🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

“Things aren’t always what they seem.” A doctor delivers this adage to Jen Harding (Christina Applegate) in the Season 3 premiere of Dead to Me, and it pretty much sums up the entire series.

Jen Doesn't Want A CT Scan | Dead To Me S3E1She doesn't need anymore bad news.

Throughout the show’s first two sweet, suspenseful seasons, Jen and her best friend Judy Hale (Linda Cardellini) tell a lot of lies and make just as many astonishing discoveries. Their lives are turned upside-down again and again; sometimes as a result of their own misguided actions, and sometimes because that’s just the way life is. The third and final season continues Dead to Me’s legacy with all sorts of twists. Viewers are treated to small (and often hilarious) shocks, like a bathtub falling through the ceiling and Jen –– who’s hardly a stereotypical PTA mom –– agreeing to make 1,000 origami cranes for her son’s Christian singing dance group. And there are also big swerves with major implications for the story’s conclusion.

Here are the most jaw-dropping surprises, all driving home the doctor’s wise message. As life keeps teaching Jen and Judy, things really aren’t always what they seem.

Episode 1: Jen’s cancer scare

After Jen and Judy’s car gets smashed up in a hit-and-run, the two go for routine tests in the hospital, where fate hits them with one cruel twist, then another. First, a doctor tells Jen that her CT scan showed shadows and that she should get checked out by an oncologist.

But just when you think Jen’s Season 3 storyline is going to be a cancer journey, the doctor refers to her as “Miss Hale.” Because Jen had spilled water in her own hospital bed earlier in the episode, she moved to Judy’s, which caused the doctor to mix up their charts. It’s actually Judy whose health is in question.

Episode 6: Jen’s pregnancy

To cheer Judy up after her chemotherapy treatments, Jen decides to take her on a fun and eye-opening mushroom trip. Things start out amusing, but after Jen makes the rookie mistake of looking in the mirror, she freaks out and makes her son Charlie (Sam McCarthy) drive her to the hospital because she thinks she’s having a heart attack. Once again, it seems like the universe has landed Jen in the ER for a reason: This time, the doctor tells Jen that she’s pregnant.

Saeed Adyani/Netflix

Episode 7: Ben’s presence when Jen’s husband was killed

Jen’s love interest — and twin brother of her murder victim —  Ben Wood (James Marsden) arrives at her door with something to say to her. Judy, he says, told him some things that helped him understand why Jen can barely stand to look at him sometimes. Viewers — and Jen — are expecting him to tell her that he finally knows that she’s responsible for the death of his twin brother Steve, Judy’s abusive ex. Instead, he says, “Every time you look at me, you see the face of the man that killed your husband.”

Ben Has Something To Say | Dead To Me S3E7"You see the face of the man that killed your husband.”

At first, Jen thinks Ben is speaking metaphorically, since he is Steve’s twin and Steve was with Judy in the car that struck and killed her husband. But it turns out he means it literally. A flashback shows that Judy and Steve were driving a very drunk Ben home when they hit and killed Jen’s husband.

Episode 9: The mysterious death of FBI Agent Moranis

The penultimate episode of Dead to Me is the wildest of rides. Since she knows that she is dying, Judy takes the fall for Jen and confesses to Steve’s murder. But, of course, Jen isn’t going to let her best friend make that sacrifice, so she convinces Officer Nick Prager (Brandon Scott) to let Judy out of police custody temporarily in order to participate in a clinical trial. Except, that’s not exactly what happens. Judy’s estranged mother, Eleanor (Katey Sagal), finally steps up by stepping into her daughter’s ankle monitor. Eleanor drives Judy’s car off to San Francisco, where the trial is taking place, so Judy and Jen are free to go on the long-awaited Mexican getaway that they’ve been fantasizing about.

As the pair hits the road, Nick tells his superior, Detective Ana Perez (Diana Maria Riva), about letting Judy go, and shares his fear that his career will be over if FBI Agent Glenn Moranis (Garret Dillahunt), who is investigating Steve Wood’s murder, ever finds out. Perez then surprises Nick — and the audience — by sharing that Moranis was killed and all his investigative findings ransacked. Who murdered him? That’s left ambiguous… but later, we see Perez dropping the FBI files into the front seat of her car along with a Bic and a small bottle of lighter fluid.

Episode 10: Jen’s final words

Of course, a show about two women who bond over the killings of their respective husbands –– both of which are revealed to have been committed by the other –– ends with an outrageous and ambiguous cliffhanger. After Judy passes on, Jen has her new baby and settles into life with Ben and her three kids. But she appears to choose chaos one more time. Gazing at the cat that she brought home from Mexico after her final trip with Judy, as it paws at the door of the pool house where her best friend used to live and right next to where she killed Ben’s brother, Jen says: “Ben, I have to tell you something.”

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