The Ending Of Apple TV's The Changeling Explained
Apple TV+ has been making some bold decisions lately, and the best of those decisions might be adapting the 2017 fantasy drama novel "The Changeling" by Victor LaValle. An eight-episode series, the adaptation stars LaKeith Stanfield and Clark Backo as Apollo Kagwa and his new wife Emma Valentine. After a charming courtship, the pair welcomes a son named Brian named after Apollo's absent father.
The magic of their new child wears off quickly, though, as Emma becomes deeply disturbed by changes in Brian's behavior. Seeking to make sense of it, she makes a horrifying decision that destroys her husband's life and sends him searching for answers. But what he finds is nothing he could have ever imagined, as he uncovers a hidden world of the fantastic right beneath the surface of New York City.
A dark drama full of left-field revelations and shocking twists, the finale may be one of the most stirring and surprising in Apple's growing roster of original series. To make sense of it all, you might need a little help, which is why we're here to explain the ending of "The Changeling."
What you need to remember about the plot of The Changeling
Thanks to a series of extensive flashbacks, audiences learn that both Apollo and his wife Emma come from troubled upbringings. But once they find each other, their love seems limitless, and despite the harried birth of their first child, Brian — born in the confines of a New York City subway car — their future as parents seems bright. Things take a disturbing turn, however, when Emma begins receiving photos of her own child and strange messages from an unknown party, sending her into a paranoid panic. But nobody takes her seriously.
Apollo is worried that his wife may be suffering postpartum depression, but when Emma lashes out — insisting that their son is not a human baby at all — he realizes something much more serious is going on. Before he can act, Emma snaps, attacking her husband and leaving him for dead while murdering her own son before running off and disappearing into the night. Brutalized by his own wife, and with nobody to help him, Apollo then sets out to find Emma, desperate for revenge for killing his son.
Apollo's hunt for Emma
On a harried search for his wife, Apollo has a chance encounter with a lonely man named William (Samuel T. Herring) — whose own wife left him years before — who becomes an unexpected ally in his quest. With William's help, Apollo learns that Emma may be hiding on North Brother Island — a small, uninhabited land mass in New York's East River.
There, Apollo discovers a community of women and children who have suffered incidents similar to what Emma described — their babies were stolen, replaced, or killed. The group is led by the enigmatic Cal (Jane Kaczmarek), who claims to be some type of witch, and tells Apollo that Emma wasn't crazy — their son Brian really was taken and replaced by an other-worldly creature. She tells Apollo that Emma was indeed on the island, but left on a search for her son, who she believes is still alive.
That's not all, though: Cal also makes the startling revelation that William is not who he claims to be and is in fact working for the creature that has been abducting children. William is the living embodiment of a diabolical entity who steals babies to feed an ancient troll, which Apollo knows from an old fairy tale he read as a child.
A final showdown at the end of The Changeling
In the finale of "The Changeling" all story roads lead to a climactic confrontation on North Brother Island. Apollo inadvertently brought the very man responsible for kidnapping children to the community of his previous victims, which he now seeks to destroy. Following a series of explosions that all but level their little community, Cal leads the survivors to a boat that will take them back to New York, but not before a mysterious creature leaps into the water and follows them.
Setting out on his own boat back to New York, Apollo begins a new quest that will take him to Forest Hills, where he believes that Emma has gone to find their son. It's said to be the home of William Wheeler — the place where he takes babies to feed to an ancient and magical being. To buy him time, Cal stays behind and confronts a deranged William, who she impales with a wooden branch before throwing herself off a cliff to spare herself from death at the hands of William's allies.
Concluding on a cliffhanger, the episode ends with Emma and Apollo both arriving at the forest where they believe the devilish creatures are keeping their son.
What happened in that final scene?
"The Changeling" ends on a cliffhanger with an ominous final scene that closes out the season finale. It happens after Apollo takes a boat off North Brother Island. First, he's seen digging up the grave of his son Brian in an attempt to confirm that the baby that Emma killed wasn't really their son. Though we don't see the baby itself, we do hear a baby's cries, which wouldn't be expected if the buried corpse was actually a dead human baby. But that's not all — the creature in Brian's grave reaches out and bites Apollo's finger.
After this horrifying discovery, Apollo goes further. Searching an underground catacomb, he comes upon an open doorway in a subterranean system of caves and is met with what at first appears to be a slimy, wet wall of rock. But that wall is no rock at all ... it slowly begins to move. That wall, behind the cave door, is actually some kind of monster, and the final shot of the series is its giant opening eye.
But the question remains: What set this chain of horrifying events in motion? The answer to that goes back to Emma's trip to Brazil.
Emma's three wishes
Early in "The Changeling" we meet Emma while she's on a research trip to Brazil. There, she has an encounter in a lagoon with an old woman claiming to be a witch, who the locals warn her to stay away from. When she defies those warnings, the witch ties a thread around her wrist and tells Emma to make three wishes. These wishes are responsible for all of the tragedy that later befalls her.
According to the old woman, Emma's wishes will all be granted when the thread falls from her wrist on its own. Her first two wishes, we later learn, are for a loving husband and a perfect son. She gets both of those wishes fulfilled not long after returning home — she marries Apollo and Brian is born. But Apollo, determined to prove that he's all Emma needs to be happy, cuts the thread from her wrist. In doing so he cut short the witch's blessing, corrupting the third wish, which is never revealed.
One friend of Emma's knows that third wish but dares not speak it. Somehow, though, it's related to a photo that Emma took in the jungle, which now hangs in an art gallery in Norway.
Who are the Wise Ones and who are the Kinder Garten?
As "The Changeling" unfolds, audiences — along with Apollo and Emma — come to realize that the world isn't just what we see on the surface. There is a hidden world of magic, and in that world are two opposing groups: The Wise Ones and Kinder Garten.
Based in North Brother Island, the Wise Ones are mothers who have been victimized by Kinder Garten — their babies have been stolen and often replaced by inhuman monstrosities that look and behave like human infants to everyone else. Though the Wise Ones might seem to be otherworldly, they are simple people who have found community in their shared tragedy. They also live in abandoned subway tunnels in a hidden, underground society in New York City. It's even suggested that Cal — short for Calisto — may have some kind of witch-like powers. The same might also be said for their rivals, a group of 10,000 men who collectively call themselves Kinder Garten.
Ostensibly led by William, they are revealed at the end of "The Changeling," and they are the henchmen for a nightmarish, monstrous creature who feeds on children. Hailing from Norway, their founders arrived hundreds of years before, settling in Forest Hills. It's never revealed exactly what the creature is, but presumably, it's a manifestation of the troll from Apollo's childhood fairy tale.
What Apollo's visions really meant
Throughout "The Changeling," Apollo has visions of his troubled childhood in the form of nightmares that have plagued him for years. One of the more persistent dreams he suffers is a vision of his father (Jared Abrahamson), who abandoned him and his mother when he was just a toddler. In this vision, his father returns home unexpectedly, wearing a mask that he peels back before spewing blue smoke. Later, however, it's revealed that this vision isn't a nightmare; it's a memory.
Though the mask and smoke were twisted in Apollo's mind, his mother Lillian reveals the truth that his father did return to visit him when he was a child, and it was no friendly house call. As it turns out, Apollo's mother had not been honest about the end of her marriage. Apollo's father hadn't abandoned them at all — she kicked him out after he accused her of having an affair that she'd actually been guilty of.
When Apollo was just 4 years old, his father returned in a rage when Lillian was out at work. Unwilling to accept a life without his son, Apollo's father attempted to drown him in the bathtub. Thankfully, Lillian returned home just in time to save Apollo's life and murder his father in the process. This was more than just a dark incident from his past, though, as it also illustrates a repeating cycle in Apollo's life.
How the past comes full circle
Alongside the story of Apollo and Emma is a series of extended flashbacks to their separate childhoods that focus, specifically, on their parents. The story of Apollo's mother Lillian (Adina Porter in the present and Alexis Louder in flashbacks) gets the most attention, as we see her difficult marriage to Brian, an NYPD parole officer. Lillian's threats to take young Apollo away from Brian led him to lash out and attempt to kill Apollo, and a mystical deal with a higher power allowed her to get away with his murder.
This comes full circle in the present day, because Apollo makes similar threats to Emma after she tells him that their son isn't real, shortly before she attacks Apollo and kills their "child." Lillian feels her deal with the devil is the cause of all of Apollo's current problems.
In the flashbacks to Emma's youth, meanwhile, we learn that her mother Christine (Samantha Walkes) suffered from mental illness and tried to kill her entire family in a fire. Thankfully, Christine's father got her and her sister out of the house in time, but not before he died in the blaze while attempting to save her mother. Like Apollo's past, the story Emma's mother repeats itself, as Emma begins to wonder if her visions of her son being an otherworldly creature are truly real, or if it's an inherited mental illness from her mother that is to blame for her killing her own child.
The hidden racial themes of The Changeling
"The Changeling" touches on many themes that are easy to spot: The challenges in parenting and the difficulties in relationships, for instance. From mental illness to parental fears, the series is rife with deeper meaning. But there's one theme that may be lost on some viewers unless they look carefully. Because from the very beginning, "The Changeling" has themes of racism that aren't as easy to spot but are a major part of both the book and the television adaptation. After all, it's no coincidence that almost every main character in the story is a person of color, including the children in the witch's community.
In an interview with the LA Times, author Victor LaValle revealed that "The Changeling" uses horror and science fiction to tell a story about race. "If I wrote about [racism] directly, my fear is that it starts to become too lecture-y and kind of dull, for lack of a better term. But if I blend them with really dramatic situations, I find that it's like a little bit of syrup to help the medicine go down."
The series' ninth episode, meanwhile, is centered entirely on Apollo's mother Lillian, and explores her struggle as a Ugandan refugee forced into a subservient role in America. Her white police officer husband, meanwhile, can clearly represent the inherent unfair power dynamic present in many institutional systems for people of color.
How the ending differs from the book
Based on a celebrated novel, "The Changeling" inevitably had to make some changes to the story to make it fit the format of an eight-episode series. The flashback sequences are more fleshed out, and there are many other minor changes. But the ending might be the biggest change of all. Because the original novel didn't end on any kind of ambiguous note, nor on a cliffhanger — instead, it closes out the story with a tidy conclusion that wraps up every loose end. Be warned, though, because there might be potential spoilers ahead for a second season of "The Changeling."
While the Apple TV+ series ends with Apollo and Emma reaching Forest Hills in search of their son, the book shows what happens after they arrive there. Not only does Apollo discover the corpse of the creature Emma killed — which is no baby at all — it also shows Emma and Apollo rescuing little Brian from the clutches of the creature that has been eating human babies, killing the monster in the process.
As the finale of the TV adaptation subtly hints, the book more clearly reveals that Emma has magical powers herself. It reveals the origins of the monster — a Norwegian troll — and why it's collecting human children. We also learn what Emma's third wish was, though we won't spoil that here.
What the director has to say about the final episode
A slow-moving, somber series centered on a grieving father and a determined mother, "The Changeling" is a character drama first and foremost. It doesn't see a lot of action, or even much in the way of fantasy, until the very end. In the series' last episode, not only does the world of fairies, trolls, and witches come front and center, it also sees some explosive set pieces and even a climactic fight scene.
"It's the finale so the series is coming to this crescendo," director Solvan Naim told the LA Times. "Making it action-based while dealing with all the emotions and being able to give closure to those and keeping with the thriller-horror part of it — it was a nice blend of genres."
Series creator Kelly Marcel, meanwhile, managed to find ways of inserting hints as to what was really going on to leave audiences guessing about that magical world, and not everyone even picked up on it. "In every episode where we feature water, it's been interesting to me that nobody's noticed the creature is there."
What the book's writer says about the show's cliffhanger ending
With a book that ends definitively, one might expect that author Victor LaValle would be frustrated by the ending of the adaptation of "The Changeling." That's not the case at all, however, as LaValle himself was heavily involved in the making of the show and worked closely with writer and producer Kelly Marcel on bringing it to life. "When she and I were working, she was saying, 'All I want to do is be additive. I want to give,'" he told CBR in an interview published just after the finale aired. "Everything from the book, even straight dialogue, all the rest, made it into the show. And then she just added more."
As for that open-ended climax, LaValle was more than supportive, understanding the desire to expand the story and provide audiences with unanswered questions that leave them wanting more. "One of the things that Kelly and I talked about was building a show that threw out a lot of mysteries. We were also really committed to answering those questions, solving those mysteries, but wanting to really build them up and build them up and build them up so that you feel, on some level, as thrown into a fairy tale as Apollo and Emma are."
Will there be a second season of The Changeling?
Given the unfinished story in the final episode of "The Changeling," the series practically cries out for a second season. Victor LaValle has promised, however, that any unanswered questions at the end of the finale will be answered, suggesting that Season 2 is already in the works behind the scenes. Fans waiting for the story to continue, however, may be in for a long wait, because as of press time, no further seasons have been ordered by Apple TV+.
The lack of news on Season 2 of "The Changeling" could be due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, with studios hesitant to make announcements until it's been settled. But given the lengthy work stoppage, any movement will likely be slow, leaving a long gap between seasons. If it does come, however, expect it to explore the ending seen in the book, with Emma and Apollo reuniting to search for Brian, and having a final showdown with the creature who has been preying on human children.