You can say a lot of things about the Duffer Brothers’ latest Netflix project, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, but you can’t say it doesn’t live up to its title. Many bad things – arguably too many – do indeed happen throughout, and the payoff to many comes in a demented ending that somehow creates even more disarray around a story already involving a cursed bloodline, self-mutilation, and a very gross love potion. In a pretty bold move, the vast majority of the finale takes the form of an elongated argument. It’s a bit like Malcolm & Marie, only death is literally in attendance.
Luckily, I’m on hand to break all of this down. Who is the Sorry Man? What’s up with that curse? How does everything conclude? Who lives, who dies, who ends up together, and who doesn’t? Folks, we’ve got a lot to go over. Even more than usual.
Who is the Sorry Man?
The “mystery” of the Sorry Man is solved pretty early on, but it’s still fairly important to mention since it’s explicitly connected to everything else and is super important to certain character arcs, particularly Rachel’s and Jules’s.
Soon after Rachel arrives at Nicky’s family’s cabin, she’s regaled with a story about the Sorry Man by Portia. As far as Portia is concerned, the whole thing is a creepy urban legend made up by Jules, who claims to have seen the demonic serial killer in the woods as a boy. The Sorry Man turns women inside-out in search of his lost wife, who he believes is nestled in the entrails of another woman, muttering the word “sorry” all the while.
As it turns out, the Sorry Man is Rachel’s estranged father, whom Nicky naively invited to the wedding in the hopes of triggering a reconciliation. What Jules saw as a kid was the death of Rachel’s mother, who was pregnant with Rachel at the time. Rachel’s father cut her out of her dead mother’s belly, which is what Jules saw as a kid, since he was hiding under the bed. As a trauma response, he had reshaped the details of the story in his mind.
The Curse on Rachel’s Bloodline
Rachel’s mother died immediately after getting married because her entire bloodline is cursed. As explained by The Witness, whom Rachel first encountered as a rest stop on the way to the cabin, his great-great-great-grandfather had died in a hunting accident, and his great-great-great-grandmother had made a deal with Death in order to bring him back to life. Such deals are always complicated – just ask anyone who has ever been in a Final Destination movie – and the result was the bloodline becoming cursed. Everyone in the lineage must marry their soulmate, and only their soulmate, lest they die.
The Witness met a woman, Marianne, whom he believed to be the love of his life. However, his knowledge of the curse made him too afraid to commit to their union, and he jilted her at the altar. As a result, the curse spread to her and her bloodline. Eventually, she got married to another man – Rachel’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. The Witness became an immortal observer, forced to be present at each subsequent union in the family. Several members of the family avoided getting engaged entirely. Some did and died. Only a precious few managed to find their true soulmates.
Rachel Rejects Nicky
The big dramatic question of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is whether Rachel and Nicky are soulmates. By the time the ending rolls around, it’s clear they’re not. To be fair, it was obvious anyway, since Rachel had only agreed to go through with the engagement out of politeness, but when Nicky decides to call off the wedding to deny the institution of marriage, it’s one selfish decision too many, and it also proves he never really believed Rachel about the curse. It’s perhaps just as well she decided not to drink that semen/hair/blood/toe cocktail.
Knowing that Nicky isn’t her soulmate, Rachel decides not to marry him, which also means cursing his entire bloodline. But she has earned a second chance – she was willing to go to considerably greater lengths than Nicky, even though it was he who ruined it. But this has the unfortunate knock-on effect of killing basically everyone in Nicky’s family (almost everyone; more on this in a minute), since they’re all shallow and self-interested and none of them loves their significant others.
The family home becomes a bloodbath. The wedding’s attendees begin dropping like flies. Nicky, finally believing in the curse, and under urging from Jules, who is trying to prevent Jude from inheriting the curse, puts the ring on Rachel’s finger. Knowing she isn’t his soulmate, she, like everyone else, begins to bleed aggressively from the nose and eyes, eventually keeling over, presumably dead.
Rachel Is the New Witness
There’s a loophole in all this. Since Rachel refused to marry Nicky, despite them being engaged, the curse was passed on to his family. It can’t be reversed, so even though she technically dies from marrying him after, she had already rejected him first, completing the transfer, just like The Witness did. As it turns out, being the Witness is an inherited position. Rachel’s rejection of Nicky causes the original Witness to finally pass away, and she inherits the title. Since the Witnesses are technically immortal until the next person in the bloodline backs out of their wedding, Rachel is saved from her fate.
Rachel becomes the new Witness, cursed with immortality and fated to be present for all the remaining weddings in the Cunningham family. She even cautions Jude to never forget what he saw and to be very careful about who he decides to marry in the future.
Who Lives and Who Dies?
As soon as Rachel passes on the curse, virtually all of Nicky’s family drops dead. His mother, Victoria, dies from the curse, although she was dying anyway, to be fair, and so does Portia, who, it turns out, had a shotgun wedding in Vegas. All of the guests – a panoply of cousins and even more distant relatives – seem to die. Even the Witness croaks.
Nicky lives, obviously, but he’s going to have to be careful who he marries in the future, which will be difficult for him given his myriad mommy issues and his endless desire for a “perfect” romance. Surprisingly, Jules and Nellie also survive. You’d think this would be because they were getting divorced, but Jules never signed the papers. They were soulmates all along. The show is arguing that Nicky’s version of marriage – based on the false rubric of his parents, since even his beloved mother wasn’t faithful – is untenable and unrealistic, whereas the messy, fractious kind is what’s real.
That’s something we can all get behind.
