The Girl From Plainville showrunners break down the finale and that tragic alternate ending sequence
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It's time to say goodbye to The Girl From Plainville.
The Hulu true-crime drama, which follows the infamous case of Michelle Carter (Elle Fanning), has streamed its final, heart-wrenching episode. In it, we are taken through the final day of Conrad "Coco" Roy III's (Colton Ryan) life (walking his dog, going to the beach with his family), and we learn of the verdict in the case (Michelle is found guilty of involuntary manslaughter).
Following the verdict, there's a prolonged dream-like sequence in which Michelle imagines what her and Conrad's lives could have been like if everything had gone differently. It's Christmastime, and Michelle has returned home from college for the holiday. After spending time with family, she goes to a local bar, where she encounters Conrad. In this reality, though, he ghosted her after their Florida meet-cute and they never struck up a relationship. Together, they reminisce about the future they could have had, and Michelle grapples with her feelings about Conrad and his death.
The episode ends with Michelle's sentencing — a title card reveals that after beginning her 15-month prison sentence on Feb. 11, 2019, she was released in Jan. 2020 due to good conduct — and we learn a bit about the ways Conrad's family has honored him since his death.
Speaking to EW ahead of the episode's debut, showrunners Patrick Macmanus and Liz Hannah break down the finale's pivotal moments, including that tragic dream sequence and the inspiration for the surprising bathroom scene between Michelle and Katie Rayburn (Aya Cash).
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The moment between Michelle and the prosecutor, Katie Rayburn, in the bathroom was surprising. Michelle tells her, "I know you're doing this for Conrad, so I want to thank you for caring about him this much," and you can see how much it rattles Katie. Was that moment purely fictional or was it based on a real interaction?
PATRICK MACMANUS: Well, the background for that moment came from conversations that we had with Jesse [Barron, who wrote the Esquire article the show is based on]. We visited the courthouse. It's a small town. The courthouse is right on the public square, and around the square are a bunch of restaurants, and everybody was sort of encamped there, and so Jesse had said to us that you were constantly running into one another, that there were absolutely moments in which Michelle was crossing paths with the Roy family... We did get a story about the fact that there were crosses in bathrooms, but the Katie and Michelle thing was an invention on our part.
LIZ HANNAH: It was inspired by a story that there was a journalist who had been trying to talk to Michelle for months and would stake out at her house and knock on the door and all of these things and would never get an interview, and the Carters had never given an interview. Then on one of the last days of the trial, she was in the bathroom, and Michelle was there, and she was so struck that Michelle was just suddenly there and didn't say anything, and said that Michelle was very normal and very sort of cheerful, in a very strange… It was just a very strange experience. So it was inspired by that moment, and I think influenced in trying to get into the head of Michelle right before her life's about to change again.
Another part that sticks out is, of course, that dream sequence, which serves as a sort of alternate ending for Conrad and Michelle. Tell me about that.
HANNAH: I think a lot of it came from us selfishly wanting to see the bittersweet life that they both could have maybe had if they'd never met, or if they'd met and they'd talked once and never exchanged numbers. So I think that came from 20 weeks in the writers room with really, really depressed, strung-out writers trying to find something in there, and it also, I think, came from what we were talking about with the Glee fantasy [in episode 4] of, "How do you depict Michelle's guilt?" I don't mean guilt in terms of the verdict, and I don't mean this in terms of judging her. I just mean in terms of being the person that was talking to Coco that much, and being the vessel for a lot of his emotions.
How do you deal with your emotions for that? How do you deal with your experience? It felt to me, watching her in the courtroom, that that was somebody who wasn't present, who wasn't there, who was really disconnected. So that kind of was the jumping off point for us, and Patrick and I spent a long time talking about, "Where would you go if you were that girl who didn't want to be there? What would be the moment you would revisit, or where would the place be that you would go to hide?" So that was where that came from, and also selfishly, we were shooting this in December, so we finally didn't have to paint out any of the Christmas lights everywhere. [Laughs]
Steve Dietl/Hulu Elle Fanning as Michelle Carter in 'The Girl From Plainville.'
It also ties in with all of the imagined text conversations between Conrad and Michelle throughout the series. How did you guys figure out the tone of those text messages and how to portray them?
MACMANUS: Well, look, we've now, over the course of the last 10 to 15 years, seen text messages portrayed in TV and film, and there's only so much you can really do with that, and so we knew from the beginning — this is way back, this is when it was just Liz and me and Elle — that we were trying to figure out a new way to be able to portray text messages. That was part one. For this show in particular, it was extraordinarily important that we found out a new way of doing it, simply because they'd only been in each other's presence three times over the course of their entire relationship, and the idea of spending three hours, let alone eight hours of storytelling, just watching text bubbles pop up on screens or appearing over people's shoulders at text screens was going to be something that we knew was not going to be particularly cinematic once you got to the end of the day.
So that was the nuts and bolts reason why we were looking for a new way in, but where sort of all the pieces fell into place for us, was when we came to the conclusion early on that this relationship for them was as real as any relationship that they knew in their "real lives" — that this was as powerful for them as going to the movies together, or going to a ball game together, or sitting in a park talking to each other, or having a picnic. This was real for them, and so once that sort of all came together for us, then the logical step was for us to put Michelle and Conrad in the same space, and it absolutely was a goal of ours to try to figure out how to get them to execute those scenes in a manner that still felt like people were texting, but also infuse those texts with the same emotion that these young people were infusing every single one of their text messages with, while still allowing room for them missing each other.
There are quite a few moments throughout the course of these text reenactments that I think we feel particularly proud of, where you can really sense the fact that they're ships passing, that they're not getting the message correctly with each other, and that's something that we all face on our day-to-day basis, where we don't understand tone from texts, but it was… Easy is not the right word, because we had the thousands of text messages that we had. It was a phenomenal asset and a phenomenal tool that made our jobs easier. Figuring out how to cull all of those down into a cogent story that got to the heart of their relationship, that was the hard part. And for that, we owe a great deal of gratitude to our writers and to our researcher, who was with us every step of the way making sure that we got it right.
And, of course, the other big part of the finale is watching Conrad's final day. How much of what we see actually happened, and how much did you guys have to fill in the blanks for?
HANNAH: That's all real. That was from his text messages and from Lynn Roy's testimony. So that's all real of what he did on his last day, and he was talking to her the entire time, so there's almost a timeline of his day, and then of Lynn filling in the gaps when she was around, and that was something we always talked about. We knew that we were going to be telling the story from his perspective. We felt that it was really important to be in Coco's POV for his last day, and to experience it with him.
I will say it was definitely something we dreaded getting to and writing and shooting. It was really hard, and not just because of the subject matter, but what we're getting to, what we're leaning to. Everything was taken from what happened in real life, and I think something that stuck out so much to us, and Patrick, you felt so strongly about this, is just the mundaneness of it all. Of walking the dog, of playing a video game, of going to the beach with your family and knowing that's the last time you'll do anything. What happens when you know that, when you're looking at it all, and the choices you make in looking at it all that way?
MACMANUS: It's hard to think about what it must have been like for Lynn and for Co, Lynn in particular, because that was his day. She had no clue what was going to come that night, and it kind of cuts to the quick of one of the deeper reasons for why this show exists, which is that we can never know what someone is going through, and that we can never blame people for tragedies like this. All we can hope to take out of a story like this is that we can reach out to people who might be troubled and say to them that that day doesn't have to be the last day, that you can speak about this, that you can reach out for help about this, and that that help exists.
I don't want to make this show more than it is, but it was always, again, a north star for Liz and I that it couldn't just be about entertaining, that this isn't just a regular true crime show. That this has something to say to people out there, which is that you are never alone, and that all of us have some degree of issues with mental health that we're all dealing with every single day. So I don't want to go down too much of a rabbit hole, but I think it's important that the mundanity of that day is like millions of people out there right now, that it could happen at any point in time.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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