Summary
The ending of The Cage looks like it’s heading down familiar tracks, but Episode 5 offers some dark and welcome surprises.
I’ve got to be honest, I was expecting a more run-of-the-mill ending to The Cage than what’s offered up in Episode 5, a finale that takes a couple of quite surprising turns. While the sudden cliffhanger is a clear campaign for a second season, I didn’t mind it, since Niko’s inevitable betrayal of Taylor has been teased since the beginning. With this and the revelations about Taylor’s mother and Regis, the outcome of the championship fight against Ibrahim and Taylor’s potential future in the UFC almost seem a small affair by comparison.
Let’s break it all down.
Ibrahim Might Have Been Responsible For What Happened to Boss
The finale of The Cage picks up three months after the penultimate episode. Boss is alive after being stabbed by a seemingly random goon at the underground MMA event where Taylor went postal, but he’s in a coma. In the intervening time, Taylor has been lounging around with Elena feeling sorry for himself while Bilal and Niko have been looking into the assailant.
Predictably, the stabber has a connection to Ibrahim and is present at all of his fights. As we know, Boss had some kompromat on Ibrahim that he used to threaten him in an earlier episode. It turns out that Ibrahim was abusive to an ex-girlfriend and Boss was aware of it. It’s the kind of thing that would ruin a promising career if it came out, so with Ibrahim the current champion of ARES and seemingly destined for the UFC, it stands to reason he’d want to cover his tracks.
This gives Taylor even more reason to dethrone Ibrahim, but in the meantime, he’s heading to Mexico at Boss’s request to train with some more legendary UFC fighters.
Lessons From Jon Jones
When Taylor first gets to Mexico he’s greeted by Brandon “Sixgun” Gibson, which I’m fairly certain will mean nothing to people who aren’t pretty deep into MMA culture. I was laughing at first thinking that this was the big “legend” who was going to turn Taylor’s fortunes around, but it turns out Gibson’s just a stepping stone to former light-heavyweight and current heavyweight UFC champion Jon “Bones” Jones.
This is similarly funny because anyone even cursorily familiar with Jones’s career knows that many of its downswings have revolved around alcohol and drug use and resulted in a litany of criminal charges. This means he’s perhaps not the ideal candidate to coach Taylor through a personal reinvention where he reminds him how to unlock his true potential, which I alluded to in my review of The Cage, but that’s what we get anyway. And Jones is a surprisingly decent actor so I’m willing to forgive it.
After another training montage, Taylor gets the eye of the tiger back. He’s ready to take on Ibrahim.
Jon Jones and Melvin Boomer in The Cage | Image via Netflix
Taylor’s Mom and Regis Have Been Exploiting Him
Mere hours before the fight — GSP returns out of nowhere to corner Taylor in Boss’s absence — Taylor begins to panic because his mother and Regis haven’t picked up the tickets he left for them. So, fearing that they have once again been blindsided by the loan sharks, Taylor risks the fight to go and check in on them.
When he gets to their place he finds them packing. They’re about to leave for Mallorca. In a dark twist, Taylor’s mother revealed that she concocted the entire loan shark story, getting Regis to punch her to make it convincing, just to motivate Taylor into making her more money. She has been saving up for a long time, not struggling anywhere close to the extent she has been pretending, to squirrel away enough cash to leave the country — and leave Taylor behind. Her justification is that she was ashamed of Taylor’s academic failures and never believed he’d make a career “boxing” (of note: he never bothers to point out that he does MMA, a totally different sport, at any point in the season.)
Taylor vs. Ibrahim and Niko Shows His True Colours
From this point, The Cage begins rocketing towards the ending that we were all expecting. Taylor has a close fight with Ibrahim but ultimately emerges victorious, becoming the ARES champion and avenging what happened to Boss. Backstage, he’s approached by UFC matchmaker Mike Hamilton and offered a fight on an upcoming Paris card, fulfilling his combat sports dreams.
But…
Niko shows his true colors in a final sequence where he nips out to get Taylor a bottle of water and happens to bump into some anti-doping personnel outside. It was established in an earlier episode that Niko gobbles performance-enhancing drugs like they’re going out of fashion, so naturally, he has some on his person. We see him look at the bottle of pills, and then at the bottle of water, and can see the cogs in his mind whirring. In the final shot, he hands Taylor the water, which he gratefully drinks, and we see the tell-tale white powder of smushed tablets on Niko’s fingers. It looks like he has sabotaged his best friend’s career right as it was taking off.
