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The Undoing has had many mysteries across its six episodes on HBO. Why did Henry (played by Noah Jupe) have that hammer? Exactly how many coats does Grace (Nicole Kidman) own? And most importantly of all, who was it that killed Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis)?
Major spoilers ahead...
In the series finale of the HBO series, titled "The Bloody Truth," we got answers to all those questions and more. Henry had the hammer, as we previously predicted, as he had found it and hid it to protect his father Jonathan (Hugh Grant). Grace has A LOT of coats. And, most crucially, it was Jonathan who killed Elena.
Of course, that means that there was no mystery all along—after all, it was Jonathan who has been on trial for the majority of the show's six episodes. Not only that, but it was Jonathan who committed the murder in the book The Undoing is based on—though the novel reveals that right at the start, leading fans to suggest that the murderer had been changed for the HBO version.
As such, what the show essentially did is pull off an anti-twist; viewers spent so long speculating about who the killer could be (with Lily Rabe's Sylvia their main suspect) that those who had not read the book missed the obvious suspect that was in front of their very eyes the whole time.
That hammer was literally the closing blow against his case for innocence. Though the murder weapon does not make its way into the court case, Grace seals her husband's fate by taking the witness stand vowing to defend her husband, but in reality does the exact opposite.
The episode then shows us in gory detail exactly how he killed her, before Jonathan finally reveals his true colors to Grace by kidnapping his own son (who he had previously tried to frame in an act of desperation), leading to a police chase ending on a bridge, where he threatened to jump before being taken off into custody.
In the end, then, it seems that The Undoing was never actually a murder mystery in the same way that Big Little Lies was. Instead, the central mystery of the show was exactly how much we know about our loved ones, even if they seem like perfect cancer-curing doctors.
Of course, there is some argument that the show might have been better just focusing on that question and how it affects Grace's view of her life (as the book does) rather than giving so much time to a murder mystery that was never really a mystery.
Though there is unlikely going to be another season of what has been billed as a limited series, The Undoing has left us with a pretty sour portrayal of this entire world—a world where lawyer Haley (Noma Dumezweni) knew the whole time that Jonathan was a brutal killer and yet tried to get him set free, and a world where Grace is working as a therapist and yet clearly does not know anything about the inner life of anyone, including the man closest to her.
The Undoing is streaming now on HBO Max.
