‘The Changeling’ Season Finale Recap: Short Story

When I sat down to watch this climactic episode of The Changeling, I distinctly remember thinking “I can’t believe they’ve only got an hour to wrap this all up.” Then I pressed play and saw I’d gotten it wrong: They only had half an hour to wrap it all up. 

I have to admire the chutzpah on the part of writer and showrunner Kelly Marcel. In “Battle of the Island,” so named for basically the only thing that happens in it, Marcel doesn’t struggle to tie up enough plotlines to give the show’s first season a satisfying resolution — she doesn’t even try. Chopping the usual running time in half is almost a statement of defiance in that regard. “You sure you don’t need an hour for th—” “No, we’re good, thanks.” That feels like confidence to me.

I just wish it were earned. There’s simply not much to this finale, when it’s all said and done. William, whom we learn traveled from Norway to mess with Emma’s life after seeing that photo in that gallery, welcomes the arrival of the big giant monster that’s apparently the boss of the child-stealing operation. The monster, which we never catch a glimpse of except maybe as an underwater blur in a flashback about Norwegian immigrants to New York, destroys the witches’ village and kills a bunch of people, though the only body we see belongs to William’s ex-wife Greta. 

Apollo, Cal, and the survivors flee, at one point making a treacherous descent down a sheer cliff face. Most of the survivors get on a ferry to safety, soon sailing out of throwing range of the pine trees the monster uses as projectiles. Cal sends Apollo off on his own in a rowboat to find Emma in Forest Park, while she has a final battle with William, seeming to kill him before committing suicide rather than falling victim to the monster. Apollo vows to come for Emma, Emma approaches a magical merry-go-round, there’s a stinger in which William’s demonic “Kinder Garten” collective is revealed to be an online troll army in addition to a network of possessed child murders, and there’s like a dragon or something in the subway. The end.

The hope, of course, is that it’s the end for now, and boy do we ever have to hope if we want to derive really any kind of emotional catharsis or satisfaction from this episode. We don’t see Emma reunite with her baby. We don’t see Apollo reunite with Emma or the baby. We have no reason to believe Cal permanently killed William, last seen being dragged off by the unseen monster. We don’t see the monster, now that I mention it. We don’t see any fairies or trolls or changelings either. 

We don’t even get a sense that the plot has been rocketed forward with these cliffhangers, the way, say, Twin Peaks’ storylines did at the end of its similarly open-ended first season finale. The questions we have now — where’s the baby, what took him, will Apollo find Emma, what will happen if he does, what’s William’s real deal — are all the same as they were before the opening credits rolled. In other words, we get nothing, really, no payoff for time spent except the promise of something to come. Aside from Cal’s death it’s as if this episode didn’t happen at all.

Is that good enough? Y’know…yeah, probably. Denying your audience any kind of opening season wrap-up whatsoever isn’t a habit I want to see showrunners adopt as a rule, and it’s frustrating to see it in effect here. My concerns about the emotional tone of the show remain in effect, too. (Over the past week I kept thinking about how little I want little soliloquies about how great it is to remember the smell of food cooked in the kitchen with love in a horror TV show.) But it’s still LaKeith Stanfield, one of the best in the biz. It’s still Clark Backo, who I feel has many more notes to play in this role. When the show does make its mind up to be creepy, it’s real creepy — just the baseline assertion “It’s not a baby” alone is a scary thing to hear, to contemplate, to consider the ramifications of and the rationale behind. The Changeling was frustrating, but it showed a great deal of promise. I’ll head deeper into the forest if the journey continues.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.