<i>The Girlfriend</i> Finale Is Full of Bombshells, Right to the Very End

Spoilers below.

Prime Video’s six-episode limited series The Girlfriend is a battle of perspective. In telling the story of a controlling mother suspicious of the lower-class woman her son begins dating, the show employs a dual POV: one from the mother Laura’s (Robin Wright) viewpoint, and the other from girlfriend Cherry’s (Olivia Cooke). In doing so, the psychological thriller confirms one thing for sure—no one’s perspective is ever 100-percent believable. But while many of the other episodes of the series employed title cards to split the narrative into the two POVs, the finale opts to tell a straight narrative and allow the audience to decide which character’s interpretation of the story is closer to the truth.

When Laura’s son Daniel (Laurie Davidson) brings Cherry home to meet his parents, Laura is immediately suspicious of Cherry’s motivations. For one, they’re a wealthy family—Cherry comes from more modest beginnings—and Daniel is now a doctor, providing stability for Cherry. Laura also perceives many of Cherry’s interactions with her family to be overly sexual, almost baiting Laura to react. But more than anything, Laura is still reeling from the death of her young daughter Rose, which has forced her to tighten her grip around Daniel, even though he’s a grown man.

Laura’s need for control manifests in her desire to break up Daniel and Cherry, and she even goes so far as to lie to Cherry about Daniel’s fate after an extreme mountain climbing accident. But when Daniel finds out that his mom has interfered in his life by telling his girlfriend that he died, it’s a step too far for him and effectively drives an irreversible wedge into their relationship. He not only begins dating Cherry again, but proposes to her in the finale and doesn’t invite Laura to the celebrations.

That’s not to say that Cherry is entirely innocent. She has a vindictive streak, seen briefly when she sabotages her ex-boyfriend’s wedding early in the series. But she’s adept at keeping this part of herself hidden from Daniel and his father Howard; Laura is the only one who notices something is off, and it’s her determination to expose Cherry that is ultimately her downfall in the finale of The Girlfriend.

The first blow to Laura is from Howard, who packs his belongings and leaves her after finding out about her ongoing affair with one of her artist clients, Lilith. When Laura pleads with him about freeing Daniel from Cherry’s clutches, Howard suggests that they stop interfering and allow him to make his own decisions (and potential mistakes). Cherry is a nice girl in the eyes of Howard, who cites her donations to a nursing home where her father supposedly died as a metric of her goodness, and he can’t understand why his wife can’t accept her into the family. He doesn’t stop there, either; Howard accuses Laura of not allowing him to properly grieve Rose, and reveals that he has been secretly convincing his wealthy friends to buy from her to prop up her failing art gallery.

With her world crashing down, Laura is vengeful. She digs up the mail that she stole from Cherry’s apartment earlier in the season, finding a “past due” bill from a nursing home. Putting two and two together from Howard’s throwaway defense of Cherry, she heads to the nursing home to meet Cherry’s father, who is very much still alive, though bedridden. Just as he threw a fit when seeing Cherry in a previous episode, he reacts angrily at the mention of his daughter’s name, and the nurse explains that he fell 20 stories off of a building and broke his spine in two places and fractured his skull.

Believing Cherry is responsible for her father’s predicament, Laura arrives at the butcher shop where Cherry’s mom Tracey works with her phone recorder on. Tracey already knows who Laura is, so she jumps to the point: Laura is worried that Daniel will end up like Cherry’s father, and pleads for advice. Tracey doesn’t outright deny Cherry’s involvement, but claims it was an accident and that Laura has no idea what her husband put them through to drive her daughter to that action.

Laura can’t understand why Tracey is protecting Cherry, but Tracey makes it simple: She’s her mother, and she’ll do anything she can to protect her daughter. Still, she leaves her with a warning that interfering with Cherry’s plans will be met with retaliation. With this conversation recorded, Laura tries to warn Daniel one more time and asks him to come over and talk. But he’s in the shower when her text message comes through, and Cherry is able to easily intercept (and delete) the message before he even sees it.

Ingratiating herself further into the family, Cherry also asks Howard to walk her down the aisle—a request that genuinely touches her future father-in-law. But when Cherry sees her mom later, she has an entirely different response to the pending nuptials. Tracey refuses to come to the engagement party because she sees the writing on the wall about it all “going to shit” based on Laura’s visit to the butcher shop. While she tells Cherry about Laura poking around about their past, she doesn’t outright tell her how much she revealed.

Still, that’s enough to get a retaliatory response from Cherry, just as Tracey predicted. In the middle of the night, Cherry sneaks into Laura’s gallery, covering the cameras with scarves she came prepared with. She takes a “Mama Bear” teddy bear from Laura’s desk and proceeds to put out a lit cigarette in the two eyes of a portrait of Laura herself. When Cherry comes back to her mom’s house late at night, Tracey scoffs at the sight of Cherry decked out in all black, knowing her daughter was up to no good.

It’s not until the morning that we see the full extent of Cherry’s handiwork. Laura wakes up to find the teddy bear on her porch, and she runs to the gallery to find the windows smashed in and the art on the wall defamed by the word “LIAR” scrawled across all of them. Laura is gleeful—she believes this is her ticket to getting Cherry out of the picture for good—but she’s briefly brought down to earth when Lillith, her lover and the artist of the now-ruined works, accuses her of having no empathy.

It doesn’t stop Laura. She arrives uninvited to the engagement party, where she’s called the cops to arrest Cherry in front of everyone. But the move isn’t as much of a flex as she thought. Cherry goes with the cops in order to not create a scene and Laura is left looking evil, especially to Daniel who is distraught about his fiancee’s arrest. While in custody, the cops accuse Cherry of harassing Laura and say they have CCTV footage of someone with her similar build entering the gallery. Cherry, unfazed, claims that it’s actually Laura who has been harassing her and refutes the CCTV footage by throwing Laura’s former assistant Harriet’s (who was unceremoniously fired) name into the mix.

With little more than a he-said-she-said accusation to go off of and Tracey’s alibi about Cherry’s whereabouts, the police release her from jail. Tracey warns her that Laura knows the truth about her father and says that she shouldn’t have lied on behalf of Cherry all those years ago. All Cherry is after is ambition, Tracey says. She doesn’t believe that Cherry actually loves Daniel. But right now, Cherry doesn’t want to hear any of it—she wants to get home to her fiancé.

The only problem is that he’s at Laura’s house. Knowing his mom was behind Cherry’s arrest is the final straw for him. He asks what more she wants from him, and accuses her of controlling every aspect of his life. She’s curated his whole world, made him be the golden boy who had to be both himself and fill the void of Rose, and now he’s done. Laura is surprisingly calm during the interaction. She matter-of-factly says that he had to choose one of them, and he chose Cherry. Daniel rightfully points out that he shouldn’t have to choose, but Laura has already moved on to saying goodbye.

It’s a red herring dressed as a white flag. She asks him to have one last drink with him, and under the guise of getting ice for their whiskey, she crushes a few pills into his glass to sedate him. Daniel barely makes it through their “all good things must come to an end” toast before collapsing. She gets his barely conscious body onto the couch with only one mission: to force him to listen to the recording of Cherry’s mom.

Before she can press play, her security camera alerts her that there’s someone in the garden, and she already knows who it is. When Cherry couldn’t find Daniel at home after being released from jail, she knew that he’d be at Laura’s. Telling half-truths, Laura admits that Daniel was here but left 30 minutes ago. He knows everything, she lies, and is leaving Cherry. At first, their conversation is hostile, but civil. Cherry asks why Laura has had it out for her from day one, and Laura says she didn’t want to lose her son. But soon, Laura admits to knowing about what Cherry did to her father and Cherry doesn’t even flinch at the accusation. “He deserved it,” she responds before diving into Laura’s insecurities. “What do you think is going to happen when I’m gone?” she asks. “You think he’s never going to move out and meet another woman? You think you’re going to keep him a child forever?”

Laura doesn’t acknowledge that, and instead threatens Cherry with another police call. Undeterred, Cherry swats the phone out of Laura’s hands and it slides neatly out of reach under a small table. Just then, there’s a thump from upstairs and Cherry rushes to find a lethargic Daniel on the floor of the living room. But Laura wrestles control of Daniel from Cherry and locks her in the room, taking Daniel to her bedroom and calls the police from the landline. Still, Cherry can’t be tamed for long. She jumps out of the second-floor window and reenters the home through the unlocked basement door.

With a knife in hand, Laura meets Cherry in the basement and threatens her to get out of Daniel’s life—or else. Laura accuses her of destroying her family and says that Cherry has driven her to violence. They tumble into the pool, where the fight turns physical.

Speaking of Daniel, he’s slowly regaining consciousness upstairs, hearing snippets of the menacing conversation between the two most important women in his life. He arrives just in time to find his mom holding Cherry’s head underwater, nearly suffocating her. Daniel jumps into the pool to save Cherry. But to do so, he holds his mom underwater until Cherry gets out of the water and away from Laura. Cherry is coughing as she catches her breath but when she looks over at Daniel, she notices that Laura’s body has gone limp. She yells for him to stop, but it’s too late. Daniel has inadvertently killed his mom.

The series then flashes forward to find Daniel and Cherry not only blissfully married, but also expecting a child. They seem to have moved into Laura and Howard’s home, and Daniel appears to be doing fine after the horrors that occurred in this very house. But as he’s cutting limes, his mom’s cat Moses sniffs at something stuck under a table. Daniel reaches under to find Laura’s phone. Tearfully, he plugs it in and begins going through her “Favorites” photo album, which is basically a virtual shrine to Daniel.

But then an unusual thumbnail catches his eye. It’s a video of Laura from the day she visited Tracey at the butcher shop. “Let me tell you about Cherry,” Tracey’s voice begins, filling Daniel with confusion. “When she’s got her sights set on something, god help you.” Tracey’s monologue corroborates everything that Laura accused Cherry of all season—including breaking a glass over her head, which Cherry blamed on Laura—and ends with a warning. “Tell your boy not to be fooled by the good times. Sooner or later she’ll want something from you that you’re not prepared to give. And then, well, she’ll find a way to get rid of you.” Just before the screen cuts to black and the credits roll, Daniel’s horrified face looks out at Cherry, whom he realizes he doesn’t know at all. She’s massaging her baby bump, a sign of the “good times,” but Daniel now knows that things may not always stay quite so joyous. It turns out that Laura’s perspective might not have been so warped after all.