The Body, Netflix’s new campy-horror TV series, came out this week. But based on a quick social media browse, it might as well have come out months ago. The high school thriller inspired passionate fan debates among viewers and dozens of fan cams dedicated to favorite characters long before a single episode aired. Now that The Body has finally arrived, however, fans are having an entirely different debate that hinges on its wild cliffhanger ending.
In search of answers, we turned to co-showrunners Quinn Shephard and Gina Gammell, who admit they don’t even know where the series is headed next and that they enjoy the conversation the finale has inspired.
“We are amiable and gullible and don’t have an answer either,” Gammell tells Polygon.
Below, we break down some of The Body‘s biggest season 1 mysteries with Shephard and Gammell, and discuss where the story might be headed next.
The following contains spoilers for The Body season 1 ending.
The Body season 1’s ending, explained (sort of)
Broadly, The Body follows a high school dance team who may or may not have sacrificed a girl’s soul to qualify for their Regionals competition. Through its eight episodes, the show explores the shifting dynamics and allegiances between its three main characters: Anya (Kristina Bogic), Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros), and Elise (Sara Boustany).
Season 1 ends with Anya confessing the sins that had been eating at her all through the season, including both her sexuality and the fact that she feels responsible for the series’ inciting incident, where Grace (Sofia Wylie) fell into a coma after taking some ecstasy at a Halloween party. Anya reveals that, when Grace started feeling sick, she decided to drive her to the hospital, only for Grace to seemingly die in the back seat. In a spur-of-the-moment decision, Anya returns Grace’s body to her bedroom and tucks her in, hoping to cover it all up without having to deal with the consequences.
Following Anya’s confession, Grace wakes up, stunning everyone, and says, “I’m God.” It’s the season’s final line of dialogue and one heck of a cliffhanger.
“It was the place we were always aiming towards,” Shephard says.
Shephard and Gammell agree that what they enjoy the most about the season finale is the fact that it can inspire passionate debates.
“We want people to feel similarly at the end to the way you feel at all of the biggest turns of the show, which is a continued curiosity about what is really going on, and a certain autonomy to influence that in your own watching,” Shephard says. “A certain ability to be like, ‘No, I know for sure that she’s possessed.’ And then someone else is like, ‘No, in the last episode, they said that she could hear stuff in the coma.’ I think those are our favorite conversations to witness.”
The question of what’s real and what’s imagined lies at the core of the series, which is constantly pitting religion against reality. The many supernatural appearances and occurrences that take place could be part of a mass delusion, or they could be a miracle.
Gammell says that the theories that people share with them “entirely convince us each time. It doesn’t matter. Depending on who we’re speaking to, we’re like, ‘You’re right. It is the devil.’ And someone else is like, ‘No, no, she has a drug interaction.’ We’re like, ‘You’re right. That is correct too.'”
What to expect from The Body season 2
If the show gets renewed for season 2, one thing is clear:
“Grace will be awake,” Gammell says. She and Shephard are excited to write new dialogue for Wylie beyond “I’m God.”
Whatever comes next, Shephard and Gammell seem to want their show to continue to straddle the line between science and religion. At least for now, they want no clear-cut answers.
“We’re both people who believe in science and ghosts,” Shephard says. “So I think that we fall in the middle.”
Bonus: How White Chicks inspired The Body
Much of The Body works because it’s at its best when navigating tones that seem opposite, at least on paper. Shephard began writing the show’s pilot as a drama; it was only after some time had passed and she and Gammell began working together that they landed on the campy tone that makes the series so memorable.
“I think the satire and the comedy of the show was very much born from our working collaboration on it, and Gina finding the stories of things that upset me as a teenager quite funny,” Shephard says.
An example of this is a scene that depicts our three lead characters in the car together, with tensions at an all-time high. Shephard reveals that after she had written it and finalized it, she got an idea for the scene’s tone from watching White Chicks.
“I sent a still to my DP and said, ‘I think this is how the scene should look: them in the convertible: White Chicks,’” Shephard recalls.
If you’ve seen The Body, you know exactly what scene Shephard is talking about. While the actors play it like a serious drama, the tone makes it one of the show’s funniest moments. The result is a marriage of two seemingly opposing sensibilities.