This post contains spoilers for The Midnight Club. If you're not caught up yet, check out our spoiler-free review of Season 1.
Mike Flanagan adapting Christopher Pike is a dream come true for a lot of horror fans who grew up in the 90s and 00s. Pike’s story provides the foundation for Flanagan’s most recent Netflix series — The Midnight Club — following a group of terminally ill children who create ghosts (tell stories) as a way to connect and share their deepest, darkest fears and secrets.
Unlike Flanagan’s other Netflix offerings, The Midnight Club is not meant to be a limited series. The major cliffhanger ending makes that fact extremely apparent! Thankfully, IGN’s own Tom Jorgensen sat down with the horror maestro himself to help make sense of what we saw at the end of The Midnight Club and to reveal a couple tidbits about what he hopes to share in Season 2.
The Midnight Club Ending Explained
In the finale of The Midnight Club, we see Ilonka (Iman Benson) and Kevin (Igby Rigney) finish off their respective tales. These stories take up much of the last episode, with very little of the final chapter taking place in the present. What we do see after the two kids finish their stories and share their long-awaited first kiss is a scene featuring Doctor Stanton (Heather Langenkamp) with the reveal that she is not only a survivor herself, but a former member of the Paragon.
The glimpse of the hour glass tattoo on the back of the good doctor’s neck wasn’t so much a surprise, but the decision to end the series with the moment was a major cliffhanger. As for what it all means? Well, Flanagan’s staying tight lipped for now.
“That connection is going to be revealed in Season 2 (if there is one) very explicitly so I don't want to spoil anything there,” Flanagan explains. “Her connection to that [the Paragon] is deeply personal and it wouldn't be too difficult, I think, looking back at the season.”
The Midnight Club crew expecting a Season 2 certainly clears up why Season 1 ended so abruptly and with so many questions left unanswered, but Flanagan is not a cruel man! The writer/director gave us a few hints on Stanton and promised not to leave fans hanging.
“Stanton's connection to the Paragon and to that world was important and we felt like a really cool reversal to go out on,” Flanagan says. “The manner of that connection and what it truly means about her character is something that I think will still be surprising. We're still hiding a few cards at the end there. But yeah, I think it was meant to be a fun cliff hanger. We'll address 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 any hard details on how Stanton was connected to the Paragon, all signs are currently pointing toward her being Athena, the daughter of Regina Ballard.
But why spend so much of the finale focusing on the kids’ ghost stories rather than progressing the overall series narrative? We didn’t have the opportunity to ask outright, but Flanagan did talk about why stories were such an integral part of The Midnight Club (in addition to the source material, of course).
“I very much believe that when we die, we become stories and we live on in the imaginations of the people that loved us,” shares Flanagan. “This provided an opportunity as characters drop away on the show that they don't leave the show, that they remain in the imaginations of their friends and remain characters later on in their stories. If the show does do a second season, and I have no idea if it will, part of our big plan for that was that we would be keeping cast members around because they'd still appear in each other's stories even though the storytellers are gone. And that was something I thought thematically was very important to keep in the show.”
Flanagan is known for consistently working with the same actors — affectionately dubbed as the “Flanafam” by fans — so it looks like we can expect the trend to continue in The Midnight Club Season 2 should we see it, and with more than just the surviving club members.
In the meantime, it looks like we have all the answers we’re going to get until Season 2 of The Midnight Club. Expect more stories, more midnight toasts, and answers on Doctor Stanton, the Paragon, the founders ghosts and more if the story continues!
Some quotes have been edited for clarity.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/the-midnight-club-ending-explained