‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Season 1 Finale Recap: “Your Next Life Could Be So Much Happier”

If you had Margo on your leaderboard for being the “I Know” in I Know What You Did Last Summer, then you win a gift certificate to Snak ‘n’ Stuff. That’s right, it’s revealed in the IKWYDLS Season 1 finale one that Margo — mouthy rich kid, TikTok influencer, frequent mukbanger, and Lennon’s spurned lover — is also a spree killer whose particular mental damage is a toxic cocktail of obsession, arrogance, and classic zoomer indifference. (She killed Harold, the wizened cook at Ohana, because he was a hapless bystander to her murking of Officer Cruise.) Margo? Really? Even after all the teasing of cult weirdness and town secrets that go back generations. Even after Dylan’s increasingly wacko behavior. Even after Bruce acting all mysterioso and holding secret meetings with the suddenly not-dead mother of his identical twin daughters. It was Margo. And according to the woman herself, she killed for love.

“I did it for Lennon. The real Lennon,” Margo tells Alison right after she stabbed her and killed the twins’ mother during an eventful sequence out at the cult compound. Margo also tells Alison that she had the Alison/Lennon switcheroo sussed all the way back in the fall when the hashtags and other social media ephemera Alison was posting as Lennon rang hollow. But wait, how does killing the twins’ mom jibe with Margo’s love for Lennon? And why does Alison ultimately lie for Margo and pin the murders on Dylan? These are the kind of questions that I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn’t quite get around to answering, which was the show’s problem all season long. Instead, it builds questions into its questions, and couches the hard facts in the vagaries of cult activity. There was certainly love in what Margo did — the twisted kind, the obsessive kind. But she really killed because she likes killing. “I guess you never know what’s going on in the mind of a psychopath,” Margo said of Dylan, back when she was still setting up the frame job on him. But it turns out she was talking about herself the whole time.

While Margo is a murderer, Alison isn’t fully an innocent. Her secret is safe, since the Wai Huna medical examiner fell for Bruce’s ruse of switching out his daughters’ pictures in their frames, thereby misidentifying Lennon as Alison. Plus, if Bruce and Lyla do marry, the police chief will become her stepmother. She lied to the cops for Margo, helped pin the murders on Dylan, and even lied to Bruce about her own mother’s demise. Margo is a psychopath, but there’s something broken inside of Alison, too, something IKWYDLS alludes to with more flashbacks to the night of the accident, when it becomes clear she knew exactly who she was about to hit with her Jeep. She even mashed on the accelerator. At episode’s end, Alison stands with Margo on the rocks out by the cave, and they share a look that’s filled with both deceit and contentment — these two are bound together in their fucked-up-ness, and they like that just fine.

As for the cult, while it’s up to Bruce to sell Clara’s compound, it’s Dylan that proves to be the truest believer. In this final episode, when he isn’t spouting off about living truths in the next life and preparing people for prophecy, he’s dissecting brains from ferrets and tossing them into jars full of ants. And once he takes the fall for Margo’s murder spree, he’s seen in the prison reading room prosletyzing to his fellow jailbirds from the cult’s book of teachings. Bruce isn’t the cult keeper, after all; Dylan was Clara’s acolyte all along. Not only that, but IKWYDLS stokes the cliffhanger fires with a closing shot of Riley’s honey-embalmed body. Suspended in a freezer, her eyes suddenly snap open. Maybe the cult found its “one,” after all. There’s no official word on a second season. But if Riley comes back from the dead, finds out it was Margo who murked her and everybody else, and challenges her frenemy to a winner-take-all knife fight, we’re definitely here for it.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch I Know What You Did Last Summer Episode 8 on Amazon Prime Video