SPOILER ALERT: This piece spoils the entirety of We Were Liars now streaming on Prime Video.
From the beginning of Julie Plec’s and Carina Adly MacKenzie’s television adaptation of E. Lockhart’s bestselling book We Were Liars, it’s clear that narrator Cadence Sinclair Eastman has a vivid imagination and a knack for storytelling.
Throughout the series, which also stars Shubham Maheshwari as Gat Patil, Joseph Zada as Johnny Sinclair Dennis and Esther McGregor as Mirren Sinclair Sheffield, viewers are on a journey told from Cadence’s sometimes unreliable perspective, waiting on the edge of their seats for her to recover her equally vivid and colorful memories of summer 16 so that she can piece together what happened that left her barely clothed on the beach one night on her family’s private Beechwood Island. The Sinclairs — led by patriarch Harris (David Morse) and matriarch Tipper (Wendy Crewson), parents to three daughters Carrie (Mamie Gummer), Penny (Caitlin Fitzgerald) and Bess (Candice King) — spend every summer on Beechwood, but one sunswept stay during the summer that cousins Cadence, Mirren and Johnny and best friend Gat were 16 became much more sinister and changed things forever.
Those who have read Lockhart’s novel may have a better idea of the events that led to Cadence’s current post-traumatic migraines and head injury. While bits and pieces are breadcrumbed throughout the first seven episodes, the finale reveals all, specifically what went wrong with the plan that the core four Liars dreamed up in the last moments of the penultimate episode.
“We want[ed] to stretch out the suspense a little bit and give each, each of the liars their own experience of that big event,” author and EP Lockhart told Deadline. “So that while this is happening for Cadence, this is happening for Gat, and this is happening for Johnny, and this is happening for Mirren. We were looking in the writers room, as I was writing the outline, for ways that each person could be on their own emotional journey in that big set piece, and so it was a way of differentiating. It’s not the same for Gat, Johnny and Mirren.
Read the full breakdown of what really happened on Beechwood Island in summer 16, how creators Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie plus EP Lockhart — who wrote the teleplay for the finale pulled it off and their comments on various aspects of the story below.
Here is your final spoiler alert warning if you have not yet watched the whole show or finale!
L-R: Joseph Zada, Shubham Maheshwari and Emily Alyn Lind in ‘We Were Liars’
The Fire
At the end of episode 7, titled “Everyone Knows The Captain Lied,” Cadence, who goes by Cady, burns Harris’ will after she finds it in Clairmont House at the begging of her mother Penny. Even though the will dictates that Cady would inherit Beechwood Island, she still burns it, which her mother only instructed her to do if there wasn’t anything favorable for them dictated in the document.
Then, the first Sinclair grandchild posits to her two cousins and love interest, “What if all the material things our family fights over were gone? What if we made a mess so big that only a Sinclair could clean it up?” followed by the words “We could tear it down, teach Harris and the moms the ultimate lesson.”
Harris and the moms have left the island for the night because Harris tripped, fell and hit his head pretty badly while in an argument with Cady about his prejudice. Thus, Penny took him in a helicopter off-island to a hospital, and Carrie and Bess followed on the ferry, leaving only the four liars there alone since their little siblings are off at summer camp. The seventh episode ends with current brunette Cadence who is still gathering her memories telling Johnny and Mirren that she remembers they set fire to Clairmont, and that is why it was rebuilt as New Clairmont with stark and cold architecture before her next visit during summer 17.
The Plan – With One Big Difference From The Book
In the opening moments of the finale, the Liars cook up a plan of how to set fire to Clairmont, with Joseph Zada’s Johnny questioning if they even “know how to do arson.”
Cady, Johnny and Mirren doused different parts of the house in motor boat gasoline, soaking old Boston Sentinel newspapers — part of the Sinclair publishing empire — in it as well as extra kindling. Cadence said she would do the downstairs. Mirren took her mom’s old bedroom and the East Wing. Johnny took the attic. Gat, who in the book takes the basement, had a different role in the show of being the escape boat captain.
“This was one of the best debates that we had in our writers room, which was about half writers of Indian descent and half everybody else. We had the conversation [of], Gat is a young brown man when a crime happens on an island, how do the liars acknowledge that and respect that?” Plec told Deadline. “Because now they’ve learned about what it means to be a young brown man on a very rich island full of white people. And then what part do they want him to play in this whole act of civil disobedience? And maybe we should protect him. Maybe they would want to protect him and not have him involved.”
L-R: Shubham Maheshwari and Emily Alyn Lind in ‘We Were Liars’ on Prime Video
Prime Video
Plec said that the other half of the writers room, particularly Sid Gopinath and Aditya Joshi, fought for Gat to be involved in the whole scheme.
“I think it was in particular, Sid and Aditya, who are two writers of Indian descent, who said, essentially, ‘Don’t neuter him at the end and not let him get his hands dirty, he would be angry,” MacKenzie added. “He would want to light this fire.”
In the book, Gat’s choice to douse the basement in gasoline is what gets him trapped in the conflagration Cadence starts by excitedly lighting up quicker than her three counterparts, but even the added detail of the clock striking midnight as the signal to light up didn’t save Mirren and Johnny from the disorienting smoke. In an even more heartbreaking moment for Gat, he gets drawn back into the house when nobody shows up shortly after midnight. The gas main catches fire and the house explodes, killing Mirren, Johnny and Gat.
“What we ended up doing was making sure Gat was still complicit, but turning the dial up on Cadence’s complicity, because, had she not had this like deep seed of Sinclairism in her that even in this moment, as she’s burning it all down, she can’t resist going back in for those pearls, he might have made it,” MacKenzie continued. “So we just wanted to shift the blame, give Cadence some things to think about in the future and keep Gat bad*ss.”
L-R: Shubham Maheshwari and Emily Alyn Lind in ‘We Were Liars’
Prime Video
Cady doesn’t reveal that she went back for the necklace of black pearls that her mother and aunts were constantly fighting over until midway through the finale when she is bidding her goodbye to the ghostly form of Gat she has kept around in her mind. All three liars, in fact, had been figments of Cady’s imagination for the entirety of summer 17 because they all died in the fire. The reason she would get such bad migraines around the memories was that her brain didn’t want to hold onto the fact that she had lost her three closest friends in such a tragic accident that was her own suggestion.
“The filming of the finale was a big enterprise with special effects and visual effects and stunt people and various experts involved, and a lot of movie magic as well,” Lockhart said. “For me, that was one of the coolest things to see that final sequence, and the way it got put together in post-production, but also the way it was filmed on set, in order to have all the pieces that we needed to create this story on film.”
How We Were Liars Connects To Lockhart’s Prequel, Family of Liars
Joseph Zada in ‘We Were Liars’ on Prime Video
Prime Video
Of course, the idea of the Liars only being in Cadence’s head the whole time is challenged by the final scene in the last episode, in which Aunt Carrie goes back into Redgate for some pills and turns around to see her dead son sitting cross-legged on a countertop telling her he doesn’t think he can leave.
“If you take a look at Family of Liars, you will see in Chapter One that Carrie has all along been having conversations with her dead son, and it does beg the question, ‘Is she too, just so psychologically damaged that this is how she hallucinates her grief? And is that what happened to cadence?’ or ‘Are ghosts real on Beechwood Island?” Plec, who has spoken to Deadline about followup season plans previously, said. “Season 2 dives deeper into that question.”
MacKenzie said that they couldn’t answer that question right then, but Plec continued to connect the dots laid out by Lockhart’s prequel novel, Family of Liars, which tells the story of the three Sinclair sisters when they were teenagers one summer on the island.
L-R: Caitlin Fitzgerald (with back turned), Candice King and Mamie Gummer in ‘We Were Liars’
Prime Video
“What’s so wonderful is by the end of the season, we’ve gotten to know these Sinclair sisters as moms and as grown women who are deeply flawed, and they keep hinting at tension and trauma from the past, all season long, up to and including in the end, when Bess says, ‘Do you think this is punishment for what we did this summer I was 16?’” Plec added. “And lo and behold, if that’s not the summer that’s talked about in the prequel Family of Liars. So you can bide your time in between seasons reading it, and you can write Amazon letters about how much you need [a second season.]”
Lockhart, who has a third book set in the We Were Liars universe titled We Fell Apart coming out in November, described this moment as a “coda.”
“I’m not allowed to talk about Season 2 plans, but if you watch We Were Liars all the way til the end and you watch the little coda, you can see that that coda tips to the start of Family of Liars,” she said. “We have not forgotten about what’s going on with Johnny and Carrie.”
