Sometimes a mystery isn’t really about what happened, but instead more about how and why it happened. That’s the case with Netflix’s four-part limited series Adolescence. The show tells the story of 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), who’s arrested for the murder of his classmate Katie Lewis (Emilia Holliday) at the beginning of the first episode. By the end of that first hour, it’s clear that Jamie did do it. We see security camera footage of him committing the crime. So there’s no mystery about whether or not Jamie is a murderer. So then the real question is about the circumstances that led to everything, and Adolescence answers it by the end.
Adolescence is filmed entirely in one continuous shot, which makes the tragic story all the more harrowing as the audience feels like they’re living it in real time with the characters. Throughout episodes 2 and 3, the audience learns that Jamie had low self-esteem and spent a lot of time in his bedroom reading incel propaganda. He asked Katie out, but she turned him down and accused him of being an incel on Instagram. All of that led to Jamie getting enraged enough to commit murder. It’s shocking, but even more gets revealed in the last episode. Here’s an explainer on the ending of Adolescence.
What Happens At The End Of Adolescence?
The last episode of Adolescence takes place 13 months after Jamie’s arrest, on his dad Eddie’s 50th birthday. Eddie — who’s played by series co-creator and co-writer Stephen Graham — and the rest of Jamie’s family are still reeling from all the fallout of Jamie’s arrest while Jamie sits in a detention center awaiting his trial.
Jamie calls Eddie to wish him a happy birthday and to let him know he’s decided to plead guilty to huis murder charges. “In Episode 4, he’s much further along on his journey than before,” series co-creator Jack Thorne said on Netflix’s site Tudum. “Jamie now knows what he’s done and what his future might be. That allows him to put his feelings in a box and close the lid on himself in some way.”
Eddie is left to confront everything that’s led his family to this sad ending. In the last moments of the series, Eddie sits in Jamie’s room (the same place the series begins, with Jamie’s arrest) and cries as he tucks Jamie’s teddy bear into bed. It’s all truly heartbreaking. “We knew that we wanted to end it in that room. We wanted the journey to finish where it began,” Stephen Graham said to Tudum. “This is where the person who Jamie became was created.”
There’s one more devastating detail hidden in the Adolescence finale. The last song in the show is a cover of Aurora’s “Through the Eyes of a Child,” and it’s sung by Emilia Holliday, who plays the murder victim Katie. It’s a poignant end to a harrowing series.
