Insomnia is a new British thriller series on Paramount+ that does a fair amount of genre switching within its comparatively short six-episode runtime. Perhaps this switch is to be expected, for the maker of the series, Sarah Pinborough, is herself a writer with cross-genre novels in her repertoire, and this thriller series is also an adaptation of her own novel of the same name. The plot is centered around Emma Averill, a woman about to turn 40 who fears that the inexplicable psychotic attributes of her mother will start to show in her as well. But Emma’s usual life is suddenly challenged when her estranged elder sister and an old acquaintance turn up, together with the symptoms that she has feared all her life. Overall, Insomnia is quite enjoyable if taken lightly, even though the mind-bending suggestions at the end give an unsatisfactory twist to the tale.
Spoiler Alert
What is the series about?
Insomnia begins with a strange scene in which an elderly woman keeps repeating a loop of numbers under her breath while staring straight at a wall in her room. The woman is clearly disturbed by something and is also seemingly in a hospital room with a security camera monitoring her at all times. But her sudden act of self-harm by bashing her head into the mirror on the wall is unprecedented, and the authorities cannot stop her in time. She is soon hospitalized in a critical condition, and her known contacts are informed about the situation.
Emma Averill, the protagonist of the show, happens to be the younger daughter of the elderly woman, Patricia Bournett, but the two have had no contact in many years. It is Emma’s elder sister, Phoebe, whom she has also not seen in many years, who informs her of their mother’s situation. Emma rushes to the hospital, but with more concern for her sister than her sick mother. Patricia had been a patient of some serious mental ailments from the very time that her daughters were young girls, and certain incidents made Emma hate her mother forever. It was because of this troubled childhood that the woman had been put up in a mental care facility for most of her life, and Emma kept no contact with her, maintaining all the distance that she could.
However, the blood tie between a mother and daughter is perhaps not as easily cut as Emma fears, for she is about to turn forty in the next few days. It was at the age of forty that Patricia’s psychotic behavior first began, and it very rapidly affected her so much that her daughters were in significant danger at their house. Emma is terrified of the possibility that she, too, is going to develop similar ailments, fearing that the sickness is hereditary and might have been passed on to her as a twisted and unwanted form of inheritance. She is well established in her career as a lawyer and lives a fairly grand life in a sizable house with her husband, Robert, and their two children, Chloe and Will. However, all this stability starts to be challenged when Emma starts to suffer from an unending insomnia, dozing off only for a few minutes and then waking up to find herself in unnatural situations in the middle of the night. To understand the matter better, she puts up security cameras all around the house and is absolutely horrified to realize that she is repeating the same psychotic acts as her mother.
Do either Emma or Phoebe kill their mother?
A few days later, when Patricia Bournett is found dead on her hospital bed with clear signs of asphyxiation, the police open an investigation into the matter. When the records are checked, it is very clear that Emma was the last person to have visited the woman in her ward, and this puts suspicion on the protagonist. However, Emma is convinced that the world needs to know more about her elder sister Phoebe as well, since she too can very well be a suspect in their mother’s death. The primary reason for Emma’s belief is a traumatic event from their childhood, when little Emma walked into her sister’s room only to find her mother holding a pillow on the girl’s face, trying to suffocate and kill her. Therefore, according to the protagonist’s understanding, Phoebe might have become vengeful against Patricia because of the incident, for she was old enough to understand and remember that her mother tried to kill her and might have taken the mother’s life when the opportunity came.
Phoebe, however, had indeed moved on from the matter and had shown more sensitivity towards her mother than Emma after growing up. While Emma completely abandoned her mother, the elder sister tried to acknowledge and understand Patricia’s struggles and tried to give her company as well. This was why she often visited her mother at the care facility over the last year, as she tried to have a bond simply out of respect for their blood ties. The visits ultimately had to stop because Phoebe apparently tried to hurt her mother, but this was probably because the elderly woman’s psychotic episodes began, and Phoebe just had to defend herself. During the initial episodes, Insomnia portrays Phoebe as someone who has an ulterior motive, too, as she seemingly tries to take over Emma’s life and family. However, this turns out to be false as well, and she was actually always very protective of Emma, to the extent of even taking blame for her actions in their childhood.
On the day of Patricia’s death, Emma had indeed visited the woman and confronted her with some harsh words, knowing very well that her mother was not in a responsive state. Her intention was to face all her internal hatred and fear for her mother and to try and move past these feelings, which would also help her bury the fears of developing a similar psychosis. At that very moment, Patricia had come to her senses, and she had clutched her daughter’s hand, which is why traces of Emma’s DNA were found on her hands. However, it was not Emma’s confrontation or any of her actions that had killed her mother; instead, it was the work of a nurse at the hospital. Just after Emma left the room, the nurse sneaked in and choked Patricia to death with a pillow. This nurse happened to be Emma’s new friend, Caroline.
What is Caroline’s real identity?
Emma first meets Caroline Mitchell in a bizarre incident when she accidentally runs into the woman on her bicycle with her car. Emma apologizes to Caroline, finds her ID card as a professional caregiver on the road, and tracks her down. The two women eventually become friends, with Emma sharing everything about her life’s problems with her. However, it is revealed at the end of Insomnia that this was not actually the first meeting between the two women. After the police were called by Emma and Phoebe on the night when their mother tried to harm them, the girls were rescued and put up in foster care for the rest of their childhood. While Emma already showed some signs of her mother’s psychosis, most significantly by scribbling the same series of numbers that her mother used to repeat on the wall, Phoebe protected her and took all the blame upon herself. This led to Emma being readily accepted by foster parents, while Phoebe had to spend much longer in the adoption home.
During this time, a couple came to adopt Emma, and since they already had one adopted daughter, they wanted to ensure that the two girls would be friendly to each other. However, this first daughter was Caroline Mitchell, and she did not want to share the love and attention she was getting with any younger sister. As Caroline was older and physically stronger than Emma, she tried to drown the protagonist in a pond on the foster home premises so that her parents would not adopt her. It was Phoebe who saved her sister from the incident, but everyone believed that it was she who tried to hurt Emma. Since Caroline’s plan failed, she threw tantrums during the whole drive back home, and this terribly distracted her father, who was driving the car. This led to a horrific car accident, in which Caroline survived with the fewest injuries, but her mother was left paralyzed and her father died.
Caroline Mitchell had psychopathic tendencies even as a young child, most notably through her extreme measures to ensure whatever she wanted. The girl lacked any sense of empathy or logical understanding, and there was already a dangerously violent side to her. The road accident had actually left her father still alive, coughing up blood, and in extreme pain, but Caroline could not bear the noise of the struggle. In a ruthless and insensitive manner, she choked the man with her plush toy and killed him on the spot. Life took a brutal turn for her after the accident, as she was left alone to care for her injured mother, and such was the difficulty of it all that she grew up with only the skills to be a professional caregiver. But during this whole time, she also remembered the name Emma Bournett, for she still held the girl responsible for the pathetic situation in her life from childhood. Thus, when she heard the name again at the hospital where she worked when Patricia was admitted to the place, Caroline’s eyes lit up, and she plotted a plan of revenge.
Can Emma protect her family?
Once Caroline finds out about Emma’s life and her family, she turns extremely vengeful and jealous, desiring to take everything away from the woman whom she still blames for ruining her life. She rejoices at the fact that Emma is arrested by the police for being the lead suspect and then crashes into Phoebe with her car after the latter goes over to her house. Caroline also remembered the elder sister who had saved Emma from drowning, and so she knew that Phoebe would still protect the woman at all costs. Therefore, Caroline removes Phoebe from the scene to then lace a cake with sedatives and take it to Emma’s house for her family. Upon finding the woman, she uses this opportunity to drug Robert and Chloe. A little while later, when Chloe’s lover, Julian, comes over to the house to check on her, Caroline violently stabs him to death as well.
On the other side, Emma now realizes that her sister does not have any ill intentions, and she sticks by Phoebe’s side in the hospital. It is Phoebe who then tells her about Caroline’s real identity, and the protagonist rushes home after trying to reach her friend through calls and also by showing up at her house. Thus, a showdown takes place between Emma and Caroline at the end of Insomnia, in which Emma is stabbed brutally, but she still continues to fight for her family. She finds Caroline trying to smother young Will on his bed and finally puts her down with a cricket bat. Emma had also informed the police about the threat at her house earlier, and just as they arrived, she fell unconscious from her bleeding wound. While it is not really clear as to whether Caroline dies from Emma’s strike or just loses consciousness, all of her criminal acts have been recorded on the hidden cameras, meaning that she is arrested and imprisoned even if she survives. Emma, though, is successfully able to protect her family from the attacker in the end.
What do the numbers actually mean?
Insomnia ends with a scene from a few weeks after the incident with Caroline, when Emma is finally able to walk again, and Phoebe’s injuries have also healed. As Emma and her family move away from their old house into a new property, the two sisters sit down for a chat, and the protagonist gives Phoebe her thoughts about what the numbers uttered by their mother actually meant. This is where Insomnia takes a bizarre turn towards the supernatural, and if a second season of it is ever made, then this twist will surely be the driving force of the plot. When Emma thought about the numbers that Patricia used to maniacally chant, she recognized a weird pattern to them and then realized that they were all timings. When the woman uttered “1,0,1,2,3,3” and so on, she was actually meaning timestamps, like “10:01” and “02:33.” Incidentally, these were also the exact timings of Emma’s own psychotic episodes, which included filling up the bathtub, lighting up candles, rattling on the back door of the house, staring at and talking to someone imaginary in the closet, and then finally trying to smother Will.
Emma would unknowingly set out to do all these things at the exact times mentioned by her mother, in chronological order, which was strange in itself. However, the most bizarre turn is that all these actions were actually ones that Caroline performed on the night of her attack on the Averill family, and the timing of her actions was also exactly the same as the numbers chanted by Patricia so many years earlier. This means that Patricia’s condition was not out of psychosis, but she was merely playing out a premonition as a warning for the future. This further implies that the woman actually had superpowers, which enabled her to sense events in the future. Patricia always claimed that her younger daughter had the same bad blood as her, which is actually the superpower of performing premonitions of a future incident. This was why the insomnia and the strange acts suddenly became a part of Emma before her 40th birthday, for her mother’s superpowers were indeed getting transferred into her.
Therefore, Patricia trying to smother Phoebe or Emma later trying to smother Will were just premonitions of Caroline’s attempt to kill Will in the future. Similarly, both the mother and daughter’s weird act of talking to someone in the closet was a premonition of Caroline finding Will and speaking to him inside the closet. But the theory of Patricia simply performing the premonitions without wanting to hurt her daughters also has a paradox in the sense that her psychotic behavior, including her self-injury in recent times, were incidents that actually allowed the whole thing to play out. Without her illness, Emma would not have been in an adoption home, wanting to be adopted by Caroline’s parents. Similarly, without Patricia smashing her head into the mirror a few weeks earlier, the twisted reunion between Emma and Caroline would not have taken place either. This dilemma is something Phoebe mentions as well, and Emma does not have any answer to it either.
Insomnia‘s ending leaves its characters and the viewers in the dark regarding this matter. The series finally ends with one more twist, as Will is seen scribbling a different sequence of numbers, or timestamps, on the wall of his room. This confirms that the psychosis, or the supernatural ability, has been genetically transferred to the boy as well, and he is able to sense some events in the future. Whether we will learn more about this event and more about this unnatural ability depends on whether Insomnia will ever return with a second season.
What does the post-credits scene mean?
Insomnia also presents a very brief and missable post-credits scene, in which Caroline is seen held at a psychiatric hospital, which confirms that she is actually still alive. The woman is aware that she is being recorded on the security cameras in her ward, and she looks up at the camera with a creepy and vengeful look. Strangely enough, even though the camera footage has time stamp recordings attached, like CCTV images usually have, the time remains still throughout the 2 or 3 seconds that we witness it. This can suggest that Caroline has some supernatural abilities as well, which might be letting her manipulate time or completely freeze it. Sadly, the timestamp on this CCTV footage does not match with the numbers that Will is seen scribbling a little earlier, or even with the numbers Patricia kept uttering, meaning that the post-credits scene does not hint at or suggest anything particular. Perhaps Caroline being alive and Will having inherited the supernatural ability of seeing premonitions from his mother, a new timeline, or even a time loop is being created, which will be covered in the next season.
