Mike Flanagan Breaks Down Why He Changed The Ending to Carrie

Mike Flanagan may be the go-to guy when it comes to adapting the works of Stephen King, but he always leaves his mark. The creator of The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass has his go-to moves — monologues, repertory casts, themes of religious guilt — and they’re usually pretty clear to see, no wonder what the source material is.

That hasn’t changed with Carrie, Flanagan’s take on King’s classic tale of bullying, revenge, and telekinesis. There are multiple major changes, like the entire story moving into the present day or the passing of Carrie’s father happening right before the series starts. But the biggest changes were saved until the end, where we see a completely different fate for Carrie and Margaret White. But what exactly happens, and why did Flanagan choose to make such a choice? The answer may affect the show’s future as we know it.

Warning! Major Spoilers for Carrie Episode 8, “AP Physics,” below.

The final episode of Carrie picks up exactly where you expect: with Carrie’s initial reaction to her prom queen prank. But we’re told this in a series of interviews after the event, so we already know who survived: Sue Snell tells the interviewer about what really happened, and Tina is there showing the effects of everyone’s smartphone exploding in their faces. As we track Carrie’s journey, we watch as she lays waste to her school, encounters (and murders) Billy and Chris, and finally makes it back home.

In a heartbreaking few scenes, we see Margaret comfort her daughter after everything happens, but that hides a dark secret: when Carrie least expects it, Margaret attacks her daughter with a knitting needle, following the advice given to her by the mysterious woman she met up with. This attack is unsuccessful and leads to Carrie tearing down the entire house.

Just when she’s about to push a wall onto her mother, Margaret reaches out and manages to awaken her own latent telekinetic powers and stops it from crushing her. We then see her being interviewed after the event, revealing she survives Carrie’s reign of terror — a huge change from the book and previous adaptations.

It’s then that we see the interviewer, who is played by longtime Flanagan collaborator (and his wife) Kate Siegel. She reveals to Margaret that she’s actually there on behalf of the powered women we saw investigating Carrie. She asks Margaret, using some kind of compulsion power, if she could awaken that power again. When Margaret says no, the interviewer uses her power to stop Margaret’s heart, instructing her colleagues to make it look like she passed away of natural causes.

Meanwhile, Carrie manages to survive her revenge tour through Ewan, and she wakes up in the car of Emaline, the “imaginary friend” Carrie kept seeing throughout the series. It becomes clear who she really is: someone who can astrally project, so Carrie was actually just seeing projections of her until now. They ride off into the sunset together, escaping the mess they left behind.

So why change the ending to allow Carrie to have more adventures? “We had to end this so that if the last frame of video in Episode 8 is the last time we ever see this version of Carrie, that had to be right, that had to work,” Flanagan tells Inverse. “But always with this, because we knew she was going to survive the story very early, it was like, well, what could this mean moving forward?”

According to Flanagan, that could mean a possible three-season arc, but the ending wasn’t completely motivated by the hopes of a continuation — it was more of a gift to the character herself. “If this is the end of Summer H. Howell's tenure as Carrie White, I wanted to send her off into the world we thought she deserved,” Flanagan says. So even if this series doesn’t continue to a story of Carrie in the great big world, at least she’s headed in that direction.

Carrie is now streaming on Prime Video.