The Boroughs: What The Shocking Final Scene Actually Means

Warning: This post contains SPOILERS for The Boroughs. In Netflix’s new Stranger Things‘ replacement, The Boroughs, idyllic retired life crashes into a sci-fi conspiracy that upends the world of a group of residents of a sleepy desert retirement community. Ultimately, the residents who have been sidelined and cast off (at least in the opinion of Alfred Molina’s Sam), thwart the evil company behind the community, who it turns out were using residents as feed for their pet monsters, in order to keep Mother – the original alien/monster – alive, to syphon off her blood for its regenerative healing properties. It’s quite complex when you relay it like that. In the end, Sam helps Mother escape and return to her birth place in the bowels of the desert.

In the final scene of the series, after Sam and the surviving residents have toppled nefarious CEO Blaine Shaw (Seth Numrich) and his wife Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg), and allowed the alien Mother to die (taking her spider-like infants with her), the friends are celebrating at Sam’s house. He excuses himself and goes to the bathroom, and while he washes his hands, his reflected image in the mirror glitches twice, like the Boroughs staff. The suggestion is that the story isn’t over – though there’s not a second season renewal yet – but what does Sam glitching actually mean?

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Why Sam Glitches in the Mirror At The End Of The Boroughs

On the surface, the idea that Sam has a continued connection with Mother even after her death somewhat compromises (or at the very least retcons) the information we learn through the series. The Shaws and their staff are connected to Mother because drinking her blood has changed their bodies, and their outer appearances are merely projections of how they wanted to look. But Sam didn’t drink any of Mother’s blood (that was limited to Wally) and there was no established rule that the telepathic connection he shared with the alien in any way transformed him physically. So there’s something amiss.

More intriguingly, when Mother cast projections of Sam’s dead wife to him, they glitch the same way Sam’s reflection does. It’s the tell that reveals the visions are not real, though Sam assumes they’re hallucinations or ghostly visions of his trauma manifest. Does that mean what we’re seeing in the mirror isn’t real? Symbolically, this could suggest that Sam is projecting an image, hiding something in those happy moments, or that his spirit has been permanently altered by the events. But there’s no precedent to that, and The Boroughs is more of a scientific show than a spiritual one. Ultimately, it feels like the suggestion is that Sam somehow remains connected to Mother, or that she has left a trace of herself on him.

The Other Confusing Question About The Borough’s Ending

There’s more confusion at play here too, which might suggest what we see at the end of The Boroughs is not as it seems. When Mother dies, Blaine Shaw withers away immediately and dies, because, as established earlier, the creature’s blood is only a temporary reprieve from physical ailments (including simple aging, which is seemingly what kills Shaw). The question, then, is how The Boroughs simply continues to exist as a community when Shaw dies. Putting aside the fact that the CEO of the company and some of the controlling board are dead, the surviving staff loyal to Shaw will presumably all die off. Shaw didn’t believe he was in danger, so the idea of him having a succession plan doesn’t really work, and the community is so cut off from the rest of society that it simply continuing to function normally makes no sense.

Could it be that the flicker of Sam’s reflection is actually a bigger indication that this is no longer reality? Is this merely a continuation of the sequence where Sam and Lilly are reunited in the immediate aftermath of Mother’s death? That vision isn’t explained, and doesn’t fit with how the other visions work. Not to mention, the explosion that kills Mother literally disintegrates the “kids”, but Sam escapes almost entirely unscathed. Is Sam’s happy ending, feeling like he belongs with his Boroughs friends no more than a dying vision of his ideal of feeling useful and accepted?

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