Summary
An overstuffed and hurried finale really resolves nothing, with the show banking heavily on a second season to give us any kind of ending.
This recap of The Longest Night season 1, episode 6 contains spoilers, including a discussion of The Longest Night’s ending.
The finale of The Longest Night begins with, of all things, a lonely single supervillain montage, as we get a snippet of Simon, in his immaculate home, boiling two eggs for breakfast and eating them at the table, all dainty. The cycle repeats a couple of times. Eventually, though, he inexplicably plunges his hand into the boiling water and stabs to death the woman who bandages his hand, just in case you needed a reminder of exactly who this guy is.
The Longest Night season 1, episode 6 recap
It’s right for the finale to start here since there’s still so little we don’t know about Simon. We don’t know what he has on whoever is pulling the strings of the cops outside. His “friends” who have kidnapped Laura don’t seem to know anything about him. The news of that kidnapping even throws things into disarray for the cops, who didn’t anticipate the development and don’t want an innocent young girl to be killed as part of their crusade.
Simon covers for Hugo, claiming he pushed Montes off the roof at the end of the previous episode, so the warden is free, for now, to try and mount his next ill-advised operation to save the day. Meanwhile, the prisoners are debating freedom of a different kind. Cherokee is leading them through his pre-dug escape tunnel. Some don’t want to risk it. Others, like Nuria and Javi — who we learned in a previous episode was a trans man, and who we learn in this one killed six people for virtually no reason — feel they have little choice. The assailants are close to breaching the Red Block and, presumably, killing everyone they find inside.
The question becomes whether everyone can be saved. Hugo is already deeply committed now, but for the call to save Laura to work, they need to be able to hear Simon’s voice. This means that Simon can’t be captured by Lennon and his crew, even though Bastos agrees to let them in to spare any further bloodshed (and on the proviso that his file gets wiped, though we also learn it was Hugo who reported him in the first place.) In a nifty sequence, Hugo rockets a car through the maintenance tunnels while the cops give chase. He’s heading for the roof, and at the same time, we cut back and forth to Laura’s captors debating on whether to kill her as the deadline hits. They’re victims too, after all, and are just trying to protect their own loved ones. Rosa wants to pull the trigger, but her husband talks her out of it. Well, almost. But just as Rosa is about the pull the trigger, the phone rings. Hugo tells them Valentina is waiting for them. He made the deadline.
But at that moment, Laura begins to have what looks like a heart attack. Lending context to the repeated flashbacks we’ve seen throughout the episodes of Laura having a similar attack in a swimming pool and Hugo carrying her to the hospital, it seems Laura has a heart condition. She seems to die as Hugo screams and we cut back to six hours earlier.
The Longest Night ending
In a brief scene, we see Rosa’s daughter being kidnapped and Rosa being left a little package containing various syringes, a gun, and a phone. This is exactly around the time that Simon’s arrest is being reported on the news.
In the present moment, Lennon catches up to Hugo on the roof and essentially blames all of the carnage on him, saying that if he had just told him about Laura being kidnapped they could have resolved everything together. Instead, Hugo’s deceptions led to all that followed, which seems like a pretty one-sided view of the situation if you ask me. But as the sound of sirens begins to be carried through the night, Hugo reveals that he called the cops to report an armed group attacking the prison, but never specified that they were cops themselves or that they were looking for Simon. He and Lennon can still negotiate. Lennon tells Ruso to seal the Block, with a hodgepodge of guards and inmates sheltering inside.
And then the show just… ends, more or less, with almost nothing resolved, and on the contrary several lingering subplots still very much in play. Manuela, for instance, finds Espada alive and well, and Simon saves Elisa from one of the cops. In the very final scene, as Lennon and Hugo talk on the roof, Lennon explains how, since nobody knew Simon was going to be in Baluca, he must be receiving help from someone. And the camera pans to a picture on Rosa’s mantle, which includes her and her husband, the long-haired man we’ve seen receiving phone calls all season, and… Hugo himself?
I’m not sure what we’re supposed to assume here — that people Hugo knows are responsible, or that Hugo himself is in on it with them, and that he gave away Simon’s location. This finale leaves so much unanswered that the show is actually more complex now than when it began and we knew literally nothing, and the lack of resolution hurts the final product. If we don’t see a second season greenlit, we won’t see any kind of ending. And that’d be a real shame for an otherwise enjoyable thriller.
You can stream The Longest Night season 1, episode 6 exclusively on Netflix.
