If you’ve just watched the His & Hers ending and came away with more questions than answers, you’ve come to the right place.
Netflix’s new murder-mystery thriller series starring Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal, based on the novel by Alice Feeney, is a twisty drama about a string of murders in a small town outside of Atlanta. Told over two timelines, which are spliced together to keep the audience at the edge of their seat, His & Hers can be tricky to puzzle together, especially if you’re second screening the show (and even if you aren’t, to be honest).
Keep reading for a breakdown of what the hell happened during that bonkers finale.
Spoilers ahead.
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First, a quick recap of His & Hers…
The he and she of His & Hers are Jack (Jon Bernthal) and Anna (Tessa Thompson), an estranged married couple who separated after the tragic death of their infant daughter. Anna disappears after her daughter’s death, essentially ghosting her life—including her job as a news anchor in Atlanta. Jack, a detective, is unable to find his wife and eventually loses his job on the local force. At rock bottom, he moves back to his and Anna’s shared hometown of Dahlonega, a small town outside of the city, to live with his alcoholic sister, Zoe (Marin Ireland), and his niece, who he treats as his own.
A year after her daughter’s death and her disappearance, Anna returns to work to find she’s been completely replaced by Lexi Jones (Rebecca Rittenhouse), a bird-like blonde with aggressive ambition. It’s clear from the jump that Anna doesn’t respect Lexi, and she begins plotting to get her job back.
At the same time, Jack is assigned a homicide case in Dahlonega. He and his partner Priya (Sunita Mani), a young officer from Boston, investigate the mysterious murder of Rachel, a local woman who was found stabbed and splayed on the hood of her car, which was parked in the woods. The medical examiner concluded she’d recently had sex and found a red-and-white friendship bracelet stuffed into the victim’s mouth.
A local news conference is held shortly after the body is found. Much to Jack’s surprise, Anna is among the throng of local press. She asks, “How did you know the victim?” a question that shakes Jack to his core. Later, we discover that Jack had been having an affair with Rachel, and the two were hooking up in his truck in the woods on the night of the murder. We also learn that Anna had witnessed him and Rachel going at it because their rendezvous point was near the cemetery where Anna had been visiting their daughter’s grave.
Because the husband or boyfriend is typically the first suspect in a homicide like Rachel’s, Jack goes out of his way to throw his partner Priya off the scent, doing lots of illegal stuff like tampering with evidence, falsifying legal documents, and generally being the definition of a Bad Cop. Meanwhile, another murder occurs in Dahlonega: Rachel’s best friend since grade school, Helen, is found dead in her office. Anna is the one to find her body—and also the first reporter on the scene. Once again, a friendship bracelet is found in the victim’s mouth.
Helen’s death makes Zoe fearful for her life. She seems to suspect that Anna is behind them all and tells her brother that his wife is not who he thinks she is. Rachel, Helen, Zoe, Anna, and another girl, Catherine, had all been friends in school, which we learn through flashbacks of Anna’s 16th birthday party.
By the time Zoe turns up dead, stabbed to death in her bathtub, Anna begins to put the pieces together that Lexi, her work nemesis, is actually Catherine—the girl her friends had bullied at school. Priya, meanwhile, turns her suspicions on Jack as well as the elusive Catherine, who yields no results on a Google search save for an article about her dead older sister. Everything comes to a head when Richard (Pablo Schreiber), Anna’s cameraman-slash-lover and Lexi’s husband (stay with me), invites her to stay at Lexi’s lake house when their hotel reservation is mysteriously canceled.
Anna believes that Richard has lured her to the house for Lexi to kill her and pulls her gun on him. Anna exhausts all of her ammo without hitting Richard, which is when Lexi enters the picture. The two begin fighting when Lexi spots the gun on the floor and picks it up. She attempts to shoot Anna—who knows the clip is empty—and is instead shot and killed by Priya, who had followed her instincts to Lexi/Catherine’s home. Lexi dies, and the murders of her classmates are pinned on her posthumously. Detectives believe that she acted not only on some high school revenge fantasy, but to put an end to a blackmail scheme that Rachel and Helen had cooked up. It turns out the two had realized that Lexi was Catherine, and that she was responsible for her older sister Andrea’s death.
Wait—Lexi is who?
Lexi is actually Catherine A. Kelly, the teen who was bullied by Rachel, Helen, and Zoe’s sadistic high school friend group. As we learn from the photos on the wall of her lake house, she shed weight after her teenage years, dyed her hair blonde, and reinvented herself as Lexi, a shortened version of her middle name.
Lexi, as we find out in a flashback, is also capable of murder. Back in their teenage years, Lexi’s older sister Andrea is depicted as a mean girl who ridicules Catherine mercilessly. When their family is about to head out for an afternoon on their sailboat, Catherine is asked to grab Andrea’s inhaler. She does, but expels it all of its medicine and hands her asthmatic sister an empty inhaler. When Andrea suffers from an attack while out on the water, her inhaler is useless, and she dies.
What really happened in the forest on Anna’s 16th birthday?
Throughout the series, Anna’s 16th birthday party is alluded to as a turning point for her high school friend group.
By the final episode, the chain of events has finally been sorted: Anna invites her friend group to her home in Dahlonega for her 16th birthday party. Before Catherine arrives, Rachel gifts Anna a push-up bra and tells her to try it on. She then takes a photo of her in it and sends it to a group of boys, unbeknownst to Anna. Anna, a wannabe TV journalist, has her video camera out and is recording every moment.
Later, the girls venture out into the woods to what appears to be their regular stomping grounds. They’re enjoying themselves when a group of boys, invited by Rachel and armed with alcohol, approach. When the boys offer Anna and Catherine a drink, they object at first, but ultimately cave to the peer pressure.
It then becomes clear that the boys were promised sexual favors, and they descend upon Catherine. Rachel, Helen, and Zoe watch as she’s held down against her will. Anna, however, springs into action, realizing that Catherine had been set up. But when she frees Catherine, the boys turn their attention to her—and Catherine walks away, unwilling to help her savior. Anna is then raped while the girls—and her video camera—watch.
So, who murdered Rachel, Helen, and Zoe?
Buckle up—this one’s a doozy.
That voice-over at the beginning of each episode, where Anna talks about each kill getting easier and easier? Well, the creepy words she’d been reciting were not her own, nor were they Catherine’s. They were written by Anna’s mother, Alice (Crystal Fox).
Alice is a relatively minor figure throughout the first five episodes. She is introduced to us as a retired cleaning woman who worked for the families of Anna’s rich classmates and now suffers from dementia. We learn that she was babysitting Jack and Anna’s daughter on the night of her death, and that she had recently been found, naked, wandering the streets around her neighborhood.
After Lexi’s death, Jack and Anna get back together and get pregnant again, and Anna has her old job as a news anchor back. It’s then that Anna’s mother leaves her a letter that explains exactly what went down.
After Anna disappeared, Alice was heartbroken. Feeling disconnected, she went into Anna’s old room and found all of her old video recordings, most of which were faux news broadcasts filmed in Anna’s childhood bedroom. She watches them one by one, attempting to feel close to her missing daughter, until she comes across the tape of the 16th birthday party.
She is enraged on her daughter’s behalf, but she still can’t reach her. She waits at the cemetery, hoping that she might find Anna visiting her daughter’s grave. On the anniversary of the baby’s death, Alice finally sees Anna—and then watches as Anna witnesses her husband having sex with her high school bully. At some point, Alice slashes the tires on Rachel’s car. After Jack drives away, Rachel realizes her predicament and exits her car to find Alice. She is confused but not suspicious, therefore completely taken aback when Alice begins stabbing her over and over.
As Alice says in the letter, her position in life—an elderly woman who has been written off as crazy—has afforded her the perfect cover. After she kills Rachel, she sheds her clothes and wanders the highway naked, faking a lapse of memory. She uses keys from her housekeeping days to get into Helen’s office and Zoe’s house, where she commits both murders, and also to enter Lexi’s lake house to plant the evidence she’d been collecting from her victims. She then shakes suspicion by playing up symptoms of dementia, leaning into a crazy-but-harmless-old-lady role.
In the end, Alice explains in the letter, it was for the love of her daughter that she committed the murders.
How did Jack and Anna’s first baby die?
Though the writers left some room for speculation early on that there may have been foul play in the death of Jack and Anna’s daughter, it is later confirmed that no one was at fault. In her letter to Anna, Alice writes that the baby died of “crib death,” also known as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
Are Jack and Anna back together?
In the final scene of the show, Jack and Anna are very much back together, and Anna is expecting another child with Jack. Perhaps that’s why Alice’s motivations for the killings—“a mother’s love”—struck such a chord with her daughter.
Will there be a season two of His & Hers?
This is a mystery easily solved. There will not be a second season of His & Hers, which is a limited series. However, several of author Alice Feeney’s other works are coming to the screen. Beautiful Ugly is being adapted for a film, while Sometimes I Lie is being adapted for a TV series.
