Breaking Down the Hopeful Ending of Netflix’s New Sci-Fi Mystery Series The Boroughs

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Boroughs.

In the picturesque desert retirement community known as the Boroughs, things certainly aren’t what they seem. For one thing, there are monsters in the walls. For another, the unnervingly upbeat owners keep up a Stepford-esque facade. So when recently widowed new resident Sam (Alfred Molina) discovers his friend Jack (Bill Pullman) has been killed by a mysterious, alien-like creature feeding on his brain fluid at night, it’s up to Sam and a ragtag group of fellow seniors to figure out what’s actually afoot in the New Mexico town they call home.

Created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews (The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance) and executive produced by the Duffer Brothers (Stranger Things, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen), The Boroughs, all eight episodes of which are now streaming on Netflix, follows Sam, estranged married couple Judy (Alfre Woodard) and Art (Clarke Peters), terminally ill former doctor Wally (Denis O’Hare), and retired music manager Renee (Geena Davis) as they band together to uncover the truth about the otherworldly threat stalking their neighborhood.

What’s up with the monsters in The Boroughs?

These creatures turn out to be the children of an ancient supernatural entity that married Boroughs owners Blaine (Seth Numrich) and Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg) Shaw, nicknamed “Mother” (Nancy Daly), after she hatched from an egg Blake—formerly known as Marcus—discovered in the copper mine that used to sit on the same land as the Boroughs. Oh, and thanks to their habit of drinking Mother’s blood, Blaine, Anneliese, and the rest of their cabal of staff have been kept from aging, getting sick, or dying since 1949, maintaining the same youthful appearance for decades. Unfortunately, this requires Mother’s children to provide a steady supply of brain fluid for her to feed on, which is siphoned out of the community’s elderly residents while they’re sleeping, effectively shortening the already limited amount of time they have left to live.

However, Mother has no desire to keep this practice up and has long been desperate to break free from her imprisonment in their facility. Since Mother doesn’t experience time in a linear way, she is able to communicate with people whose minds are lost in time. But the only retirees who previously met this criterion were those whose brains were too damaged by neurological conditions to be able to help her escape. Sam’s consciousness, on the other hand, has been split by grief, making it so Mother is able to get his attention by appearing to him as his dead wife Lily (Jane Kaczmarek).

“He’s always stuck in the moment that he lost [his wife], so he’s got a foot in two different times,” Addiss told Netflix’s Tudum of Sam’s connection to Mother. “He’s here with you, but he’s always, in some way, with her, holding onto that moment because of the loss. That’s how much he loved her. And so his experience of time is a little bit fractured.”

How does The Boroughs end?

Eventually, Mother manages to convey to Sam that she wants to die and that she intends to do so in the cave where her egg originally hatched. After Wally springs her from the Shaw’s clutches, the group manages to lure the couple and some of their lackeys into the makeshift particle accelerator trap that former engineer Sam built out of old cathode-ray tube TVs. This scrambles their fundamentally altered cells, killing Anneliese and leaving Blaine severely injured.

Sam then escorts Mother to the cave to let her die, but Blaine follows and brutally attacks him. Luckily, just when it seems like Sam’s time might be up, Mother explodes in a wave of light, killing herself, her children, and Blaine, and using her powers to temporarily transport Sam back to the night Lilly died in order to give them a a few more moments together. “If Sam’s arc is about going from not accepting that death is part of life to embracing it, then he starts in a very sad place, missing Lilly,” Matthews told Tudum. “We thought [the way] to help complete that arc—to heal that wound and create a little closure—[was] to give him this magical moment.”

Later, during a party back at his house in the Boroughs, Sam retreats to the bathroom to change the bandage on his forehead and we see his reflection glitch in the mirror just as Mother’s projections used to glitch. While it’s not clear exactly what this means, it seems to indicate that Mother is either still trying to communicate with Sam in some capacity or, perhaps, that he inherited a little of her magic. According to Addiss, the moment is intended to hint at where the show hopes to go next if it gets picked up for a second season.

“We wanted to have some fun,” he said. “There’s something happening, something going through the air.”