‘The Institute’ Ending Explained – A Lot Of Symbolism and Payoff, But Little Closure

Stephen King is the most famous horror writer in the world, which is worth remembering sometimes, because The Institute isn’t really a horror story. It’s terrifying in its implications, sure, but it doesn’t co-opt the iconography and grammar of the genre. Or, at least, it didn’t. But the ending of Season 1 is rife with it. Ironically, the creepy kids are the good guys, the victims, but as far as aesthetics are concerned, a bunch of dead-eyed telepathic children staring at the camera has the desired effect. It took eight episodes, but in its finale, The Institute really feels like a King story.

This helps to raise the stakes. It reframes the kids, whose lives are at stake throughout, as an appropriately menacing force, and it creates the impression that you’re only ever a scene or two away from something thematically or visually horrific. Ten minutes into “Fight”, and there’s a nasty death, a dismembered corpse, and several scenes of malnourished kids in jumpsuits muttering directly at the camera. By the end, the titular facility is being held telepathically in the air. It’s like King’s playing his greatest hits.

After all – most, anyway – of the key questions were answered in the penultimate episode, this finale is all about payoff. And setting up a second season, obviously, since that has already been confirmed, despite the story not really lending itself to a continuation like that. And it accomplishes both of those things pretty well, especially the former, as we’ll see.

Good Riddance to Tony

Tony’s death is a neat shorthand for the kids rising up against their oppressors, since he’s purely an instrument of the Institute’s evil. Sigsby’s entire claim that the facility’s world-saving efforts are justifiable holds very little water when someone like Tony is in its employ. He has no character, no backstory, and no motivation beyond sadistically torturing kids. His death is the beginning of the end.

His death occurs, for what it’s worth, because of the predictable hubris of Stackhouse and Hendricks trying to force Avery, against their better judgment, to conduct a mission. It’s a simple enough affair, forcing someone driving a car to careen it off a cliff, but as soon as Avery is hooked up to all the Back Half kids and the Hum in the Recovery Room, it’s game over. Their combined psychic might wrecks all the equipment, feeds Tony his own taser – how fitting – and gives Luke a headache.

There are also, I think, multiple flashes of other kids in other Institutes all over the world, which Sigsby implied was the case in the previous episode and is reiterated through dialogue in this one. It’s a nice idea – and possibly the crux of Season 2 – that Avery’s breakout efforts also alerted the other facilities to the existence of each other, prompting a worldwide revolution. That should bring the true string-pullers out of hiding.

The Final Solution

Proving his Hitler-esque bona fides, Stackhouse’s solution to the problem of the escaping kids is to gas them all to death. Shutting off the power to lock them in a corridor, he instructs his oddly enthusiastic security team to brew up a batch of chlorine gas, and then uses that as a cudgel to threaten Tim and Luke into returning to the facility. If Luke doesn’t give himself up, his friends will all be killed, and Luke knows he isn’t bluffing since he can sense what’s happening from miles away.

Of course, though, Luke’s too smart for that, and with the help of Tim and Wendy – who I’m still not sure about – he plans a very simple bait-and-switch to wriggle back into the facility while Tim keeps Stackhouse and co. occupied. It goes off without a hitch, and Luke is able to reunite with his friends inside the Institute, almost all of whom – the named characters, at least – are much livelier than the catatonic state they were in whenever we glimpsed them in previous episodes.

It’s satisfying to see the fear and panic among Stackhouse, Sigsby, and Hendricks, too. They’re all worried about not just the present problem at Dennison River Bend, but about the man on the phone, their direct superior, having them all killed for potentially endangering the entire global operation. The Institute’s ending relies heavily on the idea of the oppressors being reduced to the victims to provide the audience catharsis. It’d be hard to argue that it doesn’t work.

Raising the Roof

Of course, the biggest bit of symbolism in this finale is the Institute itself being destroyed. Once Luke gets inside, Avery leads the kids in a gigantic global telepathic network to use their combined might to open the doors, but the effort starts uprooting the facility at its very foundations, and it begins crumbling around them. This adds a bit of jeopardy to the escape, and also results in the weird sacrifice of Avery and all the other kids, since he has to remain behind to maintain the telepathic connection for reasons I’m not sure I entirely understood. Couldn’t they all have just run out of the open doors?

Either way, the point is made when Luke, once he’s outside, psychically raises the entire building into the air and slams it back down. It’s like Yoda lifting Luke’s X-Wing from the Dagobah swamp. What is it with heroes and the name Luke, anyway? A question for another time.

For all its symbolic power, though, this does leave almost everything unresolved. With the exception of Stackhouse, who falls through the crumbling floor of the facility, presumably to his death, everyone else is still alive. Hendricks fled like the weasel he is, and Sigsby is able to get away with the flash drive containing the evidence Maureen recorded. The mysterious man on the phone orders a clean-up crew to erase all of the evidence, and is so unbothered by it that he then nips outside to play with his children – or grandchildren, or kidnapped children from God-knows-where, it’s kind of unclear – to make the point that he probably does this kind of thing quite a lot.

Tim, Wendy, Luke, Nicky, Kalisha, and, for some reason, George all make it out of the facility and head to wherever they’re going next together. It’ll be for Season 2 to figure out something for them to do. And it’ll be interesting to see what it is.