The penultimate episode of HBO‘s The Regime ends with Chancellor Elena Vernham’s (Kate Winslet) worst nightmare coming true.
**Spoilers for The Regime Episode 5 “All Ye Faithful,” now streaming on Max**
Elena’s been betrayed by her inner circle, attacked by her people, and toppled from power in a coup. The final minutes of The Regime Episode 5 “All Ye Faithful,” show how the ever-encroaching rebels manage to not only take the Palace on Christmas Eve, but leave a path of violent destruction in their path. Elena and her lover Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts) are left to escape on their own, through the tunnels of the dungeon where he and Keplinger (Hugh Grant) rotted together in just last week’s episode.
However the greatest tragedy of the episode is what happens to the Palace’s manager, Agnes (Andrea Riseborough). We’ve watched as the loyalist has equivocated for months whether or not she should betray the increasingly erratic Elena to the Americans, who have offered her and son Oskar (Louie Mynett) sanctuary. Finally, on Christmas Eve, she signals to her son, firmly in Elena’s clutches, that they will be escaping to Paris the next day. All they have to do is make it through the night…
In the final moments of The Regime Episode 5 “All Ye Faithful, we see that Elena and Zubak have abandoned their prop son Oskar in the frenzy of their escape. The little boy hides all alone under a piano as the rebels storm the Palace. Only Agnes, the ghost of the great regal residence, moves through the shadows of gunshots to reach her son. She’s almost made it when she is felled by a bullet. It’s a bitter reward for the loyalty she’s hitherto given Elena.
“She’s very, very loyal to Elena, but she’s loyal to her in a familial way and that’s been
weaponized against her,” Andrea Riseborough said during a press conference for The Regime Decider attended last month. “She’s had a child stolen basically and is co-parenting with somebody who’s a little bit unstable, and that’s hard to navigate.”
Riseborough added later in the discussion., “I’m not telling you where I started just utterly hating poor old Elena, but she gets pushed past a point, Agnes.” Clearly, based on her promise to Oskar that soon he would be eating crepes.
So Agnes dies while Elena takes to the underground, but what happens to Oskar? Is he killed? Kidnapped? What happens to the kid?!?
As far as we know, Elena and Zubak live again to fight another day, aka next week’s episode, The Regime series finale. Agnes, however is dead. And Decider can sadly confirm that we will not learn in the The Regime Episode 6 what exactly happened to poor little Oskar. We’ll never see him on the HBO show again.
In fact, when Decider spoke to The Regime creator and showrunner Will Tracy, he told us that he sort of liked leaving Oskar’s fate ambiguous.
“You know what, this sounds like I’m being a coy showrunner or an indecisive showrunner, but I don’t necessarily have an answer,” Will Tracy said. “Or maybe I feel that I’m happy for the audience to ascertain what might have happened to him.”
“I imagine it’s probably not the rosiest tale, but nor do I necessarily imagine that he’s dead, per se. But I don’t think it’s a great situation.”
Tracy also revealed during the press conference that Decider attended that the inspiration behind the series was The Emperor by Kapuscinski, a sort of reported oral history of the last days of Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia. The book opens with the author describing the reign of terror that has taken over the nation during the aftermath. Interview subjects request total anonymity and being caught on the streets past curfew can end in death.
“I don’t have an answer,” Tracy reiterated. “I really don’t. And I was happy to leave that sort of a bit ambiguous.”
Oskar’s fate — much like Elena’s at this point — is still very much up in the air.