Ending Explained is a recurring series in which we explore the finales, secrets, and themes of interesting movies and shows, both new and old. In this entry, we consider the ending of Sharp Objects as well as its post-credits scene. Over its eight-hour runtime, Sharp Objects has emerged as an incredibly literary adaptation of its Gillian Flynn-penned source material. You can feel the weight of thought behind each addition to the show’s eclectic soundtrack, every impressionistic edit, and the many visual Easter eggs inspired by Camille Preaker’s (Amy Adams) obsession with words (for an exhaustive list of the latter, click here). It’s as if the entire architecture of the show is informed by Camille’s troubled psyche: every element colludes to create an immersive emotional environment rarely seen in television – even in this, its golden age. There were hints about its depth at the very beginning of Jean-Marc Vallée‘s show, but “Milk”, its explosive finale, retroactively transforms every preceding episode into something much more compelling than initially thought: part-character study, part-Southern anthropology lesson, and part-time travel experiment. It’s the kind of show that will demand re-watches, not least because it ends on a note that will strike many viewers as ambiguous. As you’ll see, however, the final episode and ending of Sharp Objects do provide answers to most of the questions audiences might be left with after its seismic reveal was cut painfully short. In the interests of clarity, here is everything you need to know about the mystery, and the fate of the people it involves: The killer We know from the medical records uncovered in the seventh episode and the evidence Richard (Chris Messina) discusses in “Milk” that Adora (Patricia Clarkson) definitely killed her daughter. At the time Richard visits Camille at hospital, she is also about to be charged for the murders of the other girls, but something doesn’t quite sit right with the police’s theory. Adora’s Munchausen by Proxy syndrome made her poison her daughter over several years, but in contrast, the girls’ murders were sudden and much more brutal; not at all in keeping with the slow, systematic drip of death that eventually took Marian (Lulu Wilson). Sharp Objects’ closing moments reveal the truth: Amma (Eliza Scanlen) is responsible for the murders of Ann Nash (Kaegan Baron) and Natalie Keene (Jessica Treska). Camille stumbles upon the dead girls’ teeth hidden in the dollhouse replica of Adora’s mansion, where they’re acting as a gruesome stand-in for the ivory floor Adora gushed over in “Closer”. Amma interrupts Camille’s discovery, but her initial mask of shock at being found out quickly slips into a smug confession: “Don’t tell Mama.” The dramatic reveal is abruptly clipped at this point. The editing here – a quick cut to the credits – is designed to leave viewers feeling so stunned that they’re effectively paralyzed, and therefore disinclined to immediately reach for the remote. If that effect worked, most viewers will know that “Milk” unusually features mid- and post-credits scenes. Careful watching of both tells us more about Amma’s role in the murders: assisted by her roller-skating friends wearing what look like white lab coats, she strangled Ann with the clothesline mentioned in “Vanish”. This is the first real bit of violence Sharp Objects has shown us so far, and it doesn’t stop there: the flashback depicts Natalie thrashing around in pain inside the carriage-house before dropping cold on the floor next to the bed where her blood was found. This was a detail that seemed to damn John Keene (Taylor John Smith) earlier on in the episode, but it’s worth remembering that, although he had effectively moved into the carriage-house following his sister’s death, it actually belonged to the parents of his girlfriend, Ashley (Madison Davenport), whose sister Jodes (April Brinson) is one of Amma’s accomplices. Flynn’s book expands on what “Milk” shows us by directly rebutting the police’s theory from “Dirt”: that it would take a grown adult with “some muscle” to remove the girls’ teeth. Flynn makes it clear that the teenage Amma was able to pull them out by herself: “Children’s teeth, it turns out, aren’t too hard to remove, if you put real weight on the pliers.” What’s more, the show’s finale reveals that, despite being out of the clutches of Adora and just as far away from her accomplices, Amma has failed to become a reformed soul. Moments before Camille discovers the teeth, we learn that Amma’s new friend and neighbor Mae (Iyana Halley) has yet to return home as expected. Terrifyingly, a quick flash of action in the mid-credits scene spells out why: Mae’s hands are shown gripping a fence as a violent struggle takes place in the out-of-focus background. One detail that is easy to overlook here is the polish on Mae’s nails. In the dinner scene at Curry’s (Miguel Sandoval) house, her nails were unvarnished, but here, they’re painted a bright pink. In the mid-credits flashback, we get very brief glimpses of Ann and Natalie’s hands, too – and lo and behold, their nails are painted the same color. The images evoke something seemingly trivial that John Keene mentioned earlier about his tomboy sister’s dead body: “Her fingernails were painted. When they found her, someone painted her fingernails. Natalie would never do that.” (In the book, John also writes Camille a letter explaining that he always suspected Amma was the murderer.) Flynn’s novel doesn’t explain why Amma’s MO involved giving her victims an overtly feminine makeover before she killed them, but it may have something to do with the prettified appearance Amma had to adopt whenever she was around Adora. Her motive In the book, an imprisoned Amma tells Camille she killed Ann and Natalie because Adora “got all interested in them.” The two girls, whom Adora “tutored,” were growing closer and closer to her, and Amma, ever her mother’s daughter, couldn’t stomach not being the center of her world. The show is less explicit than Flynn’s novel in this respect, but it does provide us with plenty of hints. By the time we get to “Milk”, we’ve already heard talk of Adora being close to the dead girls, although, at that point, we were inclined to interpret that bit of information as a direct indictment of her, rather than of Amma. But the finale includes a telling scene that illustrates just how possessive Amma is over the women in her life. During the dinner at Curry’s, Mae mentions that she’d like to be a journalist when she grows up, a throw-away remark Amma immediately (and bizarrely) interprets as Mae being sycophantic towards Camille: “You just say that to impress Camille […] Kiss-ass.” For a moment, both Eileen (Barbara Eve Harris) and Camille look taken aback at Amma’s sneering tone, but then the current of the conversation moves them on. Things don’t remain settled for long, however. Amma notices Camille looking at Mae’s hand – there seems to be writing on it – and the bitterness on her face calcifies. Vallée then immediately cuts to a shot of Amma doodling in a diary full of words, tacitly suggesting that she’s remaking herself in the image of her sister, the writer. This impression is deepened when Camille enters the room and Amma greets her, a note of distress clear in her voice: “Do you wish I was a writer like you?” Knowing what we know about why Amma killed Ann and Natalie, it’s clear from this scene that Mae’s off-the-cuff remark at dinner sealed her fate. The woman in white Most of Sharp Objects takes place from Camille’s perspective, so sometimes, the things we see aren’t real. One such instance is when James Capisi (Dylan Schombing) tells Camille he saw a “woman in white” take Natalie; Camille then envisions her mother lingering at the edge of the woods, dressed in an eerie, floating white gown. The final shot of “Milk”, however, breaks away from Camille’s perspective and shows us the truth: it was Amma, not Adora, who wore white under the forest’s dark canopy that day.<doc-sep>‘“Sharp Objects’ Author Explains That Brutally Abrupt Ending’ [Rolling Stone] “There was a lot of discussion in the writers’ room about how much time we were going to have after Amma comes home with [Camille], that there was going to be that extra twist,” recalls Gillian Flynn, who wrote the novel “Sharp Objects” and served as a writer and executive producer of the mini-series, in an interview with Alan Sepinwall. “We wanted to preserve that moment but give enough time so that it does feel like the rug is being pulled out from under you. You want to give enough time where Amma and Camille are being like sisters so that it is that moment of incredible shock.” ‘“Sharp Objects” Creators Break Down “Tricky” Finale — and Those End-Credits Scenes’ [Entertainment Weekly] What was going on in the second end-credits scene, in which Amma appears as the Woman in White? Flynn explains, in an interview with Shirley Li, that the intention was to close with “that sort of eeriness, that ode to the whole fairy-tale, folklore feel.” She continues: “I’ve always spoken about the fact that what I wanted to write about was the idea of female rage and violence, and how I did it by wrapping it in a mystery, so it was kind of a tip of the hat at that idea of Wind Gap and all it represents, and the folklore of it all.” ‘How “Sharp Objects” Made Amma’s Creepy Dollhouse’ [Vulture] Do you have lingering questions about Amma’s nightmare-fuel dollhouse? Well, the writer Maria Elena Fernandez has answers. According to the show’s production designer, John Paino, the floor of its forbidden room was made of plastic models of baby teeth. “We shaved them down on the backs and a little bit on the top,” Paino told Fernandez, “so it would seem like she had made an attempt to make them resemble the tusk process, because the floor looks like if there’s walrus tusks or whale tusks or elephant tusks.” “She made this fabulous dollhouse, so she would have probably gone to great lengths to sand them down and make them almost unnoticeable.” Criticism ‘How the “Sharp Objects” Finale Sums Up the Show’s Excellent Feel-Badness’ [The New Yorker] Troy Patterson praises the show for denying viewers the fairy-tale ending we craved. “The heroine was emerging as heroic,” he writes of the show’s denouement in St. Louis. “Camille Preaker had vanquished a monster, rescued a maiden, and composed a clean start at personal salvation. Call me a sap, but I was eager to embrace tidy developments that promised a feel-good conclusion, despite my belief that the show’s excellence as a work of psychological horror is tied up with a steadfast feel-badness. Then, the show snatched the promise away and crushed it.”<doc-sep>Spoilers below. “Sharp Objects,” HBO’s latest standalone miniseries offering, ended its eight-week run over the weekend. Based on the debut book by Gillian Flynn (author of suspense novels like “Gone Girl”), the show has been a weekly tour de force for A-list actress Amy Adams, who plays Camille Preaker, a journalist sent back to her hometown to write human interest stories about the grisly murders of two teenage girls. Part of the finale’s corkscrew of twists reveals Camille’s mother, Adora Crellin (played by Patricia Clarkson), to be a murderer. “She was guilty of a very female sort of rage,” says Camille in the final episode. This line sums up the show’s theme nicely. The series offers a different perspective on female rage than what we’ve seen before, however. Notably, men are neither the perpetrators nor the triggers of the violence in “Sharp Objects.” If anything, men are passive, meek, and slaves to their own emotions. At best, they exist to be the story’s deus ex machina, swooping in to save the day before returning to the background. At worst, they are complicit, turning a blind eye to the horror being perpetrated right in front of them by generations of women. “She was guilty of a very female sort of rage,” says Camille in the final episode. This line sums up the show’s theme nicely. Unfortunately, when it comes to the ending, the show pulled its final punch, truncating Flynn’s original ending. When it came time to reveal that the murder was committed not just by a woman, but by a young girl, with her two best friends as accomplices, the show chose not to delve into the motives, the psychology, or the consequences. Instead it glamorized the killings in a slick credits sequence, leaving the audience bereft of understanding how the rage of women can produce an outcome like this. “Sharp Objects” has been presented as this year’s answer to HBO’s 2017 hit “Big Little Lies,” another miniseries mystery based on another suspense novel written by a woman, Liane Moriarty. On the surface, both these shows are similar; “Sharp Objects” even looks a little like “Big Little Lies.” Director Jean-Marc Vallée helmed both, and there are times when the two series could be mistaken for half-sisters. But “Big Little Lies” is a show about sisterhood and how women protect their own against the violence men inflict upon them. Men are the monsters, the abusers, the ones who trap these characters into their positions in life. “Sharp Objects” has no need for men in these roles. It posits that sisterhood is a lie. The show begins with the murders of two 13-year-old girls. When Camille arrives in her tiny hometown of Wind Gap, she finds herself informed by both lead investigators — local police chief Vickery and the big city detective Willis — that only a man could be capable of the violence (strangulation, teeth pulling) that has taken place. Men are also assumed by everyone to be in charge of this investigation, with Camille outwardly performing the trope of the inept and ethics-free female journalist. But in reality, the cops are merely foils. This is really a story all about repressed women, and the different ways their emotions manifest. While the murders may be the catalyst for the series, the real drama happens inside Camille’s childhood home, the big plantation on the hill, where her mother reigns over the town as the daughter of the wealthiest family and biggest employer in the area. Adora, the aging matriarch of the family, subsumes the rejection she experienced as a child by her parents by performing an exaggerated form of femininity and motherhood. She is also a narcissist, so obsessed with how she appears to others that she’s developed what used to be known as Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. (Today it’s more often referred to as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another, or FDIA.) She spends her life poisoning her children, in order to be the virtuous martyr figure.<doc-sep>
Warning: major spoilers for Sharp Objects Season 1 below Sharp Objects has been a slow-burning revelation. The show’s first run was full of twists and turns, but on Sunday we finally found out who was culpable for the murders in Windgap, Missouri. But only if you really stuck around to the very end. With Season 1 all wrapped up, we tackle the big questions left with us after the finale, and whether there will be a Sharp Objects Season 2. So, who was the murderer? In the series’ final episode, Camille (Amy Adams) and Amma (Eliza Scanlen)’s mother Adora (Patricia Clarkson) was arrested and imprisoned for the death of Anna and Natalie and, the two local girls that had died in the town over the last few years. It’d long been hinted that the Crellin family were involved, and considering the suspicious death of Camille’s sister, Marian, as a child, seeing Adora behind bars felt like a satisfying ending. Too satisfying. In the last few moments of the show, it was revealed that Amma had actually killed the girls – admitting so when she told Camille “don’t tell Momma,” when the girls’ teeth were found by Camille in Amma’s dollshouse. If there was any doubt whether mother or daughter had done the deed, the mid-credits scene put that to rest. In it, we see some pretty brutal footage of Amma strangling all three girls. Mae, her latest victim, in an alleyway, Ann in the woods and Natalie in her home – that explains the blood stain on the floor of the Keene home. It leaves some pretty big questions unanswered, though. Firstly, did Adora know? Is she taking the rap for Amma in prison, and is that why she still seems in awe of her mother? Considering the control Adora had over her youngest daughter, there’s a big chance that she must have at least known, and maybe even approved of these grizzly acts. Or perhaps she’s culpable in a different way. The last episode showed how Adora would deliberately make her own children sick and dependent on her, which eventually caused the death of Camille’s sister, Marianne. In the final episode, Camille was either poisoned like Amma, or faked an illness to protect her. It was revealed that Adora had been feeding her children with antifreeze and rat poison – which Amma seemed to have built up a tolerance for over the years. Did this poison destabilise Amma? Or was the psychotic streak always there? Will there be a Season 2? So here’s the biggie – we don’t officially know yet. The series was based on Gillian Flynn’s debut novel of the same name and there hasn’t been a sequel to this particular story. The story continues further beyond the last scenes of the show. In the book, Amma is imprisoned and explains her actions vaguely, while Camille is taken in by Curry, her editor, and his wife Eileen, and given the caring family environment she craved. Last month, showrunner Marti Noxon suggested that a new series wasn’t being discussed at all, but now is saying “I mean, I never say never, I guess,” in a recent interview. That’s not a glowing endorsement of the possibility, but not an outright denial. Would the same cast feature? That’s the problem that Noxon seems to be suggesting will stand in its way. “I think for us, it’s less about whether… you know, that team, it was pretty hard to assemble in the first place. The idea of doing [that again] seems next to impossible,” she told Vanity Fair. Its worth noting, however, that Sharp Objects’ series director Jean-Marc Vallée was adamant that another of his shows, Big Little Lies, would not return – only for it to be commissioned for a second series. Vallée did leave the show, in fairness, but as proved – nothing is truly over where Hollywood is concerned. Vallée went into more detail about the chance of Sharp Objects Season 2 in an interview with Vulture and it doesn’t look great. “Would I do season two? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe. It’s meant to be a limited TV series and I have other projects, so I think I’m gonna be somewhere else. No, I won’t. I’d love to work with all these people again. Every one of them. But let’s do something else. Stay tuned for any potential updates.