Naomi Watts breaks down THAT final scene in The Watcher : It's the 'indictment of the American Dream'

Joey Nolfi
·3 min read
6

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Watcher.

Everything looked peachy for Nora (Naomi Watts) and Dean (Bobby Cannavale) at the start of Ryan Murphy's hit Netflix series The Watcher, until the dressings of their new, seemingly idyllic dream life in a fabulous New Jersey mansion rotted away into a nightmare after threatening letters from the show's titular, anonymous stalker revealed deep cracks in the foundation of their marriage. It all came to a head in the series' closing moments, which saw a new family taking up residence in the dazzling abode, though Dean — ragged, jobless, and searching for a new purpose — hung around outside, watching the new owners live the life he desperately wanted.

Watts exclusively tells EW that the final exchange between the couple (Dean, sitting in his car outside their former address, lies to his wife by telling her that he went to a job interview, but that he'll be home soon — clueless that she's actually watching in another car behind him) frames a "really dark" examination of their lives in an "indictment of the American Dream" they worked to show off with material possessions.

The Watcher
The Watcher

Netflix 'The Watcher' ending explained by Naomi Watts.

"They feel like the house is going to solve their problems, and it ends up being the catalyst that causes a whole lot of new problems that they didn't anticipate," Watts says. "Now, they're just trying to figure out who the other [really] is."

Nora's skepticism, she continues, welcomes viewers to question Dean's motivations for traveling back to the house as well — especially after he revealed to her that he sent threatening letters to their ex-neighbors (Margo Martindale, Mia Farrow) as retribution for their unsettling (and unsympathetic) welcome to the neighborhood.

"I think, yes, there are definitely undertones there of that," she says when asked if it's possible that Dean could've suffered from Stockholm Syndrome, now fully obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the mystery of the Watcher — enough so that he might've watched his successor retrieve the mail to keep tabs on letters he planted himself. "The cycle continues, and we've gone too far believing in this American Dream with such entitlement and the fear of no longer being relevant anymore if that dream isn't realized. It's a vicious cycle."

Watts is reluctant to divulge her thoughts on the show's (multiple) loose ends (Who's pigtail girl? Were Pearl Winslow and John Graff really in the tunnels beneath the Brannock home?) much beyond that, preferring to preserve the integrity of the mystery that Murphy and his team of writers and directors built into the show — which, like the 2018 Cut article it's based on, resolves without a clear answer as to the identity of the Watcher.

The Watcher
The Watcher

Netflix Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale in 'The Watcher.'

Still, she promises that the cast had fun discussing conspiracy theories of their own.

"We were all constantly speculating and finger-pointing to each other, trying to see what stories lined up. That's fun, and it helps to our advantage as actors to keep up the mystery as we played it. Not knowing is the beauty of it, and it adds to the tension of how you play it," she says. "It wasn't spelled out to us, either, so our guessing was just as fun as yours!"

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