Movies

Midnight Club Season 1 Ending Explained

October 10, 2022

This post contains spoilers for The Midnight Club. If you haven’t caught up yet, check out our spoiler-free review of Season 1.

Mike Flanagan adapting Christopher Pike is a dream come true for many horror fans growing up in the 90s and 00s. Pike’s story forms the basis of Flanagan’s newest Netflix series – The Midnight Club – at the sequel to a group of terminally ill children who create ghosts (tell stories) in order to connect and share their deepest and darkest fears and secrets.

Unlike Flanagan’s other Netflix offerings, The Midnight Club isn’t meant to be a limited series. The major cliffhanger ending makes this fact extremely obvious! Thankfully, IGN’s Tom Jorgensen sat down with the horror maestro himself to make sense of what we saw at the end of The Midnight Club and to reveal some info on what he hopes to share. in season 2.

Midnight Club Ending Explained

In The Midnight Club finale, we see Ilonka (Iman Benson) and Kevin (Igby Rigney) complete their respective stories. These stories take up much of the final episode, with very little of the final chapter set in the present. What we do see after the two children finish their stories and share their long-awaited first kiss is a scene featuring Doctor Stanton (Heather Langenkamp) with the revelation that she is not just a survivor herself, but an ancient member of the Paragon.

The glimpse of the hourglass tattoo on the back of the good doctor’s neck wasn’t much of a surprise, but the decision to end the series with the moment was a major cliffhanger. As for what all of this means? Well, Flanagan remains silent for now.

“That connection is going to be revealed very explicitly in Season 2 (if there is one), so I don’t want to spoil anything there,” Flanagan explains. “His connection with that [the Paragon] is deeply personal and it wouldn’t be too difficult, I think, looking back on the season.

The Midnight Club crew awaiting a season 2 certainly explains why season 1 ended so abruptly and with so many unanswered questions, but Flanagan is no cruel man! The writer/director gave us some clues about Stanton and promised not to leave fans hanging.

“Stanton’s connection to the Paragon and to this world was significant and felt like a really cool reversal to do,” Flanagan says. “The manner of that connection and what it really means about his character is something that I think will always be surprising. We still hide some cards at the end. But yeah, I think it was meant to be a fun eye-catcher. We will come back to it very early in the second season if there is one. And if not, I’ll put it on Twitter.

While we don’t have specific details on how Stanton was connected to the Paragon, all signs currently point to her being Athena, the daughter of Regina Ballard.

But why spend so much of the finale focusing on children’s ghost stories rather than advancing the overall narrative of the series? We didn’t get a chance to ask directly, but Flanagan explained why the stories were such an integral part of The Midnight Club (in addition to the source material, of course).