The Maddening Twist Ending to 'We Were Liars' Explained

When I reviewed We Were Liars earlier this week, I’d only seen the first six episodes. I wasn’t particularly impressed, but it was a passable diversion — if you could get past all the rich-people problems.

If I’d known about the terrible twist ending at the time, though, I’d have suggested (pleaded) with you to avoid the series entirely. I’m not even mad about it so much as exasperated. It’s shamelessly manipulative, and while it might land with its target YA audience on a tearjerker level, I suspect most adults will respond the way I did: with a stone-faced, “Are you kidding me?”

Cadence sees ghosts. She sees dead people.

The story follows Cadence Sinclair, who wakes up badly injured on the beach of her family’s private island with post-traumatic amnesia. She has no idea how she got there. The mystery unfolds across two timelines. The first is a flashback to the summer of her 16th year, when she spent her time with “the Liars” — her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and Gat, the nephew of her aunt’s boyfriend, with whom she falls in love. In this timeline, she’s blonde.

Over the course of that summer, Cadence faces a number of harsh realities. She discovers that Gat has a girlfriend back home, though by the end of the summer, they’re together. Her grandfather Harris — the family patriarch who controls the Sinclair fortune — tries to drive Gat away, because Gat isn’t white, and Harris is, um, aggressively committed to keeping the Sinclair lineage pale and blond. Johnny, meanwhile, had hospitalized a classmate in a fight, and his family quietly paid the victim’s family off. Mirren wants to be an artist, which clashes with the family’s uptight legacy expectations.

Their mothers — Cadence’s mom and her two aunts — spend the summer jockeying for Harris’s favor, especially after the death of their own mother. Each is broke for different reasons, and they’re desperate to be named sole heir to the Sinclair fortune. Their petty, endless bickering becomes the backdrop to everything, and the teens become the collateral damage.

Near the end of the summer, Harris has a fall and is taken to the hospital, along with the three mothers. Cadence, Johnny, Mirren, and Gat are left behind. Drunk and disillusioned, they inexplicably decide that the way to push back against the toxic family legacy is to burn down the house, as a literal and metaphorical “f**k you” to Sinclair expectations.

In the present timeline, Cadence returns to the island at 17, now brunette, in hopes of recovering her memories. She reunites with Johnny, Mirren, and Gat, though she’s confused about why none of them reached out to her over the past year. She spends time with them, tries to trigger her memories, falls in love with Gat all over again, and makes peace with the others.

Except — twist! — not really. In the final episode, her full memory returns: during the arson, Cadence escaped the burning house, injured. The others didn’t. Johnny, Mirren, and Gat all died in the fire. She’s been spending the summer with their ghosts. That’s why they never contacted her. They were dead.

It’s supposed to be a devastating reveal. She gets one final conversation with each ghost, apologizes, and promises to live in their honor. But it’s so shamelessly manipulative that, for me at least, it completely backfires.

Despite the deaths, Harris insists on maintaining the Sinclair status quo. He covers up the arson and deaths by claiming a gas leak caused the explosion and sweeps it all under the rug. Cadence, now resolved to break from the toxic legacy, rejects him, jumps into a boat, and flees the island. The bickering mothers, two of whom have just lost children, stand in solidarity, holding hands and finding hope in the fact that one Sinclair has managed to break free. The fairy tale was a trap, and Cadence has escaped (after being at least partially responsible for the deaths of her three best friends). The end.*

*(Except for a last-minute tag that suggests one of the mothers, Carrie, might also see ghosts, perhaps teeing up a second season. God help us.)