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.
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.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/carrie-ending-explained-mike-flanagan-who-lived-who-died
