3 Questions That Still Have Us Reeling After Watching ‘The Midnight Club’
The new Netflix series The Midnight Club premiered on Oct. 7, and the spooky series follows a group of teens living out their last days at Brightcliffe Hospice. Starring scream queen Heather Langenkamp, along with a cast of newcomers, The Midnight Club delivers on chills and thrills, but it left us with several unanswered questions. So, here are three questions that still have us reeling after watching Mike Flanagan’s latest series.
[WARNING: This article contains detailed spoilers regarding The Midnight Club.]
Who was the old man and woman haunting the teens in ‘The Midnight Club’?
Throughout the series, a frightening old man and woman appear in Ilonka’s (Iman Benson) visions at Brightcliffe. However, Ilonka sees the old man before she even arrives at the hospice.
Before her cancer diagnosis, Ilonka sees the old man, who has black eyes and a black substance smudged around his mouth, in a mirror at a party. Following the old man came visions of the house that became Brightcliffe and an ominous hooded figure sitting at a table. Later, Ilonka sees an old woman with straggly gray hair and white eyes. She reaches out for Ilonka while saying, “I’m starving, I’m starving.”
This is never explained despite the audience seeing the old man and woman a few times throughout all 10 episodes of The Midnight Club. So, ‘fess up, Flanagan. What was that all about?
Was Shasta/Julia Jayne sacrificing people to keep herself well, or was she just crazy?
Soon after arriving at Brightcliffe, Ilonka meets a woman in the nearby forest who calls herself Shasta (Samantha Sloyan). Shasta runs a wellness company and eventually tells Ilonka about a cult called the Paragon. Ilonka finds a journal by a girl named Athena, whose mother leads the Paragon. The Paragon used to meet in the basement of Brightcliffe and the leader, a woman named Regina Ballard, became obsessed with the five goddesses. She convinced members that giving sacrifices to the goddesses would help heal them. In reality, Regina poisoned everyone in the group with some sort of tea during a ritual so she could become immortal.
Shasta, who we later learn is Julia Jayne, tells Ilonka about the ritual. She and the rest of the members of the Midnight Club try to perform a version of the ritual to help save Anya. When it doesn’t work, Shasta gives some vague reasoning as to why it failed and convinces Ilonka to let her try the ritual again to save Ilonka. The women Shasta brings along collapse after drinking the tea, and Dr. Stanton (Langenkamp) arrives in time to stop Ilonka from drinking it. Shasta escapes, and she gives an evil grin to Ilonka as she leaves in the elevator. Did Shasta/Julia Jayne perform these rituals over the years to keep herself well? Or was she just bonkers? We don’t know, and it’s keeping us up at night.
What was Dr. Stanton’s connection to the cult in ‘The Midnight Club’?
Our final Midnight Club question revolves around Dr. Stanton. In the finale, Dr. Stanton tells Ilonka that she had Julia Jayne arrested several times over the years for sneaking back into Brightcliffe. She essentially brushes off Julia Jayne’s claims about healing rituals as nothing more than wild ideas created by the cult with nothing to back them up. However, in the very last seconds of the episode, we watch Dr. Stanton take off her wig, revealing her completely bald head. The camera pans to show the Paragon’s symbol tattooed on the back of her neck like the other members of the cult.
Dr. Stanton is insistingly vague about what she knows regarding the Paragon to Ilonka, and that last shot of her certainly implies she doesn’t want to give Ilonka the full story. We have so many questions about this. Did Dr. Stanton once belong to the Paragon and escape? Or does she still believe in its claims? Is she Athena, the author of the journal and the girl who helped the children escape the cult in the 40s? Has she been secretly sacrificing “sick” teens to keep herself healthy?
Needless to say, we need answers, and we hope the answers come in the form of a sophomore season of The Midnight Club. All episodes are streaming exclusively on Netflix.
