The Nonsensical Ending of 'I Will Find You' on Netflix Explained

Here we go again! Having outlined the plots of all of the omnipresent Harlan Coben's previous Netflix hit series -- Missing You, The Stranger, Stay Close, Gone for Good, Fool Me Once, and The Woods, and -- earlier this year -- Run Away, we are back at it with the latest, I Will Find You.

This one is so twisty that there were a couple of endings I thought I'd be disappointed in before the series finally sprung the ending that actually disappointed me. It's also an American-set series, starring Sam Worthingt ... zzzzz ... Severance's Britt Lower (what?!), Milo Ventimiglia, Logan Browning, and -- hey! -- Pushing Daisies' Chi McBride. It was good to see him.

Sam Worthing ... zzzz ... zzzz ... plays David Burroughs, a former law professor serving a life sentence for killing his son. He's been in prison for five years, kept his nose down, and refused all visitors -- not because he was guilty, but because he felt guilty for failing to protect his son, Matthew, from the actual killer. Five years into his sentence, his sister-in-law, a former Boston Globe reporter named Rachel Mills (Britt Lower), shows up for a visit. She brings a photo from an amusement park, and in the background, there's a little boy who looks exactly like David's son would look five years later, right down to the distinct birthmark on his face. (Heads up, potential kidnappers: if you're going to kidnap a boy and pass him off as your own, maybe don't choose the one with a distinct birthmark on his face.)

So David is like, "Well, I guess maybe I didn't kill my own son" (he was convicted of doing so in his sleep during a night seizure, with zero motive, which doesn't sound like it should merit a life sentence, but here we are). After Rachel brings in the photo, a fellow prisoner and a prison guard try to kill David, because apparently there's a secret somebody wants kept buried.

Fortunately for David, the prison warden, Philip, and his son, Adam, are close family friends, and since the warden doesn't think he can keep David safe, Philip and Adam orchestrate a breakout. It goes sideways and leads to half the cops in Boston chasing him down, but the warden ditches him in a mall and David escapes with Rachel. There's a lot of police incompetence in this thing -- David is nearly apprehended half a dozen times over the course of the series, but always manages to slip away in the nick of time.

The first place David goes is the home of the prison guard who tried to kill him. The guard, terrified of the people who paid him to do it, drops a clue suggesting that a childhood friend named Skunk, now in the mob, might have been behind Matthew's kidnapping. Then the guard shoots himself (why he didn't just shoot David and fulfill his obligation is ... unclear). Two FBI agents, Max and Sarah (who we'll later learn are father and daughter), arrive thirty seconds too late, see the body, and assume David killed him out of revenge.

Next up, David and Rachel hide out in New York in the fancy apartment of Rachel's ex-boyfriend, Hayden Payne (Milo Ventimiglia). The next morning, they visit a witness who lied at David's trial about seeing him bury his son's body. She admits she was forced to do it by the Boston mob, run by a semi-retired mobster named Nicky Fisher (Clancy Brown). Rachel gets arrested here for aiding and abetting, but David manages to talk to the witness, who arranges a meeting the next morning with one of Fisher's men. That meeting goes sideways, the witness is killed by one of Fisher's henchmen, but David -- once again -- escapes the police.

He goes back to Hayden's apartment, only this time he runs into Hayden himself, who's basically like, "Any fugitive and escaped child killer who's a friend of my ex Rachel Mills is a friend of mine!" So Hayden doesn't turn David in -- he helps him, and even springs Rachel from custody, because he and his family are very rich, and apparently that's all it takes. Rachel and David head back to Boston to question David's father, Lenny (Hugh Thompson), a former cop, because the henchman suggested Lenny is involved.

And Lenny is involved ... sort of. He thought David had actually killed Matthew, and because he's a good father(?), he and the warden, Philip, buried the bloody bat. Obviously, it didn't work, since David was convicted anyway. Also, Lenny is nowhere to be found when David and Rachel arrive -- he's been kidnapped by Nicky Fisher, and eventually David himself gets apprehended by Fisher's people and dragged to a boardwalk Fisher built on the ocean because it reminded him of the good times he had with his own dead son.

Fisher's like, "If you give me the OK to kill your dad, I'll tell you where your son is." David's not okay with that, but his dad has cancer and not long to live, so he eventually, begrudgingly agrees. Except! It was all just a test. Fisher's basically like, "Oh, well, I guess if you're willing to kill your father for your son's whereabouts, you really didn't kill your kid." But also, it turns out Fisher had nothing to do with Matthew's disappearance at all -- he was just busting balls because Lenny had planted evidence that convicted Fisher's own son, leading to his death, and he's been mad about it ever since!

So basically, the first five episodes leading up to Nicky Fisher are a dead end. Good times! But Fisher does give David one piece of advice: "If you really want to know who took your son, think about the things that make you too uncomfortable to think about." So David does, and remembers that his wife, Cheryl (Erin Richards) -- now remarried and pregnant -- once considered a sperm donor when they couldn't conceive.

David realizes Matthew may not be his biological son, but hey -- "He's still my boy!" David and Rachel once again enlist Hayden, whose wealthy family happens to own the very sperm bank Cheryl visited. Hayden breaks into his own family's sperm bank, looks up Cheryl's records, and discovers they're missing.

Long story short: a doctor who worked for the sperm bank had been illegally donating his own sperm to numerous mothers, and Hayden's mother, Gertrude Payne (Madeleine Stowe), had been covering it up. That doctor, Jacob Heller, happens to work alongside David's ex-wife Cheryl at the hospital. David and Rachel, with help from Cheryl's new husband, orchestrate a plan to corner Heller at the hospital -- and they do, only Cheryl shows up too and goes, "Uh, David. It can't be Heller, because I never actually went through with the insemination. Matthew is your son."

But Cheryl also reveals that the reason her files were missing is because she'd checked in under a different name -- her sister's, Rachel Mills -- so whoever stole Matthew probably thought he was her son.

And guess who is still in love with Rachel? That's right: Hayden Payne, the Milo Ventimiglia character who's been "helping" Rachel track down the kidnapper this entire series. If Hayden had just turned David in back in episode two, he'd have gotten away with all of it. Instead, he helped Rachel and David piece it all together, ultimately revealing that Hayden kidnapped Matthew because he believed Matthew was his own son -- the product of the sperm he donated, thinking Rachel was the one who'd use it.

And if there was any doubt Hayden was the kidnapper, it's erased when he murders a detective from a Scandinavian country (I forget which) who'd pieced together that the boy actually murdered that night -- not by David, but by Hayden -- was an orphan from a home owned by the Payne family.

There's a lot of nonsense going on here, but let's review: Hayden Payne is madly in love with Rachel, who breaks up with him (though they stay close). Hayden believes Rachel went to a sperm bank owned by his family, so he donates sperm meant for her insemination. Except it isn't Rachel -- it's her sister, Cheryl, who never actually uses it. Nevertheless, three years later, Hayden decides to kill an orphan boy, steal Matthew -- birthmark and all -- and raise him as his own. And he would've gotten away with it, too, had Rachel not spotted that photo of Matthew in the background of an amusement park she later learns had been entirely rented out by the Payne family.

Let's cut to the chase: those two FBI agents -- father and daughter -- have been major characters all series, but mostly their job has been to arrive seconds too late while David escapes again. Along the way, the daughter, Sarah Greer, figures out that David is innocent (her father gets shot at some point and spends the finale working a hospital bed).

Sarah, David, and Rachel hatch a plan to nab Hayden before he and his mother can flee the country with Matthew, since even Hayden knows the jig is up. Rachel tells him, "I'm in love with you. I want to escape the country with you," and Hayden -- dumb as a rock, apparently -- believes her. He waits around for her. There's a shootout, some running, David takes a non-fatal bullet, and Sarah shoots Hayden dead. Matthew is free!

Despite breaking out of prison and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, David's conviction is overturned, and Rachel faces zero consequences for aiding and abetting a believed fugitive. She writes a book about the whole ordeal, and everyone lives happily ever after -- except Lenny, who lives happily ever after right up until he dies of cancer. And that's it. The end.

I should also probably note that the ending was telegraphed immediately with the casting of Milo Ventimiglia because you don't cast Milo Ventimiglia as an ex-boyfriend/supporting character unless he's also the bad guy.