best way possible. With hallucinogenic drugs, dubious therapeutic methods, and a lot of trauma, things are bound to go topsy-turvy, making it difficult to tell truth and reality apart from lies and drug-induced fantasy.
Still, in the end, police officer Alex (Mae Martin) is able to exercise his agency and choose his own fate, and so do our younger protagonists Leila (Alyvia Alyn Lind) and Abbie (Sydney Topliffe). The ending is not the happy one viewers might have imagined it to be, but it still has glimmers of hope.
Here's a breakdown of everything that happens in the last episode of Netflix's limited series Wayward.
Do Leila and Abbie escape Tall Pines Academy?
As Evelyn (Toni Collette) begins to loose her grip on the town of Tall Pines, Abbie puts her escape plan into action. After following through on an elaborate scheme involving a fake love letter, a power outage, and a car Alex had left for them, her and Leila are able to drive out of town. But then Leila suddenly changes her mind. It seems that Evelyn's tactics have worked on her.
Leila is convinced that staying is the only option for her and is also what's best for her bestie whom she thinks would be better off without her.
Evelyn gets a taste of her own medicine.
Evelyn kidnaps Alex and brings him to the school's basement to try and Leap him, and inject him with the same toad venom she's been using on the kids. Things don't seem that to look good for Tall Pines' newbie cop, until Evelyn's righthand woman betrays her. Rabbit (Tattiawna Jones) turns on her leader, realizing that she was never looking out for anyone else's best interest but her own. Alex then gets back at Evelyn by injecting her with the drug—stabbing her with the syringe more than once.
Before the lethal dose takes on its full effect, an extremely high Evelyn reveals that it was not her but Laura (Sarah Gadon) who killed Laura's parents. Eventually, the cult leader looses her consciousness and enters a hallucinogenic state, where she's mentally trapped in an imaginary room with multiple green doors.
Laura becomes the new Evelyn.
The buildup of the whole show have led to this. As Evelyn looses control over her constituents, Laura rises to power. Though Alex initially thought that his partner is rebelling against Evelyn, and wanting to leave Tall Pines, it turns out that she doesn't ever want to leave her hometown, not when she's climbed up the social hierarchy and has become the leader of a new movement she's built with other alums from the Tall Pines Academy. She and her group claim to want to help young people without the same torturous methods that Evelyn had used on them.
Of course, like all cult leaders, Laura thinks she's going to be different. But like Evelyn, she's at risk of becoming drunk on her own power. Plus, we still don't know whether Evelyn was telling the truth about Laura bludgeoning her own parents to death, since we also saw Laura's parents' missing car in the pond which suggests that Evelyn did it.
Alex and Laura's baby becomes "everyone's."
This has got to be one of the eeriest, most disturbing, and most uncomfortable birth scenes ever, and not because of what happens during the birth but after. After escaping Evelyn's clutches, Alex bludgeons his own partner to death with a rock (like how Evelyn claims Laura did it to her parents). Then he runs to catch Laura give birth to their baby.
When Alex gets home, he sees Laura having already given birth, and tries to bond with their newborn with skin-to-skin contact. But afterwards, members of Laura's cult come in to do the same, and they pass the baby around to make skin-to-skin contact with everyone. This is what Laura wants: to raise their child as a child of the entire village. But Alex looks around and realizes that this isn't what he wants.
Alex runs away with the baby...or does he?
After the eerie post-birth scene, we see Alex make his escape and takes the newborn with him. He then hops in a car with Abbie, and drives off. Alex tells the young Academy escapee that she's not a bad kid and commends her for being able to muster up the strength to know exactly who she is. Abbie then tells Alex that he's a good guy, too, and that he'd made the right decision. But, just as you start to buy into this sweet moment, you realize that this scene is just Alex's fantasy.
We snap back to reality, where Alex closes the door as he gets home to his cult family. He's decided to stay. “Alex stays because he cares more about his fantasy of this nuclear family and heteronormative life than he does about his moral compass,” Martin said in an interview with Tudum. “He thinks he can turn things around. But I think it’s mainly that he just loves Laura.”
Only Abbie finds freedom.
The last scene of the last episode of Wayward is of Abbie driving past the Tall Pines welcome sign, and out of the city limits. In the end, only she was able to walk free and escape the creepy town. Still, pain will follow Abbie wherever she goes — having lost her best friend, and knowing that many other students are still trapped at the Academy.
Many questions remain. Where is Abbie driving off to? Is Leila going to be OK? Is the Academy going to be abolished? Will Laura actually do better than Evelyn, or fall into the same pattern? And the most important question of all: Will we get to see more Wayward?? We hope so. It's a limited series, yes, but never say never.
