‘The Body’ Season 1 Ending Explained by Creators and Season 2 Hopes

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for The body now streaming on Netflix.

Although Netflix’s new YA horror series The body feeds on mass hysteria, or “groupthink” as creator Quinn Shephard calls it, Shephard and co-showrunner Gina Gammell emphasize that there are no individual misinterpretations of the end of the first season and what happened to Grace.

In the eight-episode drama series, a high school dance team – the St. Barts Lions – gathers for a party on Halloween night 2004 to introduce their newest member, Grace Franklin (Sofia Wylie), who won the spot to replace Maddie Delaney (Shirley Chen) after breaking her ankle before their regional competition.

Their ritual, however, goes awry when Grace loses consciousness, falls to the ground and has seizures, forcing popular girl Anya Butler (Kristina Bogic) and under-the-radar Lisbeth Anderson (Geena Meszaros) to drive her to the hospital only for Grace to be pronounced dead by Lisbeth, who finds no pulse after a major seizure. Grace eventually swallowed an ecstasy pill as part of her initiation, in which the team members call on Satan to accept their (Grace) sacrifice in order to place at regionals.

Many of the series’ endings are shrouded in mystery depending on how viewers interpret the puzzle pieces. Grace’s gasp at the end of the first episode and the subsequent developments that led to her rebirth in the finale have always been the “north star” of the end of Season 1.

“We always knew that’s where the show was going to go. From the beginning, that was the arc of the first season, and I think that has a lot to do with things we’d like to do next season and how to continue to tell the story,” Shephard told Deadline. “So I think we never really talked about moving away from that because that was always the way it was going to end,” Shephard said. “There’s really no right way to watch the show. One of our favorite things is hearing people debate, someone who really believes the show is supernatural and someone who really believes it’s a story of mass hysteria, and there’s a grounded explanation every step of the way.”

Despite limited interaction with their new team member, the girls on the dance team begin to think they are seeing Grace in ghostly form, haunting them from her comatose state, triggered by Elise’s (Sara Boustany) performative fainting at mass. Although many Leos eventually reveal that their visions – which brought mass hysteria to an unprecedented level between them and those closely involved in their lives – of Grace were not real, the exact combination that brought Grace back to consciousness is still an enigma.

“People said it was bodily possession. People said it was the devil. People said she just woke up and that’s gibberish,” Gammell said.

“That she really is God. That there is someone else’s ghost in her body, or that she just heard them when she was in a coma. But also, isn’t that life?” Shepard added. “I mean, how many of us have a friend who says, I swear I saw a ghost yesterday, and then you sit with that person for 20 minutes, you try to figure out what the explanation is. It’s that show.”

Anya’s confession to the head priest, Father Franklin (Nnamdi Asomugha), in the finale cannot be ignored as a possible catalyst for Grace’s awakening.

“It’s a catch on fire,” Gammell said. “That’s Maddie’s prophecy, and if there’s a season 2, we’ll answer it.”

The medications the entire team took during their Halloween party have been questioned as a possible cause of Grace’s comatose state. Tyler Flores (Marcel Ruiz), who provided the ecstasy, assured the girls she was clean while offering his own analyzes of mass hysteria, linking it to repressed sexuality and frustration and more. This character started out in a very different “early iteration” that Gammell described as a “brother, fucking boy, mean”.

“He kind of started to come into being once we saw an image of him in our head (as) a little eccentric and a little lovestruck,” Shephard said. “We really liked the idea that he’s still the voice of (reason) and he’s telling the deepest truth of anyone, but he’s always a little stoned while saying it, and no one takes him seriously.”

Tyler oscillates between the popular group of guys who associate with the dance team clique while still thoughtfully engaging with students of lower social status like Leo and Lisbeth.

RELATED: Anonymous Content Signs Canadian Actress Bella Neuspiel

“I think it goes hand in hand with not trying to use men as weapons and, in fact, it’s the women who are a bit of a problem on this show,” Gammell said. “That was part of it, and how our collaboration worked. When you talk about finding the humor and finding your sweetness or your softer edges, I think Tyler is a good example of that.”

As for whether Tyler and Lisbeth had sex, a potential season 2 could answer that question. This is alluded to when the two men are shown en route to the act and Tyler asks if she has any “protection” to which she asks “from what?” leaving the door open for a possible pregnancy angle despite the closed door scene.

“I think if they’re sleeping together, it’s like another big mystery of the show. Neither of us were there, so none of us really know what happened in that room,” Gammell said. “But I think Geena jokes that Lisbeth’s first kiss was mouth-to-mouth with Grace while she was trying to revive her. So I don’t know how fast she’s going. She’s just a baby.”

Both Gammell and Shephard identify as defenders of Lisbeth, meaning they do not view her as calculating or with a motive in the story when she is on the team.

“We’ve talked a lot about how there’s an interpretation of the character that’s really manipulative or almost sociopathic, and I think we’ve never seen the character that way,” Gammell said. “I think Lisbeth is someone who is deeply committed to survival and has been for much of her life. You can feel her heart. People are perpetually baffled by her, she’s a little unreadable, but I think there’s a sweetness about her and the way she is with her brother, there’s a playfulness and her humor is so clever. She’s a character we’re only scratching the surface of in terms of where she can go (She) is desperately searching for a purpose and a place in the world.

The creators are also defenders of Lisbeth’s brother Leo (Jackson Kelly), who spends the most time on screen with Grace before she loses consciousness. A drawing of her naked as a sacrificial lamb in his diary circulates as something that connects him to the motive that could have caused his collapse.

“I identify with Leo. He has some of the heaviest scenes of the entire season, and Jackson is such an incredible actor who carried them with so much grace. He’s someone who is so tortured by his scruples. He has a bit of an OCD compulsion around morality that’s really difficult for him,” Shephard said. “We weren’t trying to make a show that was hyper-critical of religion. Obviously religion is a theme of the show, and it touches on it in a lot of ways. But I think his character is a necessary and important exploration of someone who takes things literally, even more literally than his priest wants, which is where we get that nice connection where Father Franklin says, ‘Hey, you’re taking this as being a little too hard on yourself.’ “

Leo was also seen as the last one to speak to Grace outside the party to apologize for the drawing she found in her diary.

“It was important for us to show that he has these very normal human impulses, as a teenager, that then turn, in his own sense of fear, into something really evil and out of control,” Shephard said. “I actually think it’s kind of cool to see a moment from his priest, rather than an oppressive priest, a moment of friendship between them, and we see the nuance of religion.”

Adult characters like Father Franklin, Coach Shauna Miller (Gabby Windey), and Grace’s father Michael (Motell Foster) provided a more “grounded” explanatory presence in the story to represent real-life issues amid the girls’ panic over paranormal activity. And Father Franklin fits in with the broader presence of men in the series.

“There’s such a sincere desire to do the right thing in this character. Something that came out very early on in this show is that in so many stories about groups of young women, there’s a storyline or a desire to make a storyline about men taking advantage of young women and trying to control them. And I was like, ‘Look, we’re not doing that in this show, but we’re having these girls torture this poor man who’s really just trying to do his best,'” said Shephard.

RELATED: “The…