M. Night Shyamalan insists that he isn’t a “twist” guy. “Everybody keeps on saying that,” the director said in a Zoom interview about the final episodes ofServant, which finished its Apple TV+ run Friday after four seasons. “I traffic in mysteries, ultimately, so you’re going to learnsomething. Sometimes it’s a big one-moment thing, and sometimes the reveal is in the middle of the movie. Sometimes it’s the high concept of the movie. I haven’t really honored that expectation all that much, but it’s been so prevalent in people’s minds.”
When it became clear thatServant, created by Tony Basgallop, was wrapping up its story, fans braced for the answer to the biggest question of the show: What, exactly,is Leanne, the strange and off-putting nanny who seems to be able to bring a dead child back to life? The character, played by Nell Tiger Free, believes she possesses increasingly dangerous supernatural abilities; over the course of four seasons, the family she lives with comes to agree with her. Is she some sort of angel? Something more sinister? Are they all imagining things, connecting dots where there are no dots to connect?
“It was always meant to be right on the fence for me,” Shyamalan explains. “You could, if you wanted to, [say] it’s a group of crazy people that believe this stuff. But they’re pretty convincing.”
It took three seasons—plus a pandemic-assisted script-writing binge for Shyamalan, Basgallop, and their team—to build out the story introduced in the show’s first season. “You have this beautiful setup—the idea of a woman who’s forgotten what’s happened to a child, and what she did, and a young woman who is obsessed with this woman, but also has weird things that happen around her. That’s delicious. I can feel that that’s going to go somewhere,” he says. “It became really clear that we were telling the story of this broken family that’s not having a conversation, and they will eventually have this conversation. We don’t know what the results of it will be."
The show’s final episode appears, at first, to offer a conclusion. As the end draws near, Leanne’s “powers” get more and more destructive. She agitates animals brought to the house for a birthday party; causes off-season weather events; takes away the senses—taste, smell, speech—of the people living in the Turner family’s palatial brownstone. When patriarch Sean (Toby Kebbell) and his brother-in-law Julian (Rupert Grint) attempt to return Leanne to the cultish “Church of the Lesser Saints,” she drives them from the house, appearing to injure them with blasts of wind and ill-timed stumbles into basement sinkholes.
In episode nine, “Awake,” which Shyamalan directed, Sean and Julian make one last desperate attempt to reclaim their home by forcing Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose), mother of baby Jericho, to remember her child’s tragic death. When she finally accepts what happened as a horrible accident, they confront Leanne, accusing her of using the family’s trauma to finagle her way into their home while pretending to have abilities she does not.
“There’s two story lines,” Shyamalan says. “One’s a potentially supernatural story line. And one’s just a very poignant experience with a family that I’ve never seen before. The level of tragedy involved is so deep and so traumatic that it is the engine underneath everything, this mother that has to wake up and realize what happened.” They were having conversations about “waking” Dorothy up as early as the first season, but ultimately realized that, once they resolved the show’s most important question, there was nowhere else to go. “Once we went past the first season, I went, ‘She can’t wake up until the show’s over. And then the show is over when she wakes up.’”
After all of that, another episode feels almost superfluous. But the show’s series finale, “Fallen,” must concludeServant’s other half by declaring once and for all what Leanne’s role has been. The best thing about the episode, though, is it does everything elsebut that.
Leanne and Dorothy have a shouting match on the roof in the middle of a storm, where Dorothy tells Leanne that not only does she believe her, she forgives her. Leanne, however, thinks she has been condemned by a higher power for her actions, and “saves” the Turners from the danger of her proximity by burning herself alive inside their home. Her body, having fallen into a (bottomless??) sinkhole, is never found.
