The mid-season finale of Netflix’s woeful horror-comedy series Wednesday was equal parts shocking and frustrating — shocking because of all those insane reveals and twists, and frustrating because they ended Season 2 Part 1 on a huge cliffhanger of which we won’t get to see the aftermath for another month. While you wait for Wednesday Season 2 Part 2 to drop, we can explain the thrilling half-finale so you can make sure you’re all caught up.
Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) returns to Nevermore Academy a campus celebrity, and she’s not exactly jumping for joy. She also has to deal with her brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) joining her at school and her mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) breathing down her neck while organizing a Nevermore gala. Plus she now has a creepy stalker and her psychic visions make her eyes produce black tears. When she receives a vision of Enid’s (Emma Myers) death, she must solve the mystery of the crow-manipulating murderer before it’s too late.
Episode 3 ended things ambiguously: Wednesday investigates the late Sheriff Galpin’s (Jamie McShane) “bullpen” and finds several obituaries of Willow Hill patients taped up on the wall, with arrows all leading to the name “Lois.” Morticia wins Goody’s book in a blind swordfight with her daughter, and Wednesday has no way of getting her abilities back. As she spots a cloaked figure with the infamous one-eyed crow in the distance, we shift back to Willow Hill, which houses a locked-up Marilyn Thornhill (Christina Ricci).
Want to get your facts straight on the Wednesday Season 2 Part 1 finale? Read on if you dare — if you’re not prepared, these spoilers will fill you with woe.
Thornhill is back?! That’s right. You may have thought she was gone for good after Wednesday defeated her and the monstrous Hyde she unlocked in Tyler (Hunter Doohan) at the end of Season 1, but in Season 2 Episode 4 (“If These Woes Could Talk”), Thornhill is brought to Willow Hill in handcuffs. Dr. Fairburn (Thandiwe Newton) summoned her in hopes that she could provide insight on what she did to Tyler to help jumpstart the rehabilitation process. However, it soon becomes clear that Thornhill will not be of much help — she is solely focused on reuniting with Tyler and being able to exploit his powers once again.
Fairburn does bring Thornhill to see Tyler in hopes that it will lift Tyler’s spirits, but the family reunion turns sour when Tyler goes full Hyde and almost chokes out his master. We later learn that Thornhill isn’t concerned; Hydes can’t survive without their masters, so there’s no way Tyler would ever kill her. Does this comment age poorly? We’ll get to it later.
To Morticia’s dismay and Wednesday’s uncharacteristic delight (she even smiles!), Grandmama Hester (Joanna Lumley) arrives on the scene to help Wednesday solve the case. Wednesday invites Hester to the cemetery which houses the ashes of all the Willow Hill patients whose obituaries she found in the bullpen. After running a good ol’ sniff test, the two find that the patients’ urns are filled with not human ashes, but animal ashes. The patients’ deaths must have been faked somehow.
After the one-eyed crow swoops in and steals Wednesday’s evidence, she asks Hester to buy the graveyard for her to find out who signed the death certificates of all the Willow Hill patients. Hester does just that, and later tells Wednesday that the man who signed the death certificates was Augustus Stonehurst.
As we learn from Wednesday’s stalker-turned-obsessive-lackey Agnes (Evie Templeton), Stonehurst is a Normie who used to be a science professor at Nevermore, but became a patient at Willow Hill after a psychotic break. Wednesday also learns from Professor Orloff that Stonehurst had a daughter for whom he built an aviary in Iago Tower. Highly suspicious, especially since the crow killer must be an avian. Is Stonehurst’s daughter the murderer? Is she Lois? The only way to find out is if someone were to infiltrate Willow Hill, speak to Stonehurst, and maybe even find Lois’ identity. Luckily, Wednesday already has that covered by this point in the episode.
To be her eye, Wednesday enlists the help of her deranged Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen), who gleefully embraces the opportunity to be tied up in straitjackets and shocked in the electric chair. He easily gets himself admitted into Willow Hill by trashing his room at the Apple Hollow Inn and by eating a cactus while being questioned by the police.
Once there, Fester romances snaggle-toothed lunch lady Louise and meets the elderly Stonehurst in his bird sanctuary. Fester interrogates him and his parrot, and scores the code number needed to get into Lois’ room. Unfortunately — or fortunately, if you’re as twisted as Fester — he gets caught trying to sneak into the room. The guards put him in a straitjacket and lock him in a room with Pugsley’s pet zombie Slurp, who got taken away in Episode 3.
Obviously, Wednesday cooks up a plan to bust her uncle out of Willow Hill. But before we get into that, we have to tie up a loose end with Wednesday’s Aunt Ophelia: her dark presence has been haunting the narrative all season long, but we don’t get any answers as to why she is no longer around until Episode 4. When Wednesday orders Fester to infiltrate Willow Hill, he says that the last time he did that was for Aunt Ophelia, who was admitted to the facility but had already escaped by the time Fester arrived.
Determined to save her daughter from the same fate, Morticia tells Wednesday the whole story: during their time at Nevermore, Ophelia was found screaming in the quad with black tears running down her face. She had pushed her psychic ability too far, and Hester sent her to Willow Hill to get rid of Ophelia and her problems. Later, after Morticia hears the news about Fester and after Thing almost gets killed in a grisly crow attack, Morticia tells Wednesday to stop or else things will get worse — much worse.
Naturally, Wednesday doesn’t listen, and makes a plan with Agnes and Enid to free Fester from Willow Hill and find Lois.
Wednesday knows that her music teacher, Ms. Capri (Billie Piper), is teaching a remedial music class at Willow Hill that night. Putting Enid on lookout duty and tasking Agnes with distracting the guards, Wednesday makes her way to Willow Hill by hiding in the trunk of Capri’s car. She sneaks in through the back door, steals a guard’s key card, and makes her way to Fester’s cell with the help of Louise and her crusty food cart.
After Wednesday frees Fester from his straitjacket (in under 10 seconds!), the two rush to Lois’ room. When they uncover a secret lab hidden behind a wall, they find that Lois isn’t a person, but a program: L.O.I.S stands for Long-term Outcast Integration Study. In the lab, they have patients locked away in highly secured cells — the very same patients from Stonehurst’s obituaries. They never died; someone at Willow Hill just hid them from the public to run experiments on them.
Just as Wednesday is starting to piece it all together, the cloaked Avian Killer appears out of the dark.
So it turns out the deadly Avian murderer is none other than Judi (Heather Matarazzo). Remember her? She’s Fairburn’s assistant at Willow Hill. A bit random, but we can’t say that we weren’t surprised. Judi explains that she hired Fairburn to be the face of Willow Hill while she continued her father’s work. Who was her father? None other than Stonehurst, who wanted to be an Outcast so bad that he ran experiments on them to see if he could extract their powers. Trying to become a DaVinci drove him to madness, but the experiments were more successful for his Normie-born daughter, who gained the ability to manipulate murders of crows.
Enraged, Fester tries to shock Judi with his electrical powers. But the electric current in the room is so strong that it causes a power outage throughout the entire facility. Watching the lights go out from afar, Enid alerts the police. Finally freed from their cages, Stonehurst’s victims gang up on Judi and initiate a deadly attack.
Chaos reigns over Willow Hill as freed patients all over the facility run wild. Adding to the chaos is Slurp, who broke free a while ago. Ever since Pugsley electrocuted the former Nevermore student back to life, he’s been feasting on brains whenever he can, which allows his own brain to regenerate. As he roams the halls of Willow Hill, he helps himself to a feast, chowing down on a few policemen and even Fairburn. He also snacks on Stonehurst, but just as he’s about to attack, he speaks for the first time: “Hello, old friend,” Slurp says to the man who must have been his professor at Nevermore.
Does this mean that Slurp is slowly turning human again? Or is he just becoming a much smarter monster? We’re not sure yet, but Season 2 Part 2 might give us some answers.
The power outage allows Thornhill to escape the police and break her son out of his chains. She tries to tell him that they can take down Wednesday together, but Tyler isn’t hearing it. In order to be free from his master, he has to kill her. After offering her a chilling 5-second head start, Tyler goes full Hyde and snaps Thornhill’s neck, leaving her dead on the floor. Once Tyler puts his master down, his next target becomes clear: Wednesday Addams.
In the final moments of this episode, Wednesday comes face-to-face with Tyler in his Hyde form. Unable to contain his rage, Tyler flings Wednesday out a window several stories high. Tyler escapes into the woods, leaving Wednesday lying bloody and unconscious on the pavement. As Enid and Fester try in vain to wake Wednesday, we hear her chilling narration one final time: “I’ve always dreamed of looking death in the face, but in my final moments, all I hear is my mother’s words ringing in my ears. Maybe I have made everything worse. Much worse.”
So, did Wednesday die? We don’t actually know, hence the maddening cliffhanger. We can probably assume she survives since we still have half the season to go, but who knows? Either way, we are seated for Wednesday Season 2 Part 2. Stay tuned for more news from us at Decider when it drops on Sept. 3.
Watch Wednesday Season 2 Part 1 now on Netflix.