[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for all of Devil in Ohio.]
Netflix’s new limited series thriller ends on a very unsettling note, which is what makes it so good.
In Devil in Ohio, hospital psychiatrist Suzanne (Emily Deschanel) brings a cult escapee, Mae (Madeleine Arthur), into her home. The rest of her family is less than pleased, especially as the cult want her back and the teen exhibits strange behavior. By series’ end, Suzanne and her husband Peter (Sam Jaeger) are separated, and he’s living with the kids. Suzanne is with Mae… but learns, in the final moments, that the teen staged her own kidnapping and had willingly returned to the cult. (The psychiatrist rescued her.)
Daria Polatin, who wrote the book inspired by a true story and serves as creator, showrunner, and executive producer on the limited series, breaks down that ending and addresses if there will be a second season after that cliffhanger.
That ending scene — what does Mae want exactly? A mom? Was that something she had planned from the beginning?
Daria Polatin: I don’t know that we’ll ever fully get inside Mae’s head. I think that she is a survivor and she’s someone who has an enormous will to live. They tried to kill her. They were going to sacrifice her. And they were cutting her back. She was lying on a table, and if you notice, there’s that little slice that goes up and that’s from her finding this life force inside of herself and jumping off the table, pulling her dress on, and bolting out the door. That obviously happened offscreen right before the first moments of the pilot.
Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix
But she has an enormous will to live and drive, and so that never goes away. She’s always doing things that are looking for a place for herself, for sanctuary, for protection, for a home, and I think she really finds a partner in that with Suzanne. And then we also know Suzanne has trauma from her own past and is projecting onto Mae this wish [that] she was saved when she was Mae’s age. Suzanne is kind of dealing with her own past and her own psychology and her own issues, something she’s kept very buried, even from her family and herself, really. So it’s really beautiful to watch these women connect over feeling betrayed by their mothers and being able to get their mothers out of situations that were unfavorable.
So I think from Mae’s perspective, and that’s how we approached it with Madeleine, she’s looking for a place for herself. For the most part, people think they’re doing the right thing, even if they’re doing things that from outside perspectives, people won’t agree.
Despite what Mae may have done, Suzanne is, in some ways, in a better place, not when it comes to her family, but when it comes to herself because she’s talking in therapy about things.
100 percent. I think she’s really accepted a part of herself that she didn’t want to look at. It’s that blind spot that we talk about, the difference between who you are and who you think you are, and that’s really the monster in this show. There are no vampires, there are no werewolves. The monster is our own psychology. I like to call it the horror of the everyday, because it’s the horror of our own selves and our own parts of our selves we don’t want to deal with and when you don’t deal with things, it ends up causing behavior that is, on the surface, unintended and can cause a lot of problems, as it does for Suzanne.
Ricardo Hubbs/Netflix
Even though it is being called a limited series, that ending definitely set up a potential second season. Is one possible?
Well, anything’s possible. We wrote it as a limited series. We wrote beginning, middle, and end. We put all our cards on the table. But the story naturally has a couple of questions at the end. Where did the cult go, and what’s going to happen with Mae and Suzanne? Is she going to pick up the phone and call Peter in the next moment? It’s interesting to think where it might go but for now, it is just an all-in limited [series].
Neither Suzanne or Peter are completely giving up. What would it take for their family to be whole again?
I think for Mae to be completely out of their lives. I think that’s Peter’s line in the sand, and Suzanne still completely understands Peter and is going with what she sees as a short-term separation but she still wants to get Mae set up. She says “I want to help her get a job and get her GED and find a permanent place,” and for Peter, that’s just her still not fully accepting who Mae is. Suzanne has a revelation about herself in 108 when she’s talking to the therapist. But the piece we hold for the very, very end is that Suzanne still thinks that Mae’s just like her and Mae can change and she doesn’t fully comprehend that Mae’s wiring is just so deep and maybe too deep to be recovered, so that’s that last moment that she has when she’s like, oh my God. That’s that real horror moment that she still even had a little bit of a blind spot there for Mae.
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Because of that, because it took so long for that revelation, what can Suzanne even do next? She can’t just act on it yet because it’s so sudden, right?
Yeah. And that’s why we pop out of that moment. We leave them in that moment because that’s a huge moment and there are different ways it can go. That’s what’s fun about it, too, as a conversation piece. I like to write stories that people can engage with and talk about and discuss, and so it’s a good question and it’s something fun for the audience to engage with as well in conversation, like watercooler. What would she do? What would you do? I like stories that encourage some interaction as a viewer as well and I think this gives us that to stimulate conversations with people.
As you pointed out, the cult is still out there. How much of a threat are they to the Mathis family? It seems like Mae is the more immediate threat…
100 percent. I don’t know that we really fully know the answer to that. They could leave her alone. They’re a cult. They could want her just to live in fear. They’re very manipulative, so even just knowing that they’re out there, Mae will never feel safe. She’ll know they’re always out there, so that’s part of it, too. We’ll never truly know, but no matter what, they pose a threat, because that’s just who they are.
That song playing during the attempted sacrifice of Mae, then at the end was so chilling and so good. I loved it.
Oh, yay, that’s by Isabella Summers, who is the Machine of Florence and the Machine, and she wrote the song for us. She wrote this gorgeous song and it was so good that we put it in a couple of places and then over the credits at the end, but she knocked the song out of the park. Then we also have the main title song by Bishop Briggs, who wrote the song for us as well, and our composer wrote that hymn for the cult. My writers room and I did a lot of work on forming what the cult is and writing all their backstory and so we gave the artists aspects of the cult, language of the cult, so we got to really collaborate with our artists so the pieces feel unique and special to our show while also just being super cool songs.
Devil in Ohio, Streaming now, Netflix
