Nothing makes for a good finale like an asshole ex-husband floating dead in a pool. But before getting into that, Dead to Me unpacks a lot of big time issues in its final episode "You Have to Go." The series stars Christina Applegate as a mourning widow named Jen and Linda Cardellini as her mysteriously chipper counterpart Judy, who is taken in by Jen. But with a secret in her pocket, Judy and Jen's relationship hits its climax in Episode Nine. Judy finally tells Jen that she was responsible for the hit-and-run that killed her husband. Then, going into the finale, everything is about to go off. But Dead to Me has no interest in a predictable ending.
As Episode 10 opens, Jen is hellbent on revenge. She stashes a gun in her pocket, and like the other set ups in Dead to Me, the series isn't afraid of what happens when that gun goes off. The season finale centers on the idea of forgiveness, and the first of a few clues leading up to the finale's final moments rests in the words of a rabbi Judy speaks with: "If we want God to forgive us, we have to forgive him."
The whole thing is beyond forgiveness of God though. It's about the finality of the five stages of grief: the acceptance that manifests from denial and anger and bargaining and depression. Judy has made her way through the ranks, leading her to pull all of her and Steve's money out of the bank and stash it as a cashier's check in a wooden bird she gifts Henry. It's then that she plots her final move—returning to the site of Jen's husband's hit and run and throwing herself in front of a vehicle.
But before she can, Dead to Me hits its viewers and main players with one twist after another. After moving out, Jen's eldest son Charlie returns home with news that his grandmother Lorna (Jen's mother-in-law) is addicted to pills. Meanwhile, Steve's search for Judy leads him to Jen's house, where he reveals he was in the car with Judy the night of the hit and run. As the confrontation builds, the scene cuts to Judy in the middle of the road. She receives a call from Jen telling her to come home, but when she gets there, Steve's body is floating in the pool with a fog of blood around him.
So who did it? The obvious choice is Jen, who had a gun stashed in her pocket, but there's also something peculiar about a man getting shot off screen. "I’ll just say that you don’t know that she shot him,” creator Liz Feldman said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "It’s not exactly what you think it’s going to be.” So if not Jen, then who? Let's assess:
Was it Jen?
Jen is the most obvious culprit here. She was the most opposed to having a gun in the house, and yet, she was the one who stashed the gun in her pocket at the end. She also has a history of angry outbursts and the clearest motive—no matter how far she had come in forgiving Judy for the hit and run in the final moments of the series, it doesn't change the fact that Judy killed her husband. An eye for an eye would make them even, but also, how incredibly on the nose would that be?
Likelihood: 3 out of 5 guns
Was it Nick?
Nick fell off the map during the penultimate episode, but that doesn't exonerate him. While he was dating Judy and investigating Jen's husband's murder, he talked about his weariness around guns. Back in Episode Six though, when Charlie was carrying around a gun in his backpack, Nick discovered the firearm and explained that his partner was killed because there's "nothing more dangerous than a stupid kid with a gun." He then follows that by saying, "I should probably get rid of this gun," but we never see where it goes. Was Steven possibly not shot by Jen's gun at all? He had no reason to stop by, but Nick might have been back by Jen's when the confrontation happened and shot Steven.
Likelihood: 2 out of 5 guns
Was it Charlie?
After recently reconciling with his mom, Charlie is home at this point. He was also one of the first in the series to note that his father had a gun and how much he wanted it to fulfill his role as "man of the house." At the time, it seemed like a ploy to land his dad's drum set, but it's not so farfetched to imagine a scene where the pending physical altercation between Jen and Steven led to the gun coming out of Jen's pocket, falling to the wayside, and getting picked up by Charlie in a moment of desperation. Or it's possible that he took another gun home from his grandmother's house, where he got the first one. It would also punctuate a deliciously complex chain of events considering how long it took Charlie to warm up to Judy. Now, Judy could be on the victim side of Charlie's misstep.
Likelihood: 4 out of 5 guns
Was it Lorna?
Least likely of the four is Lorna, Jen's mother-in-law. The matriarch is likely not far behind Charlie on his trip to Jen's house, considering that he a) took off in the night and b) snatched her pill stash on the way out. While it's not clear if Lorna had a gun, you know that woman is definitely packing heat. Similar to Nick, a stumble-upon situation is possible, with Lorna pulling a gun and taking Steven out.
Likelihood: 1 out of 5 guns
With that, we can't know the real answer until (if?) Netflix gives the new thriller-comedy a second season. The show on grief has only been out for a couple of weeks, but with the amount of fanfare its drummed up, it's hard to imagine that Christina Applegate (DID SHE DO IT??) and Linda Cardellini won't be back for another installment.
