Mike Flanagan wrote and directed the finale, and he knows the shot everyone came for. Pig’s blood, phones, fire, a town caving in. “AP Physics” gets there. Then it does the one thing this story cannot survive: it suggests Carrie White did not really do it. The prom is still a massacre. The tragedy has been outsourced.
Spoilers for the finale, and for the season, follow.
The hour opens where the series did, in the fake documentary. Sue Snell tells Adelaide (Kate Siegel) that talking to Carrie felt like talking to a little sister, a girl so unused to kindness that it registered as rare. Adelaide shows her a photo of Amanda, the woman who had been urging Margaret to treat telekinesis as something you kill before it spreads. Sue does not know her. She does know the car. When she saw Billy Nolan’s, she ran.
The blood is already on Carrie. A few people laugh. Sue and Tina look sick. Carrie shatters the phone cameras into hands and faces, and the gym goes dark on every network at once. She clocks Chris and Billy on the catwalk and brings it down. A light hits Principal Grayle. The collapse kills Tommy Ross, the boy who got her there. Carrie looks horrified. That is the last moment the rampage is clearly hers.
Emaline appears in her head and tells her to let go. Let me take the wheel. Sue, on the stage, sees a shadow behind Carrie. Amanda rushes her and is stopped by two girls who do not go to Ewen. A third, Caitlin, is the one who mic’d Sue for the interviews. Rita Desjardin steps in front of Amanda’s gun. Carrie, or whatever is steering her, throws Amanda and sends Rita into the fire. The doors lock. The sprinklers come on. A live wire drops into the water and electrocutes the students still on the floor. The body count the premiere promised, somewhere around 200, starts here. Sue lives because she is on the stage, off the water. She will later insist it was not just Carrie. Adelaide will ask if she is sure, and then help her not be.
Chris and Billy run. Billy aims the car at her. Chris grabs the wheel and tries to swerve. Carrie flips it anyway, walks up, and crushes the roof. Billy dies crying. Chris gets as far as an apology. Then Carrie comes back to herself, sees what the car looks like, and screams. Emaline tells her she did nothing wrong, that these people made it hard for her to exist, and feeds her the line to shout into the street: she exists. They dance through the wreckage until a gunshot drops Emaline out of the projection. Carrie walks home covered in blood.
Margaret hugs her anyway. She draws a bath, asks if Carrie can be forgiven, and asks if Carrie can forgive her. Of course, mama. The prayer closet. A knitting needle. Margaret prays for the strength to do it and breaks the skin. Carrie stops the hand, takes a stab in the shoulder from the scissors, and puts them in her mother’s back. She brings the house down on both of them. In the novel, that is the end. Here both of them live. Margaret holds a section of roof off herself without touching it, a trick she used once as a girl, when she moved a cross, and did not think she still had. The gene, she will say, sometimes skips. Emaline arrives in the flesh, shot and sorry, and pulls Carrie out of the rubble.
The interviews are the cover story. Adelaide is not a documentarian. She can get into a mind and edit it, which is how Sue becomes unsure she saw the other girls. Caitlin takes what they need from Margaret. Adelaide tells her she has a good heart and could never have given Carrie what she needs, then slows that heart until it stops, one prayer at a time. The girls from the gym move the body to a hotel room. Heart failure. Stress. The official record.
Emaline drives. Carrie, frantic, asks who she is. A friend, Emaline says, taking her somewhere safe, with others. This is the world Carrie always wanted. Carrie asks if it is hers. Emaline says the whole thing is, and asks where she would like to go. Carrie smiles. Cut to black. Flanagan has talked about a three-season plan. The smile is the application.
Howell is extraordinary in the bathroom and the rubble, and Sloyan’s death is the hour’s best scene, a murder dressed up as an interview. The prom itself looks like the thing: phones as the first weapon, water and current as the last, Tommy dead because the catwalk did not care who was kind. The problem is the steering wheel. King’s ending works because the girl you pity is the girl who does it, and you are not allowed to separate those facts. Flanagan separates them. Emaline takes the worst of the gym, talks Carrie through the car, and absolves her before the roof comes down. The discomfort that has defined this story for 50 years gets filed under someone else’s powers. Carrie survives innocent enough to lead another season. That is a franchise decision, not a tragic one.
“AP Physics” is for every action an equal and opposite reaction. The finale forgets the equal part. The blood is still hers. The blame, conveniently, is not.
