Note: This story contains spoilers from “Cape Fear” Episode 10.
“Cape Fear” came to an end much as anyone who had been watching the Apple TV series could have expected — with extreme violence and one last twist or two.
Throughout the show’s run, viewers have marveled at the choices Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom (Patrick Wilson) Bowden made as they faced off against Max Cady (Javier Bardem). Over the course of the season, the series constantly shifted viewers’ sympathies among its central trio. Although Max was clearly the villain, “Cape Fear” suggested that Anna and Tom were, at times, just as morally compromised — if not more so — which is exactly what creator, showrunner and executive producer Nick Antosca intended.
“I think that the audience takes a certain pleasure in seeing privileged or satisfied characters be broken down, and also with this version of Max Cady, we wanted to take the audience on a journey of sympathy,” Antosca told TheWrap. “He has legitimately been the victim of an injustice. At the same time, does that mean he’s not a monster?”
The twists, the turns, the complete need for every member of the Bowden family to get their fingerprints on every crime scene and on half of the murder weapons used in the show had viewers pulling out their hair but glued to the screen. Some called it a hate watch, most considered it a guilty pleasure. By the end of the season, Antosca was “not surprised” by those comparisons.
“I don’t follow the day-to-day recaps or social media reactions, but that stuff gets filtered through too, and I’m not surprised by most of it,” Antosca said. “You know, sometimes people have reactions or interpretations that you don’t expect, and that’s just kind of part of the process of making a show or a film or a book or anything.”
The Bowdens and Max had their final clashes in Episode 10, which included Max’s arrest and the Bowdens getting off the hook before having the family taken hostage and put on trial by an already-escaped Max. Antosca said the confrontation that plays out over the back half of the finale was what executive producers Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were most looking forward to.
“One thing Spielberg said was, this is going to lead to an epic confrontation and a fight between the family members and Max, right? And so he was really looking forward, I think, to some version of the battle in the house and the pool at the end, and was really happy. Scorsese similarly was super happy with the finale, and and particularly with the coda at the very end.”
The trial commences and truths come out. Zach is once again drugged, Anna and Tom admit to fixing Max’s trial so he went to prison, and Anna drops the bomb that Crystal’s “son” Luke was actually Max’s son Adam all along. Yes, that’s the same son Max roasted back at the houseboat at the beginning of the finale.
Natalie gets free which causes a domino effect to the rest of the family squirming free and Max, Tom and Anna end up in the pool out back in the middle of the storm duking it out. Tom is ready to kill Max once and for all before Anna stops him and says he should die behind bars. The final moments serve as a coda which stand among Antosca’s favorite moments from the series. Natalie is seen holding a letter with DNA results to see if Max really was her father, but is called outside before opening it (“My suspicion is that one day Natalie will open that envelope. Just not yet,” Antosca assures). The last we see of the Bowdens is a parallel to the first we see of them – enjoying a grill out day by the pool. But each one of them is rattled and looking over their shoulders. They might have won but the show’s closing moments make it clear it all came at a cost.
“They’re not going to be able to recreate exactly what they had,” Antosca said. “If you kind of stop and think about it, Tom may not be in jail, and a lot of other things may have been resolved, but they’re not going to be able to practice law the way they were. A lot of things have been exposed about them, and they’re traumatized, and they’re probably going to have to sell that really nice house. They’re just clinging to having a nice barbecue in the backyard on a summer day, but it’s going to be hard.”
He finished: “That coda was our version of something that stuck with me from the ending of the Scorsese film, which is ending with Juliette Lewis’s character in voiceover, basically saying, ‘and then we moved on, and we never talked about it again, at least not to each other.’ And it’s like, damn, really? You just tried to recreate the safety that you had before. Like, did that work? It kind of seems unlikely.”
