“Night Sky,” streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is an American science fiction drama, created by Holden Miller. The series takes us through the uncanny happenings in the lives of an elderly couple, living in the rather quiet town of Farnworth, Illinois. For years, they had a secret chamber in their backyard that they kept visiting time and again. It led to a deserted planet that did not support life (at least that’s what they thought). So they always saw the planet from inside the chamber, never daring to go to the other side. But the arrival of a stranger makes way for new discoveries and confounds their expectations. So let’s explore the mysteries of the deserted planet and witness the groundbreaking revelations that awaited Irene and Franklin York.
Major Spoilers Ahead
What Were Irene And Franklin Hiding In Their Backyard?
Old age often comes with its own set of vulnerabilities and insecurities. It’s a kind of realization where you know that it’s all going to end, sooner or later. You are scared of the unknown. You fear the things that lie in the dark. You are apprehensive and nervous about facing the eternal truth of life. You start cherishing things that you know you will have to leave behind. You start reminiscing about the good old days, where once you felt that you were invincible, taking things for granted. In the first episode of “Night Sky,” we see that Irene and Franklin were in a similar stage of life. Old age was like an uninvited guest, and they knew they had no option other than to put up with it. But there were questions still unanswered in their life, and time was of the essence. Though the Yorks seemed like any other normal couple, they knew things that made them stand apart from the league. They had a shed in their backyard. There was a tunnel in the basement that led to a secret teleportation chamber. It led to a deserted planet that was light-years away from Earth. It was magical, and Irene knew that it was all for an unknown purpose. She had gone there with Franklin more than 800 times, expecting that one day she would get the answers to all her questions, but nothing happened. She just enjoyed the view of the stars and came back. Irene’s and Franklin’s son, Michael, had left them about 20 years back, and the secret chamber had emerged out of nowhere after the fateful incident. Irene had a belief that the deserted planet had something to do with her son’s demise. She had faith that one day she would find him there. Franklin had once kept a mouse outside the secret chamber, in the atmosphere of the deserted planet, and it had died within a few seconds. The experiment had kept the couple from going outside the chamber and onto the planet for several years now. They knew that they couldn’t survive there. Irene had an accident a year back, after which she couldn’t walk without support. The accident had made Irene more restless. She wanted to take a leap of faith and go outside the chamber, to embrace the uncertainties of the deserted planet. But she knew that Franklin wouldn’t let her do it. Her health was deteriorating as she was losing her will to live. Irene was done waiting for the mysteries to unravel themselves and decides to go to the planet without telling Franklin.
Franklin’s neighbor, Byron Albemarle, was quite inquisitive in nature. He had a gut feeling that Irene and Franklin were hiding something. He often used to see them taking night walks, as it was in the evenings that they generally visited their secret chamber. Though he loved making conspiracy theories, this time, it was not all baseless. Byron also wanted to contest the town council elections, and his wife, Jeanine Albemarle, was done with his quixotic plans and silly impulses. Byron’s curiosity led him to the shed in the backyard of Yorks. But the first time, he wasn’t so lucky and couldn’t find anything. Jeanine had found Franklin’s and Irene’s granddaughter, Denise, on Facebook and had texted her about the night walks, so that it stops her husband getting obsessed over it. Denise met Franklin and suggested he move out of the big house, or at least hire a caretaker. But Franklin didn’t consider it as he knew that Irene didn’t want to do that. That same night, Irene had decided that she would try going out on the deserted planet. She knew the risks, but she couldn’t wait any longer now. She writes a goodbye letter to Franklin, and in the middle of the night, makes her way to the secret chamber, in the hope of being reunited with her son, Michael.
Whom Does Irene Find In The Secret Chamber?
In “Night Sky” Episode 1, we witness that a young man appeared in the chamber out of nowhere when Irene was just about to open the door that led her to the deserted planet. She calls for Franklin and takes the unknown man to her house. She doesn’t tell Franklin what she was doing in the secret chamber and decides to dispose of the letter that she had written for him.
Franklin was suspicious of the unknown man. He was soaked in blood but didn’t have a single cut on his body. Franklin speculated that he would have killed somebody, which made him even more paranoid, and he ended up calling the police. Irene somehow handled the situation and made the police officer leave, as she knew that their secret would be compromised. The unknown man was in no condition to talk. He was shivering with a high fever. Once his health gets a little better, he tells the couple that his name was Jude, and he had no recollection of how he landed in their house. Irene believes that Jude holds the key to unlocking every mystery, while Franklin thinks that he was just a drifter who was fabricating the truth. Jude knew things and was choosing to not disclose it. In the middle of the night, he got up and made a laceration on his leg, and took out a small device from under the skin. It was a kind of tracker that he breaks and disposes of in the sink.
Franklin finds some strange looking coins in Jude’s possession and secretly takes them to a pawnshop to learn more about them. The coins were authentic Spanish Doubloons from the 1700s, and not much information was available on them. Franklin had made up his mind that Jude couldn’t stay with them. His presence was giving a lot of false hope to Irene, and he felt that her world might come crashing down if she got to know that Jude was just a petty thief. Franklin asks Jude to take a sum of 5000 dollars and leave them forever. Jude agrees to leave but doesn’t take the money. He tells Franklin that he is not a crook and that he never had the intention of troubling the elderly couple. Franklin has a change of heart and decides to trust Jude. He takes him back home but still keeps an eye out for any suspicious activity. Jude reveals that he was trying to find his father, Gabriel, who had gone missing under mysterious circumstances. Irene asks him to trust her and give her a reason to believe him too.
Meanwhile, Franklin goes out to a bar to unwind and finds Byron there, who comforts him about the secret chamber in his backyard. In an inebriated state, Franklin takes Byron to the secret chamber, but the teleportation doesn’t happen. Franklin doesn’t understand why it didn’t work, and Byron thinks that he was just trying to make a fool out of him. But to prove his point, Franklin gives him a camera, which had the pictures of the Yorks in the secret chamber, overlooking the deserted planet. Byron gets the camera reel developed and is shocked beyond any measure. He had always waited for that opportunity where he got to do something great and prove to his wife that she had made a worthy choice. Byron gets on board and, together with Franklin, starts to find out why the teleporting chamber suddenly stopped working.
Why Was Jude Being Hunted? Who Were The Guardians?
As soon as Jude had reached Farnsworth, Illinois, he started hiding his tracks. He had gone to the secret chamber in Franklin’s backyard and taken out a crystal ball, with an illuminated core, from the teleporting machine, making it non-functional. He had reason to believe that the people who were hunting him would come looking for him through that portal. Jude is clueless about the whereabouts of his father, Gabriel. Irene asks him to let her in and reveal his secrets so that she can help him find his father. That’s when Jude tells her that he used to live in an isolated compound in the middle of nowhere. There were people, called “Guardians” who controlled each and every aspect of their lives. There were many teleporting passageways in the world, similar to what the Yorks had in their backyard. Jude and others like him were kept in captivity because the Guardians didn’t want their secret to come out in the world. Now that he had escaped, the guardians were trying to hunt him down.
In “Night Sky,” Episode 5, Jude tells Irene that the secret passageway in their backyard did not only lead to the planet, but was like a network of doorways. Jude had a small metal slab in his possession, on which the coordinates were to be put, and it transported the person to the desired location. That’s how Gabriel had gotten there. The metal slab was stolen by an old student of Irene’s named Chandra, who had gone to Irene’s house to ask for work and be her caretaker. Irene had declined the offer and told her that they had already hired Jude for the same. Chandra was a kleptomaniac, and, finding the opportunity, she stole the metal slab from Jude’s backpack. Jude and Irene, suspecting Chandra, go to her house and accidently find something other than the metal slab. Irene engaged Chandra in a conversation till Jude quietly crept into her bedroom and started searching for the slab. He found the slab and, coincidentally, also found a tracker, similar to what he had removed from his leg. He confronts Chandra, who tells him that one of her patients had given it to her in the past. Jude knew that there would be some link between this patient named Mr. Bill Dunlap and his father, Gabriel. He met Bill Jr., who told him that a stranger had given his father the tracker. Jude finds out through Mr. Dunlap’s delivery ledger that his father had gone to Enfield, Michigan, after he left Farnsworth.
Meanwhile, in a small village in Argentina, Stella, a Guardian, had been vested with the responsibility of finding and killing Jude. She used to live on the remote hilltop with her 15-year-old daughter, Toni. Her family had known about the secret passageway for over 300 years now, and also had one in their chapel, hidden from the public eye. But Stella had never revealed the secret to her daughter, even though she had been ordered quite a few times to pass on the information to the next generation. She knew that it was a never-ending mess and wanted her daughter to live a happy life away from the perils of this parallel world.
In “Night Sky” Episode 2, we see that a mysterious man arrives at their place, with whom Stella is well acquainted from before. He tells her to go ahead with the mission and also start training her daughter and making her understand the purpose of her life as a Guardian. Stella and Toni, through the secret teleportation chamber, reach New York and meet an old friend named Nick. Toni was finding it very hard to digest the loads of information that she had gotten in a span of a few days. In the middle of their journey, Stella ditches Nick, as she felt that he didn’t understand the gravity of the issue at hand and she was sure that he would land them in trouble. The mother-daughter duo set out to find Jude and kill him, and Franklin gets a call from an unknown person, who wanted to enquire about the doubloons that he had once taken to the pawnshop.
Did Hannah Know About Jude’s Father? Does Stella Kill Jude?
Jude, Irene, and Denise reach the place where Mr. Dunlap had dropped Gabriel. They met a woman named Hannah, who was running a B&B hotel named Nettle House. Jude shows her the picture of his father, and he gets to know that Hannah also knew Gabriel. Hannah tells him that one fine day, out of nowhere, Gabriel had shown up at her door. Hannah shared an intimate relationship with him. But there was something dubious about Hannah. It felt like she was hiding information and was slyly trying to find out where Jude had come from. Hannah had a secret room in her hotel, and a guy named Paul, her accomplice, was tapping Irene’s phone. They knew that Franklin had the coins (doubloons) and were getting excited and hopeful after the newfound revelations. Hannah takes Jude to his father’s favorite room in the hotel. He finds “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a novel, kept on one of the shelves. He opened the book to find a note with cryptic symbols written on it. He knew that his father had intentionally left it for him and that it meant something.
Stella reaches Farnsworth, still trying to locate Jude. Toni, her daughter, questions her about how she can be so sure that Jude was a bad man. She asks her mother what if the Guardians were wrong all along, and were killing innocent people in the name of duty and preserving their secret. Toni found a social media video of Jude, from the night he had accidentally met Denise and her friend in a bar, and had sung a peculiar song. Stella decides to leave Toni alone in the hotel itself and goes out alone to find Jude. The bartender gives her the visiting card of Chandra that Jude had forgotten in the bar that night. Stella reaches Chandra’s house, who refuses to help her unless she gives her 3000 dollars. Stella comes back to her hotel to find the same mysterious guy who met them in Argentina, sitting with her daughter Toni. Stella asks the guy to pay Chandra and get the information, but instead, he hurts her, and as soon as he gets the information about Jude, he kills Chandra.
In “Night Sky” Episode 8, the anonymous guy and Toni reach the York residence and take them into captivity, while Stella captures Jude and brings him back to the house. Just when Stella was going to pull the trigger and kill Jude, she had a change of heart. She does not kill anybody; instead, she enters into a scuffle with the anonymous guy and takes him into captivity. They tied him and put him inside the van. They bid adieu to Jude and the Yorks and hit the road.
Their van is stopped midway by Hannah. She takes Stella and Toni into her custody and meets the anonymous guy, whom she calls Cornelius. We get to know that even Hannah was an apostate like Jude, and was now a part of the “fallen world.” Back at the York residence, Jude and Denise enter the code in the teleportation chamber that the former’s father had left for him in the novel and find themselves teleported to Bangkok.
‘Night Sky’ Season 1: Ending Explained – Is Byron Dead Or Alive? What Did Franklin And Irene Find On The Planet?
Byron fixes the teleporting machine, visits the secret chambers with Franklin, and witnesses the deserted planet. Byron was curious and wanted to unravel the mysteries of the deserted planet. Franklin shows him an aeronautical suit that he had secretly built himself, using the information that was available online. He never used it as he couldn’t fix the pressurization mechanisms of the suit. As Byron was an engineer, he decided to try and fix it. He was successful in his endeavor, and the aeronautical suit was fully functional.
Byron badly wanted to prove to the world that he was worth something. He carried a burden with himself, that his wife didn’t think much of him. Byron opens the door and enters the planet. Franklin tracks him through a portable transmitter but soon loses the signal. It is very much possible that Byron might be still alive. Just before Franklin loses out on him, there was kind of enthusiasm in his voice. He says the words, “I can’t believe this,” as if he had seen something spectacular.
At the end of season 1 of “Night Sky,” we see Franklin meander into the deserted planet searching for Byron. But soon, he has trouble breathing. He falls to the ground and assumes that his end is near. In a flashback, we are shown that Franklin had found something metallic, while he was digging in his backyard. It was the secret teleporting chamber that had emerged just below the swing, on which his son used to play. He had shown the same to Irene. Irene finds an unconscious Franklin lying on the planet and removes his helmet, which enables him to breathe. Franklin was surprised as he was alive and was also able to breathe without any apparatus. Irene, too, was standing on the deserted planet without wearing the aeronautical suit.
The Yorks stand on a cliff and see buildings and signs of settlement at a distance. They had opened the gateway to new possibilities and were ready to explore and unravel the mysteries of the planet they once thought was nothing but a wasteland. It is possible that even Byron must have seen that settlement and would have decided to go further and explore it. But what we don’t know is what kind of people were inhabiting the place and whether they would be welcoming to strangers or not.
“Night Sky” Season 1 ends on a cliffhanger and leaves a lot of queries answered. Some of the questions that may be answered in Season 2 are listed below.
- Why did Hannah take Cornelius into her custody? Did she want to take revenge from him or was there some ulterior motive?
- Did the secret teleporting chamber that appeared in Franklin’s house had any link to his son, or was it just a hopeful theory devised by Irene?
- Was Jude from the same settlement that Franklin and Irene had discovered on the secret planet?
- What mysterious and revelations await Jude in Bangkok?
- Will the people inhabiting the secret planet be hospitable to the newcomers or not?
Season 2 of “Night Sky” will provide more clarity as to what the future holds in store for Irene, Franklin, Jude and the others.
“Night Sky” is a 2022 Drama Thriller series created by Holden Miller.
