OK, We Need to Talk About That Homecoming Ending

Surely we weren't the only ones holding our breath throughout Amazon's new series, right?

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Before it was even released, Homecoming was notable for many reasons. For one, it was the new project from Mr. Robot mastermind Sam Esmail. For another, it marked Julia Roberts’ first turn leading an episodic television show. And finally, the Amazon original series was one of Hollywood's first big bets on adapting podcasts for the screen.

None of those things would matter if Homecoming fell flat. Yet, this Friday the series hit Amazon Prime and—voila—it very much soared. A little bit drama, a little bit noir, and a lot of suspense, Esmail’s new show proved to be a tense thriller that kept us pushing Play on each new installment—right up to the breath-holding ending.

Homecoming also gave viewers a lot to unpack: emotional turns, surprise twists, and a really trippy score. (Also, let’s hear it for Julia Roberts!) To dig into Amazon’s latest, we corralled WIRED’s biggest bingers—writers and editors Jason Parham, Brian Raftery, Peter Rubin, and Angela Watercutter—to break down everything they liked, or didn’t, about Amazon’s latest prestige series.

Angela Watercutter: I’ll be honest: If I start this off it’s just going to be one long Stephan James appreciation post and even though we should definitely talk about how amazing he is as returning Afghanistan veteran Walter Cruz, there’s a lot to discuss with Homecoming. What did you all think? When did the show click for you?

Peter Rubin: Even with the best shows, I’ve become accustomed to experiencing Pilot Syndrome—that wait-and-see generosity we deploy to forgive the exposition and worldbuilding contrivances that can overwhelm a first episode. Not Homecoming. From the opening sequence that zoomed out of an aquarium and into social worker Heidi Bergman’s office, to the typography and aerial shots that so define the show’s art direction, Homecoming felt like a cohesive thing, an assured and compelling fully formed entity.

The question, of course, is whether that’s due to Sam Esmail’s work adapting the original Gimlet podcast—something you talked to him about, Angela—or if it’s simply the podcast’s merits shining through. I came in having never listened to an episode of the podcast, which honestly felt like a bit of an advantage; I never thought about how Julia Robert’s Bergman stacked up to Catherine Keener’s, or how James as Walter Cruz matched Oscar Isaac’s portrayal of the soldier who entered the secretive “Homecoming” program for help integrating into civilian life. However, they both gave measured, naturalistic performances (as did Bobby Cannavale as Bergman's super-shady boss, Colin, and Shea Whigham as the magnetically bespectacled DoD official looking into what exactly happened at Homecoming), so it seems like a win-win.

Jason Parham: I think because TV, as a medium, has undergone a kind of bloat in the last half-decade—as it stands, there are simply too many TV shows to keep up with—I often look for small aesthetic flourishes in a series. More than plot or award-worthy acting, what can pull me in? The Good Place, Atlanta, Random Acts of Flyness, Pose—each show has its own particular set of aesthetic quirks. Where Homecoming excels in this regard, and to Peter’s point about it feeling like a fully formed entity, was Esmail’s visual vocabulary. All of it had the sheen of a Hitchcock noir-mystery—but it didn’t feel at all dated, or out of touch.

There's a particular sense of paranoia that runs through each episode and Esmail does a fantastic job—maybe even more so than on Mr. Robot; though I only made it through Season 1 of that show, so take this with a grain of salt—of translating that paranoia to the screen, and often without dialogue (an even more impressive feat given Homecoming is based on a podcast). The overhead shot of Carrasco (Whigham) descending into a maze-like stairwell. The hazy, hushed lighting that haunts just about every shot. The use of split screens, or of aspect ratios to delineate between the past and present, heightening the sense of claustrophobia. It felt like gazing into a petri dish and watching people’s lives play out in disastrous concert. I couldn’t take my eyes off any of it.

Watercutter: Jason, that’s absolutely it. I’ll admit, and I’m in the minority here, it took me a while to get into the Homecoming groove. I enjoyed Roberts and James’ chemistry, but I wasn’t gripped until the fourth or fifth episode. It was those flourishes, though, that kept me coming back. The show doesn’t give us a lot in the beginning—sure, Shrier (Jeremy Allen White) says he doesn’t trust Homecoming but the mystery doesn’t unravel until much later—but those notes of more to come made me want to keep digging. It is, as Jen Chaney noted on Vulture, the best of WTFTV.

Raftery: Like all of you, I admired Homecoming for its medium-bending stylistic flourishes; its intoxicating corporate-noir-meets-Hitchcock set-up; and its performances (I especially enjoyed watching Shea Whigham--who’s played so many memorably ball-busting alpha-males--sweat it out as a neutered middle-management lifer). But one of the reasons why the show had me hooked from the get-go came down to pure math: With each episode clocking in at around 30 minutes, I didn’t have to worry that I was throwing away time that could be better spent elsewhere.

My Wired coworkers know all too well my frustration with Netflix’s dramas, which are invariably in need of editing--with the exception of the excellent Mindhunter, I can’t think of a single Netflix series that didn’t overstay its welcome at one point, either with sloggy episodes, or with drawn-out episode orders. But a five-hour, fast-burning thriller like Homecoming? That seems doable, especially our way-too-packed prestige-streaming era, in which it feels like a half-dozen new offerings are being shoved down the internet’s tubes every week.

And even though Homecoming could have ultimately shed an episode or so and still not lost the plot--I’m not sure how much we needed Sissy Spacek’s character, as much as I love her performance--I think Esmail and his writing team did a fine job of stripping the story down to its high-end-pulp essentials. The streamers like long-playing, long-running series--it keeps viewers stuck within their eco-system. All too often, creators have abused that privilege. But Homecoming proves you can accomplish a lot in just a few hours.

Watercutter: Also, what did you all think of the music? It was intense. Also, I felt like I had Shazam open for quite a bit of my binge—just like, wait, what is this?? (Fun fact: During that scene where Heidi freaks out a little bit and pulls all of her desk tools under her head and lays down on top of them, the song playing is from The Conversation, which Esmail had mentioned was an influence on Homecoming.) And any show that ends its season with—spoiler alert!—Iron & Wine is OK by me. Any other musical queues strike you all?

Raftery: It took me a while to realize just how deftly Esmail and his music-supervision team were incorporating classic film scores into Homecoming, but once I did, it became a welcome spot-the-tune semi-distraction: I loved hearing John Carpenter’s haunted synth-score for The Thing being repurposed for a white-collar thriller, or catching David Shire’s classic All the President’s Men cue play out in one of its final episodes. Esmail is clearly a movie obsessive: Mr. Robot was loaded with references to everything from Kubrick to The Third Man to even Risky Business. But Homecoming takes it even further, with its soundtrack-swipes and numerous Hitchcock nods--all of which are so carefully grafted into the show, they never once feel like fawning homages. It’s a uniquely mixed-medium show: A drama that’s based on a scripted podcast; structured as a TV show; and shot and stylized like a patient, claustrophobic ’70s thriller.

Watercutter: And what did folks think of the show beyond its flourishes? Personally, once I felt invested in everyone I found it to be quite wrenching, really. I enjoyed the suspense questions—What are the goals of the Homecoming facility?, What’s that drug doing to the returning soldiers?, Why can’t Heidi remember what she did while she worked there?—but there was something about Walter and Heidi’s struggle to connect in such a sterile environment that just killed me. I know that’s a really obvious point to make, but at the same time I think those kind of core relationships are lacking, or very thin, in a lot of suspense thrillers, so I was glad to find them here. Also, the back-and-forth scenes as Heidi, Carrasco, and Walter’s mother Gloria (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) start putting the pieces together had me holding my breath at times. Carrasco

Parham: Beyond the visual and auditory highpoints, I found the series mostly compelling. It’s the breed of narrative that sits in that fragile corridor between truth and fiction—one that seems almost too ideal, too devastatingly ripe, for our fractured moment. It’s a story bizarre enough to be believable: Geist, a Fortune 500 corporation known for developing food and skincare products, wants to manufacture a drug that cures soldiers of PTSD. So they build a facility with the goal of transitioning veterans back into the real world—only the truer, darker aim isn’t actually to get these men ready for family and work life, but to rid them of their psychological war wounds so they can re-enlist. Of course, the other catch is just as gutting: the drug doesn’t just wipe clean symptoms of anxiety, social isolation, depression, or explosive bouts of anger, it erases whole memories.

What Homecoming becomes, then, is a sharp critique on systemic abuse, and how the corruption of such power infects everything, and everyone, it touches. For me, the saddest realization was how easy it remains for veterans—already discarded by the same government they so proudly served—to be exploited, and held captive. Stephan James brings humanity, if a bit of naivety, to Walter Cruz, but in doing so sheds light on how the system can, at every turn, fail people, even as they continue to believe in its good.

Watercutter: Yes, that’s it! Which is why when it all comes together in the end…

Parham: What made the closing scene so satisfying, for me, was all the brilliant stylistic work Esmail did in the lead-up to those last few minutes. The scene rejects the isolation, darkness, and near-violent panic that shadowed characters all season. We’re in a northern town, far from the swamps of Tampa, the skies are as radiantly blue as we’ve seen them, and the score that augments the shot—Iron & Wine’s “The Trapeze Swinger”—carries with it none of the soundtracked terror from earlier episodes. It’s as if this scene exists in an alternate universe. I won’t spoil the final shot, but how it culminates—for Walter and Heidi, at least—is just as surprising: with a flash of tangible, no-strings-attached hope that everything, for the first time in a very long time, might actually be OK.