Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Netflix's The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the WindowNetflix’s The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window debuted just last week and now that it’s over, we can finally unpack all the twists and turns in the series, and how that exciting cameo in the final few minutes sets up a whole new mystery. Let’s recap the plot of the show quickly before we delve into what the last few minutes of the show mean.
The Lead-Up
In the first season of the show, we were introduced to Anna (Kristen Bell) a woman slipping into alcoholism after losing her daughter to a cannibal serial killer. Anna suffers from “ombrophobia” (a fear of rain) and spends much of her time nursing gigantic glasses of wine which she takes with her medications, as she gazes out her window to the house across the street. When an enigmatic new neighbor, Neil (Tom Riley), moves in with his daughter Emma (Samsara Yett), Anna is suddenly spurred out of her depression at the possibility of starting something new with the widowed next-door neighbor.
However, upon learning that Neil is dating a flight attendant named Lisa (Shelley Henning), she resorts back to her old habits. That is, until she witnesses the murder of Lisa from her house one stormy night. Unable to face her fear of rain, Anna collapses on the way to the house, after having called 9-1-1. When she wakes up though, she is back at home and the police and Neil all claim that the murder never happened. Lisa’s absence continues to trouble Anna even as she is told repeatedly that she was likely hallucinating from the after-effects of mixing her pills with wine.
As the final few episodes confirm though, Anna was right all along about Lisa’s untimely death. Her investigation reveals that Lisa was not who she was claiming to be and was instead a con woman named Chastity, working with a stripper named Rex (Benjamin Levy Aguilar) to steal Neil’s money. Things only get crazier when Rex is framed for her murder, upon the police finding Chastity/Lisa’s corpse. Meanwhile, things take a turn for the worse when the police assume Anna may have been suffering from a mental breakdown and killed Chastity out of jealousy, especially when they find a painting she had created of herself with Neil and his daughter.
The Finale
Upon being bailed, Anna pieces together some events from that night, discovering that the noises in the attic she had been hearing were a result of her handyman Buell (Cameron Britton) secretly living up there. She suspects that he is the real murderer, and when she sees him heading for Neil’s house, she races to stop him. However, upon reaching her neighbor’s residence she sees Buell fatally wounded, and Neil dead. It is here that the series takes its wildest swing yet, revealing that Neil’s nine-year-old daughter Emma is the real mastermind behind the murders.
Emma confesses to the murders of Chastity, her school teacher, and even her mother, and confesses to framing Anna. A bloody tussle ensues, with Anna killing Emma in self-defense. Luckily for Anna, this is witnessed by her ex-husband Douglas (Michael Ealy). Both Anna and Buell recover from their wounds. Buell is given permission to live in her attic and Anna finally gets back to her art, overcomes her ombrophobia, and gets back together with Douglas.
The Woman In Seat 2A
The series then flashes forward to a year later where we learn that Anna has a newborn daughter now with Douglas, and is on a flight to New York. She seems to be in far better spirits than when we saw her last but is no wiser to not mixing pills with her drinks, although this time her poison of choice is vodka. Her seatmate on this flight appears to be a well-off woman (Glenn Close!) heading to New York on “business”. But the woman in Seat 2A doesn’t seem too interested in chatting, instead putting herself together with a shiny gold compact.
The next scene then cuts to Anna waking up from her stupor to go to the plane lavatory where she discovers Glenn Close’s character murdered. However, when she gets a flight attendant (played by Community alum Jim Rash) for assistance, the body seems to have disappeared. To add to the craziness, the flight attendant then tells her that there was no one in the seat next to her for the duration of the flight. Now all of this would suggest that Anna had hallucinated the passenger and her death, were it not for the compact Anna finds on 2A’s seat, alluding to a larger conspiracy at play.
So what do we make of the ending folks? It looks like the show is setting up Glenn Close to be central in a possible second season. If the first season was parodying The Woman In The Window, the second seems to be channeling 2005’s Flightplan. In the Jodie Foster thriller, a woman’s daughter goes missing mid-flight and she is told she never brought her daughter with her, causing her to question the reality around her and hunt for her missing daughter.
It’s important to note that, thus far, the show is being billed as a limited/mini-series. If the story does continue though, we’re sure that Academy Award winner Jim Rash’s flight attendant character will certainly be in the mix next season. As for Glenn Close, her involvement in the first series was kept under wraps and there is no word yet on how big of a role she will play in a potential Season 2. The first season has been somewhat of a mixed bag for critics and fans alike with many finding the humor in this satire to be noticeably absent. Still, if the second season can up the ante of the first eight episodes and bring in more A-listers like Close, there will be certainly more of us keeping a lookout for The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, come Season 2.