This article contains discussion of themes readers may find distressing.
Inside Man spoilers follow.
Inside Man rocked BBC viewers' worlds in 2022 with its wildly twisty tale of a clergyman whose desire to do the right thing by literally everyone ended up with kidnapping, attempted murder and Stanley Tucci having the time of his life on Death Row.
Now it's finding a whole new audience on Netflix. So, for the benefit of those who have revisited it, or come to it fresh, let's dive into those plot developments and explain what happened at the end.
Over the course of four episodes, the local village vicar Harry Watling (played by David Tennant) finds himself pushed to the edge of his own morality after a badly timed joke on his son Ben's behalf makes maths tutor Janice believe the boy has an interest in child pornography.
Of course, that isn't actually the case. Harry simply took a USB stick from paedophile verger Edgar without thinking, and Ben tried to cover up what he assumed was normal porn for the sake of his dad once Janice opened the files.
Now Harry is desperately trying to convince Janice his son isn't a paedophile, with his pleas only serving to make her more sure that the teen deserves to be reported to the police.
Things end with Janice locked up in the family basement and Harry resigning himself to framing himself for the child porn possession to protect his son and committing murder by carbon monoxide poisoning (after encouragement by his wife Mary).
It gets even worse when Ben finds himself locked in the basement with Janice, with his parents none the wiser.
Meanwhile, over in the US, British reporter Beth Davenport has recruited a criminal psychologist on Death Row to help track down Janice, who sent her a blurry but ominous picture message in the tussle before she was kidnapped.
Can he crack who's taken her from across the Atlantic? And will he ever open up about his own crime?
Here's how the final episode played out, and what happened to our lead characters.
What happened to Janice in Inside Man?
Janice is definitely the worst woman to kidnap, if you were planning to kidnap anyone. She's savvy, clever and manipulative, wasting no time in spreading her DNA across the family basement using blood and urine, knowing it would assure their conviction if found out.
As a natural loner, her only commitments are work and a weekly video chat with her sister in Canada. This means it's not actually that hard to check her diary and see where she was last meant to be, leading police straight to the vicar's house when they realise she's missing.
Her smarts don't extend to "listening for more than five minutes" though, refusing to believe Harry and Mary's protests that their son is innocent, and her going to the police would ruin his life before it's even begun.
Eventually, they realise there's no way they can stop her going to the police if they release her, and her attempts to manipulate them against each other weren't entirely successful, so they decide instead to kill her off.
Only Ben realises she's in the basement before the plan is started, with Harry accidentally locking him in with Janice before sealing the door and letting a faulty space heater do its thing and fill the room with carbon monoxide.
Janice eventually survives her ordeal but only just. As the room fills with poisonous gas, she attempts to manipulate Ben into calling the police on his mum and dad, but instead in his hallucinating state, he batters her with a hammer.
By the time Harry gets downstairs to check on her, she looks dead. Deciding to take the heat for the sake of his son, he discovers she's still (barely) alive. Committing to the death, he's stopped in his tracks by Beth, who has finally pinned down where Janice is.
What happened to Harry and Mary?
We still can't figure out if Harry and Mary deserve best or worst parent awards. They commit to protecting their son, but they really go a stupid way about it.
When Mary decides Janice needed to die, Harry's martyr complex once again kicks in and he decides to "do the right thing for his family" and kill her himself. He then locks Mary out the house, handing only a laptop and a coat through a window to her before he sits in the house and waits for the gas to do its thing.
He even ignores her multiple frantic phone calls and lies to Ben about what he's up to, which is even more stupid considering Ben was just downstairs and needed saving but he didn't bring it up.
Mary, meanwhile, finds Janice's keys in her coat pocket and decides to hide out there, putting her laptop back there to hide evidence that she was ever in the house. But what she doesn't count on is running into Beth, who, with the help of one of Grieff's friends has broken into Janice's home in a bid to track her down.
Beth and Mary get into a bit of a tussle but Mary is clearly panicked and not much of a killer, picking up a bread knife and cutting Beth's arm with a swipe, before helping her with the wound. When they try to leave the house, Beth falls down the stairs and Mary uses it to escape, but Beth isn't that far behind.
As Mary calls Harry and leaves a voice message, Beth catches up with her in the street. Trying to get away from the pushy journalist, Mary walks out into a road and straight into the path of an industrial truck. She's killed instantly, and now Beth has her phone to track where Janice is. (It's not really ethical to steal a dead woman's phone as she lies in the road, Beth, but go off.)
By the time Beth and her new pal Morag drive to Harry's house, things have fully escalated, with a bloodsoaked Ben running down the road away from the scene of the crime. Beth heads into the house just in time to save Harry from killing Janice, but he turns on her, finally reaching his breaking point after all his efforts to be "good" just made things worse.
Just as he looks like he's going to kill her, he's stopped in his tracks as an excavation team sent by Grieff arrive in the basement.
What happened to Grieff?
Despite being in prison on the other side of the world, Jefferson Grieff is always a man with a plan. In fact, he was able to pin down where Janice was pretty easily after his associates looked into her Facebook profile and tracked her diary.
The cunning criminologist, who is in prison for brutally murdering his wife and beheading her, sent an excavation team to Harry's house under the ruse that he had buried said wife's head in his basement – because to date he never revealed where he put it, only saying if it ever emerged it would reveal exactly why he had to kill her in the first place.
His wife was the daughter of a mobster, and even a brutal beating from him wasn't enough to give up the burial site.
But lying about her head's location meant he was guaranteed the death penalty, and his time would be up in a matter of weeks.
He later has an arranged phone call with Harry, who has been arrested and is now in prison for everything he'd done to Janice. Together, the pair reflect on their respective crimes, knowing that they each had a "reason" even if it was severely misguided.
Despite everything, Grieff still refuses to give up where Rachel's head is, or what exactly caused him to kill her the way he did.
Instead, he tells Harry: "That’s a story for another day, perhaps you’ll be the one I tell it to. You and I are the same now.
"There are moments that make murderers of us all."
And with that, the men are left in their separate prisons, both in their own way doomed forever.
But that's not all!
In a mid-credits scene, we see Janice in prison with Grieff, requesting he take one last case before his execution – inquiring into her husband's murder. Wait though – didn't she say she wasn't married? Grieff asks when he died, and she reveals he isn't dead, but deserves to be. BOOM!
Inside Man is available now on Netflix.
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Freelance writer, Digital Spy
Tilly is Gold-Standard NCTJ accredited journalist with eight years of experience in entertainment journalism.
She has been heard giving her insight on the latest TV stories on BBC Radio across the country and on BBC News.
Previously working with The Sun Online, Yahoo, Metro.co.uk and Independent IE amongst others, she joined the Digital Spy team from 2021-2023 as Deputy TV Editor (Maternity cover).
With a speciality in TV drama and true crime, Tilly has been praised for her exclusive content with A-list stars ranging from Sir David Attenborough to the lawyers behind Making A Murderer.
She’s happy to report her mum now takes her seriously as a journalist as she got to interview George Clooney once.
