Note: This story contains spoilers from “We Were Liars” Episode 8.
After a summer of Cadence Sinclair (Emily Alyn Lind) begging to know the events of that tragic night that left her with a traumatic injury, all is revealed in the “We Were Liars” finale in a twist that shocks both Cadence and the audience.
As Cadence pieces together the night the previous summer where she and the other liars — Mirren (Esther McGregor), Johnny (Joseph Zada) and Gat (Shubham Maheshwari) — decided to burn down the Sinclair estate on Beechwood Island (literally and figuratively) to give the family a fresh start, she comes to the heartbreaking realization that the other Liars — and the Sinclair dogs — died in the fire, leaving her as the lone survivor.
The ending, as heartbreaking as it is, is left mostly untouched from E. Lockhart’s beloved 2014 novel, though creators Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie revealed there was a short time the writers considered changing it.
“There was a little bit of conversation about, do we adjust whether everyone is gone?” Adly MacKenzie told TheWrap, referring to the deaths of Mirren, Johnny and Gat. “But it was very, very brief, maybe one morning in the writers’ room, we went down a road.”
The only desired change to the book’s ending on the part of the studio was the death of the Sinclair’s two beloved dogs, Plec revealed, but noted avoiding their deaths would’ve “taken the easy way out,” saying “the whole show is about consequence.”
“It’s not just that these kids took a stand against their parents in the name of doing something good,” Plec said. “It’s that they were so unprepared and uneducated in the ways of getting into good trouble that they created such terrible trouble … that’s the point of the show.”
Adly MacKenzie also noted the TV adaptation gave Cadence more complicity in the liars’ deaths than in the book, as the finale revealed that Cadence went back for her grandmother’s black pearls, making her late for the midnight meeting time established by the group. With only Gat at the meeting point at midnight, he went back into the house for Cadence, leading him to die in the fire alongside Mirren and Johnny.
“That was inspired by, honestly, a lot of the story in ‘Family of Liars,’ and the way that that gets deeper into the generational trauma,” Adly MacKenzie said, referring to Lockhart’s “We Were Liars” prequel novel, which follows the Sinclair daughters as teenagers. “We started talking about this Sinclarianism and the way that it lives in you, and the way that you maybe can’t just decide it away, and giving her a layer of accountability in Gat’s death made it, I think, even more painful.”
Below, the creators explain how they wanted to hold viewers hands with those emotional goodbyes, tease what Cadence’s future might look like and unpack that last second twist.
TheWrap: Cadence has an emotional goodbye with each liar. What did you want to come through in those goodbyes, especially with Gat?
Adly MacKenzie: The big debate was, can we even have all of these emotional goodbyes? Because structurally, it breaks every rule that Julie Plec ever taught me about writing a TV episode. There are 400 endings in our finale. It feels like it goes on forever.
Plec: And we love every single one of them so much that even if we were told we had to lose one, I don’t think we would have. Even though we know it’s not the best way to structure an episode of television, we love those goodbyes so deeply.
Adly MacKenzie: I think about the experience of reading the book, and the way that, after I finished the book, I just sat there and stared at it and I was shell-shocked. What we did is gave the audience that shell-shocked gut punch, and then we sit with them while they’re staring at the ending for a while, and we work through all those feelings. We just wanted to have really genuine goodbyes with those characters and they were just as emotional on set as they are on screen. Those were very snotty, teary, messy days [and] some of our actors’ [best] work.
How difficult was it to thread the needle of keeping the twist a secret, but also making the Summer 17 scenes work both as if the Liars are alive and as if they’re ghosts?
Plec: The roadmap for that was really beautifully laid out in the book, and then Carina, especially, was the arbiter of making sure that, as we were laying in all the moments throughout the episodes, that there was always an easter egg, [for] the second time viewing, even sometimes to have a scene to stay in because of what it was doing. And that makes it a lot of fun to go back and watch again if you didn’t know the twist, and if you did know the twist, I think there might even be a couple times as a viewer where you’re like, “But wait, hang on a second. How’s that happening? Maybe they changed the ending,” so it’s going to keep everybody on their toes a little bit.
Adly MacKenzie: I really want people to watch it again. I really want you to get to the end of the Season 1 and [be] like, “I gotta re-binge this tomorrow.” There are little moments — the one that I was like fighting for to stay in, it’s a very casual moment of Mirren teaching her sisters to French braid hair. It’s not a big deal when you see it the first time, and when you see it the second time …
Ultimately Cadence turns her back still on her family. Why did she reject her position as the heir and what do you imagine her future looks like?
Adly MacKenzie: The last line of the novel is, “My name is Cadence Sinclair and I endure.” And that is a Cadence Sinclair-ian novel version of her play on words, because it means two things. It means “I keep going” and it means “I can bear it,” And that’s the question of what she’s going to do moving forward. In this moment, she ran away from the reporter and the questions and the sad looks. But she’s going to have to figure out a way to endure this family, [she] can’t wish them away.
All seems well until Johnny appears to be trapped. How does the ending set up for a potential Season 2?
Plec: The best gift that Emily Lockhart gave us as we were sitting down to write “We Were Liars” was she published “Family of Liars,” which is a prequel about the Sinclair sisters when they were teenagers. The book opens with Carrie telling the story of a very dark time and a very bad summer to her dead son, so we just wanted the audience to know that there’s still more story to tell, and we’re really looking forward to the opportunity to be able to do it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“We Were Liars” is now streaming on Prime Video.
