Carrie Ending Explained: Who Lived, Who Died, and What Could Mike Flanagan Have in Mind Next for This Universe?

Full spoilers for Prime Video’s Carrie Season 1 follow.

From the moment Mike Flanagan revealed that his version of Carrie would involve multiple young women with telekinesis, not just the title character, there was some scoffing from people asking why Flanagan was interjecting some sort of an X-Men element into this well-told story. But those who asked this have likely either never read Stephen King’s original 1974 novel upon which the series is based or don’t recall its details, because as Flanagan himself has noted, this wasn’t something he was inventing out of whole cloth — it’s an idea plucked straight from the source material itself.

Carrie was the first King book ever published, and it laid a lot of groundwork for what was to come in his later stories. First and foremost, it was a freaky horror tale that involved a whole lot of people being killed by the end. But also of significance is that the book’s protagonist — and ultimately the cause of all that death — is a human girl who also happens to have amazing mental powers she was born with, something King explicitly stated was not unique to Carrie. In the book, he noted there were in fact others out there with powers like hers, and in his later works — which mostly take place in an interconnected universe — he introduced many such characters.

Flanagan’s new series gives Carrie a major overhaul by not just moving the story to the present day but also reinterpreting Carrie, her mother Margaret, and other important characters in the story. Flanagan has also interwoven a plot line about other women with telekinetic powers becoming aware of Carrie and seeking her out. And oh yeah… Carrie lives at the end!

Unlike in King’s book and almost all of the other adaptations to date, rather than die in the aftermath of the massacre she set in motion, Carrie (Summer H. Howell) is instead able to escape town with the help of one of those aforementioned fellow telekinetic girls (and to be fair, one other adaptation also had Carrie survive; the 2002 TV-movie written by Bryan Fuller).

This lays the groundwork for potential future seasons of Carrie, as Flanagan does a ton of world-building through the series that’s inspired by King’s larger body of work. Read on for more about how Carrie Season 1 ended, the ways it intersected with the Stephen King universe and its other examples of people with amazing mental powers, and where it could go next.

The Body Count

Generally speaking, things played out in the finale as they usually do in a Carrie adaptation, starting with the cruel “prank” played on Carrie at prom involving pigs’ blood being dumped on her by Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton) and her boyfriend Billy Nolan (Arthur Conti). The fragile, bullied Carrie, who’d thought she’d finally been accepted, lashes out, and an outright massacre occurs thanks to Carrie’s telekinesis, which takes out most of the prom attendees and then others as Carrie makes her way through the streets of Chamberlain, Maine.

But one major change here is the inclusion of the character Emaline (Thalia Dudek), another telekinetic, who was speaking to Carrie from afar all season through her mind. When Carrie uses her powers to try to yank down Chris and Billy from the rafters, her mental deflection of the landing that falls toward her ends up inadvertently hitting and killing her date, Tommy Ross (Joel Oulette). This is a deviation from the book, in which one of the metal buckets holding the blood hits Tommy in the head, making Chris and Billy the only ones responsible for his demise.

Here, however, Carrie is distraught about Tommy and agrees when Emaline appears and asks if she can “take the wheel” from Carrie, meaning that the lion’s share of the 200+ deaths that occur that night are with Emaline controlling Carrie’s body, albeit with Carrie allowing it to happen. It’s merciless mayhem to be sure, taking out good-hearted characters like Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard) — who’s electrocuted while standing on stage — and Rita “Miss D” Desjardin (Amber Midthunder). Rita’s death is extra tragic because she’s running to help Carrie as Amanda (Katee Sackhoff), someone who’s come to the prom expressly to kill Carrie because she knew she had powers thanks to Carrie’s mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan), is trying to shoot her. But Carrie/Emaline instinctively gives Miss D a telekinetic swat as she runs up to Carrie, sending her flying into the burning stage to her doom. Grayle and Miss D have also been killed at the prom in other adaptations, though it should be noted that King himself allowed these characters to survive, albeit suffering from understandable misery and PTSD from what occurred.

Those who do survive include Carrie’s classmates, Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) and Tina Blake (Josie Totah), who are among the few to make it out of the school gymnasium alive before the doors are telekinetically locked and the floor is electrocuted. Both Sue and Tina are among those later interrogated in the aftermath by the mysterious Adelaide (Flanagan’s wife and frequent collaborator, Kate Siegel). Also surviving are some non-students who were at the prom — young women with telekinesis (Cassandra Naud and Flanagan regular Ruth Codd) who report to Adelaide and are smart enough to avoid Carrie’s deadly actions. As for Amanda, the last we see of her, she’s telekinetically shoved back onto a table, so there’s a bit of wiggle room there since we don’t explicitly see her death.

As for Chris and Billy, they escape the prom, but their later encounter with Carrie on the road ends in a variation of how it’s gone for them in King’s novel and in every other adaptation; she kills them inside their car. Notably too, we see it is definitely Carrie in control at this point, as Emaline stands to the side while Carrie flips Billy’s car and crushes it with her powers, killing the two people whose actions most directly caused this misery to begin.

Then there’s Margaret, who attempts to kill her own daughter in King’s book as well as every previous adaptation, only to be killed herself by Carrie’s powers. Similar to the famous 1976 Brian De Palma Carrie film, Flanagan has Carrie’s powers cause the White family house to collapse, but unlike that film, where both women die, Carrie and Margaret both survive. In fact, Margaret reveals she has telekinetic powers herself, as she briefly holds up part of the house that was falling on her.

In the wake of all this, Carrie leaves with Emaline, but while Margaret survives this encounter, her life ends soon after regardless. While speaking to Adelaide, Margaret reveals this was only the second time she ever tapped into her telekinetic abilities, and she doesn’t think she can do it again. Now feeling Margaret is of no use to her, Adelaide causes Margaret’s heart to stop beating in the same way that Carrie killed her mother in the book.

It’s All About The Shining

If you’re a Stephen King fan looking for those connected universe moments that are prevalent throughout his books, it’s hard not to mark out when Adelaide tells Margaret, “A lot of people have a little bit of Shine and they don’t even know it,” The word Shine, of course, refers to the Shining — not just the story itself, but the term that gives that King classic (and its acclaimed Stanley Kubrick film adaptation) its title, which was how Overlook Hotel cook Dick Hallorann described those like himself and Danny Torrance who have psychic abilities.

The Shining/Shine has since been used as a catch-all term for all sorts of mental powers seen throughout King’s work, with fans long assuming it could retroactively be used for Carrie as well. Now, Adelaide gives that assumption on-screen confirmation when she uses it in relation to Margaret’s own telekinetic abilities. It’s also worth noting that Flanagan introduces the idea of Margaret herself having limited telekinetic powers, but in the book, it does run in the family, as Margaret’s grandmother was telekinetic.

While King says in the original Carrie that those with telekinesis specifically tend to be women, there are many other mental abilities and forms of the Shining seen throughout his stories that are possessed by both men and women. That includes the Shining itself and Doctor Sleep’s Danny Torrance’s ability to see and interact with the dead; the pyrokinesis of Firestarter’s Charlie McGee; and the clairvoyance of The Dead Zone’s Johnny Smith. King’s multipart epic, The Dark Tower, would also involve characters with the Shining, but there he uses another term for it — The Touch.

Could Carrie Meet Any Familiar Faces?

Though Amazon Prime has not yet made a decision on whether they’re renewing the series or not, Flanagan has said that he has a three-season plan for Carrie. Now that we’ve seen the end of Season 1, the road is quite literally wide open for Carrie White, as she heads toward a future we’ve never seen depicted before. Could that future include other familiar faces and elements from Stephen King lore? Certainly Flanagan would likely love that, but it’s important to note that the screen rights to King’s work has been spread out across so many studios through the years that many tantalizing possibilities are legally impossible… or at least quite tricky to sort out.

For instance, in Flanagan’s own adaptation of King’s Doctor Sleep, young Abra Stone — who has the Shining — is told by Danny Torrance that there are others out there that may need her help. Abra finding Carrie in her time of need would be a natural and exciting team-up, and Flanagan could even bring back Kyliegh Curran as Abra, but Warner Bros. made both the Doctor Sleep movie and its predecessor, The Shining, and likely still has the movie and TV rights to those characters.

Another young girl with incredible powers who it would be intrinsically fun to see Carrie meet up with is the Firestarter herself, Charlie McGee. But if Universal (who made both film versions of Firestarter) still holds the rights, that would be a similar problem. So while King has a vast amount of characters he’s created, some of which Carrie producer Amazon MGM may already have access to or be able to more easily get access to, there’s also a chance Flanagan will simply use concepts from King’s work and put his own spin on it, or introduce something that can easily co-exist alongside what’s already out there.

In fact, he seems to be doing just that with Adelaide and the telekinetic girls she’s gathering. King’s 2019 novel, The Institute, is about a place that’s similarly gathering children with mental abilities, though in a notably exploitative “let’s imprison them and turn them into weapons” manner. The woman running this program, Julia Sigsby, is somewhat reminiscent of Adelaide, except Sigsby has no powers of her own; she’s coldly abusive and using these kids without any apparent personal investment. Adelaide is certainly cutthroat — look at how she kills Margaret once she learns Margeret can’t access her abilities again — but also could be more of a Magneto type who justifies her actions as a greater good for her kind. Amusingly, The Institute has its very own TV show adaptation running right now, with Season 2 debuting soon.

Besides the direct mention of “Shine,” Carrie’s first season didn’t lean into many direct references to King’s other work, though both LaMerk Industries and Sombra Corporation — companies with ties to key Dark Tower figures, The Man in Black and the Crimson King — were glimpsed in the series. Flanagan is actually developing a new Dark Tower project, but has admitted it’s been a tricky one to get off the ground. It remains to be seen if Carrie could be a direct tie to what he has planned there, or if — being the King superfan that he is — he simply included the references as easter eggs, reinforcing the ties all of this has to King’s larger universe.

Back to the Book

Another route Flanagan could go in a second season would be to explore more aspects of the Carrie novel itself via material no one has ever tackled. The book has a loose time-jumping structure with elements of a true crime story, complete with excerpts from interviews, testimony, and books from the aftermath of the “Black Prom” in Chamberlain. Some adaptations have lightly nodded to this by using a framing device where characters are being interviewed about what happened, which Flanagan does himself with Adelaide. But the book hints at some massive nationwide fallout and coverage of the Black Prom, which makes sense considering a telekinetic teenage girl essentially destroyed a town. This includes mentions of the White Commission, a federal investigation into Carrie and what she did.

Introducing the White Commission is an enticing potential element for a future season of Carrie, especially because Carrie is now on the run. Beyond Adelaide’s group wanting to recruit her and those like Amanda wanting to find and kill her, you could have a government agency on her tail as well. Could this lead to something akin to The Institute, or could the story go in a whole other direction? There are a lot of possibilities.

We’ll have to wait and see if Amazon decides to renew Carrie before we have any chance of finding out exactly what her next step will be.