Summary
The ending of Twisted Metal Season 2 unsurprisingly sets up Season 3 in a pretty explosive triple-bill of Episodes 10, 11, and 12.
The final round of the Twisted Metal tournament performs as advertised. Episodes 10, 11, and 12 are carnage from top to bottom, killing off the majority of Season 2’s cast, revealing an unexpected winner, and then turning the entire setup on its head to lay the groundwork for an inevitable third season. It’s a great example of how to deliver just the right amount of payoff in an ending while also leaving things open for a continuation, especially one that is likely to redefine the terms of engagement.
There’s plenty to break down, so let’s get on with that and recap what went down in the final three episodes.
Episode 10, “M4YH3M”
“M4YH3M” lives up to its title with a chaotic — and great-looking — round of the tournament set in the middle of a thunderstorm that claims the lives of two characters and almost nicks a third. The excitement of the racing is punctuated by a silly trial, with Calypso getting to the bottom of what happened to Dave and… Harold, weirdly enough.
The race round is simple enough — every driver is given the name of a target to eliminate. Crucially, John draws Axel, and Quiet draws Mayhem, since the two of them are split up after the wish debacle. I’m not sure the episode necessarily sticks to the rules here, since John doesn’t kill Axel, and Raven technically takes out Mayhem, but who’s counting?
Mayhem survives, just, and Axel sacrifices himself to prevent Raven from finishing her off. Since Raven also took out Vermin during the race, that means three players are eliminated, two of them dead, which isn’t bad going. Mayhem wakes up to find John and Quiet watching over her, so it seems her wish to find somewhere she belongs comes true. Or does it? She wakes up later to see Calypso disappearing into a secret passage hidden in one of the school’s lockers, and follows him to a command centre where he awakens a new racer. She returns to the room to overhear John and Quiet discussing leaving her behind, so she leaves the school with Quattro.
As for Calypso’s trial, Stu is exonerated for telling the whole truth about what happened to Dave, and Mike is stabbed for not revealing Dave’s cannibalistic tendencies after finding a finger under his pillow. Calypso also finds Grimm guilty of burning Harold, but doesn’t kill him so that Sweet Tooth can do the honours later. He does, though, strip Grimm of all his souls, though once again, to everyone watching, it simply looks like nothing’s happening, calling the show’s supernatural elements into question.
After the trial, Stu plucks up the courage to tell Sweet Tooth he’s switching teams to ride with Mike, since he’s his Harold, and Sweet Tooth takes it quite well — though he does promise to kill him during the next round.
Episode 11, “OHLYNTE”
Twisted Metal Season 2 continues to kill characters off at a rate of knots in Episode 11, as the final round of the tournament yields a lot of carnage and a few surprises, including a very unlikely winner.
Mayhem’s escape attempt is immediately thwarted, and she’s taken back to Calypso to serve as his special guest for the final since she has seen something she shouldn’t have, which turns out to be Calypso’s cheat-code final boss, Minion.
The final round takes place in front of a live audience and claims the lives of half the cast. Quiet kills Mike, and Stu crashes the car. Raven upends Sweet Tooth’s truck, but Calypso is angry about her using a shield, so he uses his maybe-magic powers to disable it. John kills Raven with one of those boomerang rockets, and she imagines Kelly reaching out a hand for her as she dies. John and Quiet take out Grimm’s bike, leaving him to fight Sweet Tooth on foot, and Sweet Tooth gets the better of that exchange, throwing him under John and Quiet’s passing cars.
And then Minion emerges, a superpowered devil thing that beats Sweet Tooth to death — I think! — and then blasts John clear out of his car. Quiet plows into him from the side and dives from Roadkill while it explodes, eliminating herself from the tournament but taking Minion with her. That only leaves Stu, who wakes up and finds himself the unlikely winner of the tournament. The penultimate episode ends with Quiet trying to resuscitate John, Mayhem killing her guard and holding Calypso at gunpoint, and Calypso blowing up the audience stands, killing all the spectators.
Stephanie Beatriz in Twisted Metal Season 2 | Image via Peacock
Episode 12, “NUY3ARZ”
A fittingly weird finale gets a little meta in its opening scenes. After crawling from a well in Virginia in 1585, Calypso apparently waited a few hundred years to pitch the concept of Twisted Metal to NBC. This was pre-apocalypse, and the show seemed like a poor imitation of BattleBots, so Calypso was laughed out of the meeting. How far we’ve come!
He got his wish, though, even if nobody else did, and it took the fall of civilization to facilitate it. But this finale reveals the key twist of Twisted Metal Season 2’s ending, which is that the tournament thing is really just the first step in a much larger plan. We’ll get to this in a minute.
In the meantime, Quiet and Mayhem jump-start John’s heart using Sweet Tooth’s truck, and they all drive away in it, following John’s crude hand-drawn map to his family’s rural retreat. They eventually find it and spend months there, fixing the place up and fishing with handguns. Stu, meanwhile, got his winner’s wish to be somewhere safe, just him and Mike — Calypso teleports him to a Calypso Industries space capsule with Mike’s dead body. Be careful what you wish for.
John, Quiet, and Mayhem’s idyllic life in the middle of nowhere is predictably interrupted by a TV broadcast that reveals Calypso has framed them for blowing up the Insider spectators during the final round. They’re now fugitives, and the Insiders have formed an alliance to hunt them down. Suddenly, Minion bursts through the door, and during the ensuing fight, she’s revealed to be a creepily reanimated Dollface.
Reeling from this revelation, John attempts to fight her off with help from Stu 2.0, who has made his way back from space after doing a few bicep curls in his isolation, now desperate to help save the day. The gang is able to escape in Sweet Tooth’s truck, though Dollface remains alive and on their tail. So, too, are the Insiders, who have declared open war against them and all the Outsiders. John figures that the only solution is to hunt down and kill Calypso, neatly setting up Season 3.
