The creators of Netflix’s The Boroughs have a three-season plan mapped out — including the very last shot of the entire series — but fans will first need to survive the questions the Season 1 finale deliberately left unanswered.
Co-creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, the duo behind The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, sat down to break apart the show’s closing mysteries, explaining why Sam Cooper’s mirror glitch, Mother’s fate, and Art’s underground tree all point toward future stories they’ve already written in their heads.
Addiss described the finale’s closing image of Sam going static in his mirror as part of the show’s broader language of signals and transmission. “Why he glitches at the end is not something we can reveal, but hopefully can reveal, knock on wood in a season two, because it’s a big part of where we’re going,” he said.
The decision to withhold answers rather than cram them into Season 1 came directly from executive producers Matt and Ross Duffer. “We had a little more of a cliffhanger tying too much into what the season might be. And they were like, ‘Listen, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. Tell a whole story and crack the door, but don’t tie yourself down to anything,'” Matthews said. “So I think it made the ending much better.”
The mysterious forbidden fruit tree discovered by Art in the underground cave is one thread the writers deliberately cut from Season 1. “We actually wrote versions of answering that question into the first season. We had some scenes that we wrote, we never shot them, and we ultimately decided to save it for later,” Addiss confirmed.
Mother’s apparent explosion in the cave carries a precise emotional logic. Addiss framed it as the show’s E.T. moment: “It was doing a lot of things in that moment… it’s the first moment where you go like, ‘Oh, Mother might have powers, even beyond what we’re seeing.'”
The series holds a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the creators have confirmed a three-season vision, though Netflix has not yet officially renewed the show. Addiss told critics the show isn’t conceived as a monster-of-the-season format: “We do think of this as one large, complex story where crazy stuff continues to happen that’s surprising, but it is one story to us.”
Critics have drawn Spielberg comparisons, with reviewers noting the creators “channel the spirit of Spielberg… managing to emulate not just his unerring instinct for storytelling but his emphasis on emotional truth.”
