Elves season 1, episode 6 recap – the finale/ending explained

By Jonathon Wilson
Published: November 28, 2021
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Elves season 1, episode 6 recap - the finale/ending explained
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Summary

“The Sacrifice” has a decent amount of action and builds to a payoff for some relationships, but it’s all over too quickly and with too little explanation to really resonate.

This recap of Elves season 1, episode 6, “The Sacrifice”, contains spoilers, as well as a discussion of the Elves ending. You can check out our spoiler-free season review by clicking these words.


As if it wasn’t obvious from the title and the cliff-hanger ending of the previous episode, Josefine is intended to be the sacrifice in this finale. Karen has her chained up in the woods, and she admittedly seems pretty torn up about it. But then again, Josefine has brought chaos to the island, and there’s only one way to restore the balance. If only all annoying child characters could be offered up as meals for horrifying forest creatures! Unfortunately, life isn’t fair, as evidenced by the predictable fact that Josefine of course doesn’t end up being sacrificed.

Elves season 1, episode 6 recap

It works as a decent ticking-clock device for about half the episode, though, as all the other various characters unite just in time to figure out where Josefine is and head out to save her. Kasper follows Liv, of course, and a surviving Muller takes them straight to the site of the sacrifice, implying that Karen has done exactly this kind of thing before. Thanks to some help from Kee-Ko, Josefine is almost able to escape on her own, but it takes Liv defying her grandmother and unlocking the chains to finally get Josefine loose. Karen is blindsided by the elves and eaten alive, which seems a fitting fate for her — perhaps she’ll do as a peace offering instead.

What follows is a breathless high-speed escape that includes far too many clear shots of the attacking elf to really be taken all that seriously, but it does give Kasper an opportunity to prove his manhood with a cattle prod, which disappointingly isn’t a euphemism. Muller eventually crashes the truck, but everyone is fine except for the elf, who ends up mangled beneath one of the front tires. Everyone is able to sprint back within the confines of the fence just in time as a useless Mads, being berated by his wife all the while, manages to finally power up the generator, forcing all the emerging elves back into their hiding spots in the ground… for some reason.

Elves ending explained

The lack of explanation for this sort of thing is a big part of the reason why Elves doesn’t land with much impact. After all this, Muller fires off a flare that summons a ferry from the mainland, and as he says his farewells to Josefine, he explains that the locals will sort all this out “their way”, and we’re just expected to buy that as a conclusion. Liv expresses the same vague sentiment to Kasper. But at least it amounts to a bit of a payoff with her since she jumps onto the ferry and leaves the island, having realized there’s more to life than being stuck there mending fences forever. These two were easily my favorite characters, so it’s nice to see their relationship actually go somewhere.

There’s also, admittedly, the sense of Josefine’s parents finally realizing she’s older than she is, but that whole dynamic was a bit trite anyway, and I wouldn’t say Josefine came off particularly well at any point throughout the show, so it essentially vindicating her consistently idiotic behavior rings a bit false. Still, at least we get a cliffhanger. As the family all happily sit inside the car ready to leave the island once and for all, the camera pans down and reveals that Kee-Ko is clinging to the underside of the vehicle.

You can stream Elves season 1, episode 6, “The Sacrifice”, exclusively on Netflix.

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