A fiery prophecy, zombie pilgrims, and a poisoned poisoner – "Wednesday" ended with such a
bang that you may have missed how the pieces fit together.
Everything happening in the explosive finale of "Wednesday" is tied to a maniacal colonizer
who founded the village of Jericho named Joseph Crackstone.
He is a vile and devious man who hates outcasts.
Even though the outcasts lived in this part of North America before he and his ilk ever
arrived there, he wants to eradicate them from the face of the Earth.
His prejudice sets the stage for the show's exploration of bigotry through a fantastical lens.
One of those outcasts is an ancestor of Wednesday Addams, who also happens to look exactly like
her, named Goody Addams.
Her family is killed by Crackstone, but she escapes and vows vengeance.
She kills Crackstone, curses his soul, and puts him in a casket sealed with a blood lock
to keep him from ever returning.
When Wednesday first visits Jericho, Sheriff Donovan tells her exactly what he thinks of
her father.
"That man belongs behind bars for murder."
Upon further investigation, Wednesday discovers that when her parents were students at Nevermore,
Gomez was accused of killing a normie named Garett Gates.
The truth is that Garett was a descendant of Joseph Crackstone tasked with killing everyone
at Nevermore with nightshade poisoning.
However, Garett was so obsessed with Morticia that he tried to kill Gomez so that he could
have her.
During their altercation, a vial of nightshade poison shattered in his pocket, killing him.
Following the death of Garett, his sister Laurel flees the country and is believed to
have drowned later on.
However, Laurel Gates fakes her death.
Like the rest of her family, she hates outcasts and can't stand the fact that they built a
school for them on her ancestor's land and killed her brother.
So Laurel builds a new identity: Marilyn Thornhill.
She returns to Jericho and manages to secure a teaching position at Nevermore.
The school sees having a normie on the staff as a first step in bringing outcasts and normies
together, but it is all a ruse.
Thornhill's mission from the very beginning is to resurrect her fallen ancestor and allow
him to finish his work.
This line of thinking is reminiscent of modern racists who preach the virtues of the "good
old days" -- but Thornhill takes it to the extreme by literally bringing someone from
the old days back to achieve his bigoted goals.
The ending of the season was prophesied around the same time Morticia and Gomez attended
Nevermore.
A fellow student who is a powerful seer has a vision of the school burning.
She recreates the image in a book that is locked away in a library hidden in the lower
regions of Nevermore.
It depicts a Pilgrim battling a pig-tailed young girl.
That student is so convinced that the girl in the picture will destroy the school that
she eventually orders her son Rowan to kill her if he sees her.
As it turns out, though, psychic visions aren't the most reliable when it comes to seeing
the future.
We do see Wednesday confronting a Pilgrim, but she isn't there to destroy the school
-- she's saving it.
This, again, plays into the idea that the way we see the world can be obscured by our biases.
As Morticia informs Wednesday, psychic visions are personalized.
If you're optimistic, or a dove, you see happy visions.
If you're pessimistic, or a raven, you see doom and gloom.
The woman who prophesied the final battle must have been a raven because she assumed
disaster was coming when it was actually salvation.
Nevermore was created to be a safe haven where outcasts can learn and socialize without the
fear of being discriminated against.
Of course, if you put enough people together, cliques and social groups start to form.
Such is the case when Wednesday arrives.
While everyone there is considered to be strange and different, they still more or less interact
the way normies do.
Wednesday is too weird even for them.
That doesn't mean she's incapable of making friends, however.
She eventually finds a group of her own; her roommate Enid is a werewolf who can't transform.
Eugene spends all his time with bees and has zero friends.
Xavier grew up rich with a famous father, but he's nothing like him.
Even Bianca, the coolest of the cool kids, doesn't quite fit in because she's a siren.
Her voice can control people so she never knows if the people around her genuinely like
her or are compelled by her voice to do what she says.
This unifies them and helps create the perfect team to stand up to Thornhill and Crackstone.
We eventually learn that Goody Addams founded a secret society known as the Nightshades
in the early days of Nevermore to protect outcasts from vindictive normies.
Wednesday discovers the location of their headquarters by matching the watermark on
the drawing of the prophecy with the statue of Edgar Allan Poe and solving a riddle.
As it turns out, the society still exists and they invite Wednesday to join them.
She declines, because even a secret society is too social for her.
Still, the fact that she was able to discover them earns her some points.
They don't all become her friends exactly, but when she informs them of the fight that
is about to take place, they stand with her to protect Nevermore and outcasts in general.
When Wednesday arrives at Nevermore, there's a monster killing people.
The sheriff has been telling everyone it's a bear, but bears don't remove body parts
and leave with them.
"Tell them a bear is back."
"You don't really believe that, sheriff."
"No, I don't."
Through her investigation, Wednesday discovers the monster is called a Hyde.
These beasts are human, but transform when triggered by traumatic events or chemical injections.
The identity of the Hyde is the main mystery carrying the series.
Hydes are tied to the people who liberate them, considering them to be their masters.
Thornhill knows this, and she also knows that the sheriff's son Tyler is a Hyde.
Following the death of his mother, Thornhill manipulates him and becomes a surrogate parental figure.
She then chains him to a cave, injects him with her elixir, and forces him to transform
into a Hyde to kill people and steal their body parts to help her resurrect Crackstone.
Like many of the characters in this show, Wednesday's perky and colorful roommate Enid
is at war with herself.
On the one hand, she seems to get along with most of the kids at school and always has
a sunny disposition, but she is incapable of wolfing out and is ashamed of that.
For most of the show the most that changes is her nails.
She's worried that her inability to transform will lead to her family disowning her.
If she isn't part of a pack, werewolf society will shun her and she will die alone.
This fear drives most of her decisions.
However, things start to change when she stands up to her mother and proclaims she is her
own person.
From that point on, she stops operating out of fear and begins acting out of love.
During the blood moon, when Nevermore is under attack, she finally wolfs out, subduing Tyler
in his Hyde form and protecting Wednesday.
"Enid?"
The Severus Snape in this "Harry Potter" pastiche is Principal Weems.
Although she is a major antagonist in the series, she isn't the villain viewers are
led to think she'd be upon first encountering her.
In fact, every decision she makes was meant to protect Wednesday, Nevermore, and outcasts
in general.
She wants to make sure outcasts are never seen as evil or dangerous so they would be
accepted by normies.
What's so tragic about this is the fact that her memories of Nevermore aren't the rosiest.
While Morticia and Gomez remember Nevermore being the greatest years of their lives, she
recalls mostly disappointment and loneliness.
"Such good times we had, didn't we Larissa?"
"Some of us better than others."
She has every reason to be the villain, but she sees the good in people and that drives
her to always do what she believes is the right thing.
Yes, Wednesday and her friends save the school from Thornhill and Crackstone, but Weems dedicates
her life to protecting Nevermore -- and that makes her a true hero.
Eugene is a stereotypical nerd who is so isolated from his peers that the mere fact that his
classmates are willing to visit his beekeeping sanctuary makes him so excited he essentially
pledges his life to them.
It would be easy to write him off as desperate for companionship, but it's a little more
complicated than that.
Eugene doesn't just help Wednesday with her investigation because he wants a friend; he
does so because he believes in his own buzzy moral code.
"Snitches get stung.
It's hive code."
Basically, Eugene understands that every bee in a hive works together to serve and protect
the queen.
He is so in tune with these creatures that he adapts their social structure to his own life.
During the Poe Cup, Wednesday has a vision when touching Joseph Crackstone's crypt.
In it, she is visited by her ancestor Goody, who tells her:
"You are the key."
You might think that this is a metaphor, but nope — it's literal.
After all, Goody trapped Crackstone's body in a casket sealed with a blood lock.
As Thornhill explains in the final episode, the only way to open it is to spill the blood
of an Addams on the night of a blood moon.
Thornhill sacrifices Wednesday and successfully resurrects Crackstone.
However, that's not the only key Goody was talking about.
Wednesday is also the only person who can vanquish Crackstone for good by stabbing him
in his heart.
As she lies there dying, the spirit of Goody passes through her thanks to her necklace
and heals her wounds, freeing her to face Crackstone and end his reign of terror forever.
The town of Jericho serves as a visual metaphor for the division happening in the series.
It's a quaint town built on stolen land with a massive school meant for outcasts looming over it.
Although the money Nevermore brings into the town keeps it thriving, the citizens there
hate the fact that weirdos are living on "their land."
They have an amusement park called Pilgrim World that teaches people all about the early
days of the town's settlement.
It is mentioned in the series itself that this worship of Pilgrims ignores the genocide
of native people and whitewashes history.
Beyond paying lip service to this, however, the show examines this dichotomy through a
visual metaphor.
By aligning themselves with the idealized and inaccurate depiction of pilgrims, the
town of Jericho makes a clear statement that they believe natives don't deserve to exist
on their land.
The land Nevermore was built on didn't belong to Joseph Crackstone -- it was reclaimed by
the outcasts he tried to annihilate.
The final showdown between Wednesday and Crackstone seems like an intentional comment on colonization
as it is literally the descendant of a long line of outcasts, Wednesday, who battles an
actual colonizer, Crackstone.
In the end, we find out Tyler was the Hyde, learn that Thornhill was controlling him,
and finally see Crackstone destroyed.
Also, Wednesday learns the importance of hugging.
She even accepts a dreaded cell phone to stay in touch with everyone.
It seems like everything is wrapped up nice and neat -- until the final scene.
As paramedics transport Tyler to the hospital, he begins transforming into Hyde form, suggesting
that we haven't seen the end of him.
Additionally, there is still the question of Wednesday's stalker.
When examining a music box found in Laurel Gates' room, she finds a secret compartment
with photos of herself.
Clearly, someone has been following her and taking snapshots.
The easy assumption is that it was Miss Thornhill, but if that is the case, why does Wednesday
get text messages from an unknown number on her new phone from a number she doesn't recognize?
Beyond that, why do those messages contain new photos of Wednesday?
Presumably this mystery will be solved in a potential season 2.