‘The Midnight Club’s twist ending explained

The Midnight Club will tug at your heartstrings and have you piecing together its mysteries all at the same time. While thematically tackling death and coming to terms with the inevitable, the new Netflix series also throws in a lot of red herrings that don’t seem to make sense — until the show’s last episode. 

Fret not! Because like any Mike Flanagan Netflix series, The Midnight Club hints at its twist endings from the show’s very beginnings. And if you happened to find yourself asking, “Wait, what’s the deal with Dr. Stanton?” we’ve got that and the show’s other big twist covered. 

Dr. Georgina Stanton is actually Athena. 

Throwing in that split-second plot twist right at the show’s end was criminal. But it was actually hinted at from the start. While The Midnight Club initially sets out Athena, the daughter of Regina Ballard (aka, the woman who began the Paragon cult), and Dr. Stanton (Heather Langenkamp), the hospice’s founder and main caretaker, as completely different people, the twist-ending reveals that they’re entirely the same person. 

Kicking things off with the hourglass tattoo, all of the Paragon’s members have their tattoos on their wrists, as we see throughout the show — including Julia (don’t worry we’ll get to that later). But Athena and her mother don’t have any ink on their wrists.

In episode five’s flashback scene that explains the cult, we first see a young Athena writing in her diary with an hourglass tattoo on her neck. Later, when her mother bends down, it’s revealed she has the same tattoo in the same spot, which suggests that this was a unique exception for the two.

Another little thing they have in common is their wigs. While Dr. Stanton takes hers off in the show’s finale to reveal her hidden tattoo, Regina’s is revealed in that same flashback when police barge into the cult’s meeting grounds and find her on the floor with her wig beside her. We don’t know what condition exactly ties the two together, but we can assume that whatever it is, it’s genetic. Apart from the many like-mother-like-daughter similarities, Dr. Stanton also knows a little bit too much about the cult and their former whereabouts. 

What’s the secret behind the staircase and the diary?

First off, Dr. Stanton is the only person who knows that the hospice’s secret basement has its own secret staircase. Whenever the kids sneak down there, they actively voice their concerns about the elevator randomly going up, worrying that it means they’ll be trapped in the basement forever. Julia makes a quick escape through the elevator in the show’s finale, menacingly thinking that she’s left everyone down there on their own. But Dr. Stanton knows better. She manages to get everyone out through her secret staircase — a staircase only someone who existed with the cult in the ’40s would know. A staircase Athena probably used a lot to escape her mother’s grasp!

In that same line of thought, when Dr. Stanton is later reprimanding Ilonka (Iman Benson) for helping Julia in the first place, she slips up and says “Julia and other people I’ve known throughout the years,” insinuating that she’s known about the cult for some time, despite declaring otherwise in the show’s first episode. Turns out, she’s familiar with several of their members, not just Julia.

Moreover, while Athena’s diary was a treasure of secrets on its own, the burning of it revealed even more answers. Everything about the short but bountiful scene pointed to Dr. Stanton’s ownership of the diary, namely through its background track. Featuring Terry Jack’s “Seasons in the Sun,” Dr. Stanton burns her diary while Jack sings “Goodbye to you my trusted friend, we’ve known each other since we were nine to 10.” It’s a small but savvy detail someone like Easter egg master Mike Flanagan would purposefully include.

The Midnight Club‘s battle is faith versus science.

In the grand scheme of The Midnight Club‘s plot, Dr. Stanton being Athena makes the most sense. On the one hand, it elevates the show’s already existing themes of faith and science. Throughout its 10-episode run, The Midnight Club constantly unpacks contentions between finding remedies in nature or in medicine. You have kids who solely believe in the harsh truths of medicine. And you have kids who believe in miracles. Athena being Dr. Stanton speaks to an evolved outlook of the two, where higher powers eventually become baseless in the face of irrefutable truths. Ilonka follows this arc, as she gradually realizes that no amount of teas, elixirs, or weird rituals will treat her diagnosis.

On the other hand, it’s a multifaceted poetic entendre. Regina wanted nothing more than for her daughter to be her pupil. And in many ways Athena was, just not in the way Regina wanted her to be. Dr. Stanton is correcting all of her mother’s wrongs in her quest to actually help people navigate terminal illnesses in a way that’ll allow them to find peace. She doesn’t believe in miracles or twists of fate; she believes in what we have. And what we have is each other. It’s a remarkable revelation that’s unsurprising when you remember that she was, after all, originally named after Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. 

Julia Jayne is alive and well. 

Julia Jayne (Samantha Sloyan) and her mysterious story of recovery is the reason why Ilonka chooses to go to Brightcliffe in the first place. So when we first find out that the mystical, hippie hottie Shasta is actually Julia, we’re overjoyed! That is, until the ritual.

Yes, that short-lived joy runs dry when we realize that Julia is kind of a manipulative murderer. And she’s been luring in Ilonka under the guise of a wellness guru to hide the fact that she’s actually a dedicated believer of the original Paragon cult. She needs Ilonka to complete her sacrificial ritual. Clues toward the Shasta-Julia-Paragon crossover start seeping through from The Midnight Club‘s very first episode. 

The photo of Julia was a hint in what it didn’t show.

When Spencer (William Chris Sumpter) gives Ilonka her tour of the hospice, they stop in a hallway full of pictures. One picture is from 1968, featuring Julia Jayne with her other Brightcliffe friends. The camera spends a wee bit of time on the image. If you go back to that picture after finishing The Midnight Club, it’ll take on a whole new meaning.

Toward the show’s end, it’s revealed that Julia’s adoration of the Paragon was so vast that she escaped the hospice and sought out Regina. At the end of their meeting, Regina tells Julia that she needs a week with her to explain all the ins and outs of the Paragon’s titular ritual. We know that the Paragon believe in Greek mythology’s five goddesses or sisters of healing. And we know that the ritual entails five women acting, or serving on behalf of the five goddesses.

Now including Julia, the picture hanging in the hall featured four girls. That means that the imperative fifth “goddess” was missing. Who would presumably take on that missing role? None other than Regina herself, who not only acted as a guide but also potentially played a part in the ritual throughout that week. That innocent hallway picture teased Julia’s need for another woman and mentor from the very beginning — a woman she’d later become herself.

What was hidden in Brightcliffe’s library?

Also part of Spencer’s tour was the library, which is regularly described as a big mosaic of books that’s easy to get lost in. Later on, in one of Ilonka’s many encounters with Julia, she shares exactly where to find the library’s medical section. She even goes so far as to give the exact decimal codes: 600, 615, and 619. How could Julia, who was still masquerading as Shasta here, know the library that intimately if she hadn’t spent any time at Brightcliffe?

On that note, Julia’s slip-up also revealed just how much time she spent scouring the library, searching for any medical miracle, until she serendipitously stumbled upon Athena’s diary and found her answer. She even indulges Ilonka in a tidbit of Greek mythology when they first meet, describing it as her “thing.” Julia’s obsession began when she fatally found Athena’s diary in the Brightcliffe library.

Why Julia and Dr. Stanton’s reveals are so important. 

Building off the show’s contention between science and faith, Dr. Stanton and Julia act as stand-ins for each side. Julia is a firm believer in natural and ritualistic remedies because she thinks they worked for her. Meanwhile, Dr. Stanton is the face of an empathetic approach to an otherwise data-driven field of practical medicine.

From the very start, these two women are pitted against each other in a symbolic and literal turf war. Dr. Stanton guards the hospice and tries her best to treat the kids through prescriptions and psychology. Julia nurtures the forest, spending her time along the spring trying to convince Ilonka that there’s a secret whimsical woe to natural wellness. Their ideological turf war plays at the center of an even larger question: How can we help people who think they can’t be helped? That answer is revealed through the show’s twist.

While Julia’s belief in natural treatment is true to a certain regard, her actions in The Midnight Club’s finale contradict her initial stance. As Shasta, she presents herself as an adamant believer in miracle teas and herbs. But we know that as Julia, she credits her recovery to the Paragon’s sacrificial ritual that involves poisoning four other women. That being said, the ritual doesn’t even work with Julia, who is revealed to be having a cancer recurrence. So on all ends, Julia’s way of going about things is just a whole bunch of hocus-pocus.

On the other hand, Dr. Stanton spent her entire career rejecting her mother’s dogma and reshaping existing medical practices to be more empathetic to the onslaught of death. She understands that accepting a diagnosis isn’t just about finding the right pills or treatment, but about finding like-minded people who’ll understand your situation, validate your feelings, and help you navigate some form of acceptance toward mortality. And it works. By the show’s end, the kids are glad they got to have each other in their last days, months, and years, and are no longer afraid of death because they know that they’re not alone.

We can try to fight science, and we can try to beat fate. But at the end of the day, it’s a losing battle. Grappling with laws, theories, or scriptures is a convoluted mess that only heeds more disappointment toward everything that’s left unanswered. The Midnight Club‘s charm is its revelation of the power of people as the ultimate antidote to all of the above. It’s an antidote Dr. Stanton knows all too well.  

The Midnight Club is now streaming on Netflix.