The heroes of Wayne on YouTube Premium go on one wild journey over the course of the
show's rollicking first season.
Where do their adventures leave them, and what might happen to them next?
This is the ending of Wayne explained.
Before you start watching the series, the name Wayne makes the show sound like it could
be about basically anything.
But by the time the first season is over, it feels like a title that tells you all you
need to know.
What's the show about?
Well, it's about that kid Wayne, that absolute madman, the Robin Hood-meets-Dirty Harry of
Brockton, Massachusetts.
How else could you describe it?
"Who's that?"
"That's f---in' Wayne."
Neither hero nor anti-hero, the protagonist of Wayne is more like a force of nature, a
teenage dispenser of violent justice whose reputation precedes him.
Everywhere he goes, his legend grows, with his enemies being left bruised, bloodied,
or — in the case of Del's daddy — with their nose half-bitten off.
But no matter how mythical Wayne is, he's far from the show's only focus.
The second half of the equation is his classmate Del.
Which is definitely not short for nothing, so don't ask.
"Delilah!
Delilah!"
The two teens are bonded by a traumatic home life, social outcast status, and a tendency
to talk with the heaviest Boston accents in the history of the east coast.
"I don't think it's got good-for-you stuff in it, like vitamins and all that.
Like orange juice and pretzels."
"Pretzels don't got vitamins."
"I'm pretty sure they do."
"Right.
Pretzel vitamins."
Wayne and Del spend the majority of the season making their way down the east coast to Ocala,
Florida, supposedly for the purpose of retrieving a gold Trans Am that used to belong to Wayne's
late father.
The car is the closest thing Wayne has to a birthright, being put together with real
passion by his dad before it was lost to Wayne's absentee mother, Maureen.
Since then, it's ended up in the possession of Curtis and Reggie, the hellishly criminal
father and son duo she ends up living with down south.
At the start of the series, getting the car back makes for such a thin motivation to cross
the country that it almost feels like a part of the show's big joke.
But when Wayne and Del actually arrive in Ocala near the season's end, it quickly becomes
clear to Del that Wayne came all this way for reasons more emotional than he at first
revealed.
He doesn't just want a family heirloom — he wants family.
If he can get the Trans Am back from Reggie, his dirtbag stepbrother — if you can even
really call him that — then all the better.
As capable as he is on his own, Wayne is still just a teenager looking for somewhere to belong.
He's so desperate for it that he'd drive across the country to seek affection and acceptance
from the mother who abandoned him when he was only five.
So what if she lives in, as Del calls it, "a white trash fortress of meth-heads and
crocodiles"?
After Wayne's dad dies, she and her horrid new family are all he has left.
"Oh my God.
I'm sorry, do you not care about how your son's been doing for the past 11 g------ years?"
"Has it been 11 g------ years?"
Wayne never talks about any of this, of course.
Though he's not what you'd call nervous around people, Wayne is a definite introvert, keeping
his emotions and thoughts guarded at pretty much all times.
Arriving with Del in Florida is the first time that he really shows any vulnerability,
and his mother's such a terrible person that the effort doesn't really pay off.
At the start of the show, many of Wayne's Brockton-based antagonists, like police Sergeant
Geller and Del's dad and brothers see only malicious evil in Wayne's behavior.
They make assumptions of his character, based on the trail of broken bones and blood he
tends to leave behind him.
As they follow his tracks toward Florida, Wayne's pursuers think that he's a madman
in a bad way.
At first, they figure he kidnapped Del — a somewhat reasonable assumption, considering
the barbaric level of damage he inflicted on Del's family.
But when they start asking questions to the people who've met Wayne, and stayed on his
good side, they uncover a different take on the fugitive teen.
Wayne is feared by his enemies, sure — but he's motivated solely by a desire to do good.
"No matter how bad life treated you or betrayed you, from where I'm
sitting, everything you do, it's done out of love."
The source of Wayne's chaotic good nature comes out in Ocala, when Wayne is catching
up with his mother and her new family for the first time in more than a decade.
We learn from Mo's recollections that Wayne is following in the footsteps of his father,
who was something of a hometown legend himself as a younger man.
Wayne's father, Mo explains, always had a certain code of honor, along with a notorious
intensity known to drive neighbors out of town.
Everything was always black and white with him, she says — right or wrong, with no
middle ground.
Sure sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Just like that, we finally learn almost everything we need to know about why Wayne is the way
he is.
It's a little bit of nature, and a little bit of nurture — or the lack thereof.
At the end of the show's first season, Wayne and Del's trail of destruction finally catches
up with them.
Sergeant Geller manages to arrest Wayne, with arrangements being made to send him back to
Brockton to face the justice system.
Del tries to escape with Wayne, but her father and brothers catch up with them too, stopping
them in their tracks and successfully shepherding her away from him, whether she likes it or
not.
The season seems to end with both protagonists at a personal low, having been captured by
everything they were trying to run away from.
Del is back with her terrible family, and Wayne is incarcerated, probably not for the
last time in his life.
But while their physical circumstances at the season's end may be less than ideal, both
characters have grown emotionally, becoming better people than they've ever been before.
On a personal level, Wayne ends the last episode in an almost triumphant place.
After the death of his father, he migrated south to see if he could find a new home with
family there.
Instead, they all took turns trying to kill each other while his mother sipped wine.
Now Wayne knows what the real score is.
His future's not with family.
His salvation is with Del.
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