The ending of The Institute’s finale was all about the back-half kids destroying the titular facility. Avery, Nicky, Kalisha, and the rest of the back-halfers were tasked by Hendricks with assassinating an individual in a moving car. Instead of doing all that, the kids decided to use their powers to destroy the technology the facility was using to compel them to kill people. In the meantime, Avery also contacted Luke—who was planning to go to the FBI with Wendy and Tim to expose what Sigsby had been doing—and requested that he return to the facility to free the kids. And although it was important to put Sigsby behind bars, Luke knew that it was a do-or-die moment for Avery and the kids. Hence, he decided to step back into that dreaded place to help his friends escape. Now, I have done a detailed recap of the entire finale; feel free to check that out. Here I’ll only be discussing the closing moments of Season 1 of The Institute and what we can expect to see in Season 2, which has already been announced by MGM+. So, strap in, I guess.
Spoiler Alert
Hendricks Ran Away
After reaching the entry gate of the Institute, Tim and Wendy managed to dupe Stackhouse and the security team long enough for Luke to get to the kids and chart their escape. While Stackhouse and the security team went into the building to subdue the kids before they wreaked havoc, not just in this facility but every other branch of the Institute around the globe, Hendricks informed Sigsby that their higher-ups had been informed about this whole situation. This caused Sigsby to get really angry, because she knew that Stackhouse was planning to throw Hendricks under the bus once the Man on the Phone decided to hold somebody accountable for this whole mess. Hendricks tried to convince himself for a while that the facility needed him but then came to the realization that he was totally expendable. Hence, instead of following Sigsby to her office, so that they could find a way to avoid facing the ire of their boss, Hendricks chose to run away. Yeah, after the 31-minute mark of episode 8, we didn’t see Hendricks again, and I am not sure if we’ll see him in Season 2 or if he will get an off-screen death. He is a loose thread who knows everything there is to know about the functioning of the facility. He is, as described by Sigsby, an idiot with a lot of scientific knowledge about the functioning of the human mind. The bottom line is that he is a liability. I doubt that he has the ability to hide well enough to avoid the facility’s highly skilled spy-assassins, and I think that his chapter has come to an end. Do I sympathize with his plight? No. He was directly involved in the torture of those kids. If anything, he deserves a brutal on-screen death.
Stackhouse Died
Stackhouse ordered one of the security guards, who was a chemistry expert for some reason, to fill the hallway that the back-half kids and the Recovery Room kids were stuck in with chlorine gas so that they’d stop trying to bring the whole facility down with their telekinetic powers. But in the time it took for him to give that order and make his way to the exit door, the walls and floors of the establishment began crumbling. Stackhouse was not an athletic individual. So, he wasn’t able to make it out of the building. He fell, suffered some grievous injuries, and bled to death. This makes Hendricks’ decision to make a run for it seem a little premature. I am sure he doesn’t know that Stackhouse has died, and he’ll constantly be living in the fear that he has outed him. No, the facility’s higher-ups are still going to come for Hendricks. But if he stayed put, I suppose he could have at least spun a narrative where he could have proven his loyalty to the Institute while putting all the blame on Stackhouse and Sigsby. However, by bolting at the first sign of trouble, he has destroyed any chances at redemption in his bosses’ eyes. The higher-ups will treat him like a leak and plug it. As for Stackhouse, what a pathetic way to go. Man should have retired and enjoyed his twilight years. Instead, he was torturing kids to “save the world.” Well, I hope he gets punished in the afterlife, if that’s something that exists in this fictional universe.
The Other Institutes
I guess the biggest revelation of The Institute was that there are other facilities spread all across the world where telepathic, telekinetic, and potentially precognitive kids are being tortured to “avert Armageddon.” When Luke and Avery connected with each other in order to “conduct” the back-halfers and the kids from the Recovery Room so that they could escape from the facility, they pushed their abilities to such an extent that they linked up with the minds of other back-halfers in other countries. And all those back-halfers actually helped Luke and Avery escape. I didn’t see those international kids escape from their respective facilities though, and this means that Luke has a big task on his hands. He has to go across the globe, seek out these facilities, and liberate the kids. But I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon, because I don’t think the facility in Dennison River Bend is the only branch of the Institute in the United States of America. If the first season has garnered enough views to warrant a second season where they can take the cast and crew abroad, then I suppose the showrunners will claim that the one and only facility in the USA has been destroyed and it’s time for Luke and his crew to travel to Asia or Scandinavia. If not, I think they’ll travel around North America for a bit. Maybe in season 4 or 5, they’ll be allowed to go international. This revelation did surprise me, but it didn’t shock me because, of course, an enterprise that can kidnap kids and use their powers in America will turn itself into a global franchise. I thought that this information would be dropped in maybe season 2 or 3. I guess the showrunners unveiled this now because they want to pique the viewers’ interest and make them wonder if these facilities will be explored in the next few seasons or if we’ll get spin-offs.
Avery and the Kids Probably Died
Unpopular opinion: I didn’t like the deaths of Avery and the kids. I am not saying this because I got sad and started crying after seeing them die; I just think the scene wasn’t executed properly. Luke, Kalisha, Nicky, Avery, the back-halfers, the Recovery Room kids, and the international back-halfers combined their powers to open the door that’d allow the kids in the Dennison River Bend facility to escape. That worked. Luke, Kalisha, and Nicky went through that door. But then Avery decided to stay back along with the rest of the kids as the aforementioned chlorine gas flooded the hallway because he needed to maintain the connection with all the other kids and complete the destruction of the facility. What I didn’t understand was, couldn’t Avery have done all that after exiting the building? I suppose it’s difficult to re-establish the “connection” after it is broken. However, failing to reconnect with everyone’s minds and living to fight the Institute another day is better than maintaining said connection and destroying a building where most of the evil staff are either already dead or have escaped, right? I suppose the showrunners wanted to make the viewers emotional about Avery’s sacrifice, but the reason it didn’t hit for me was because he took all those poor children (including Iris) down with him. Is there a chance that they’re still alive and I am angry at Avery for nothing?
I mean, in The Institute’s ending, we all saw Luke taking that building into the bloody stratosphere and then slamming it on its foundations. Can anybody survive that? Sure, I am a big fan of the “if you haven’t seen the character’s dead body, don’t assume they’re dead” rule. That said, when Luke did that building slam move, I just assumed that those kids had all been turned into a mixture of blood, bones, muscles, and concrete. I hope I am wrong.
Tim’s Plan
Tim and Wendy had been apprehended by the security guards. But when the building began collapsing, the night-knocker and the police officer got the better of them and ran in Luke’s direction. There they met him along with Kalisha, Nicky, and George (whose lack of dialogue throughout the show really perplexes me). Just a side note: does anybody know what happened to Harry, Gerda, and Greta? Were they amongst the back-half kids? Were they in the Recovery Room? Were they incinerated? Were they buried underneath that rubble? Why weren’t they with the escapees? Please, let me know in the comments section below. Anyway, Luke hoped that Tim would know what to do next, and Tim said that he had a plan in mind. When Luke peered into his brain though, he said that Tim was only planning to wing it and hope they arrive at some kind of a solution. So, allow me to speculate about what Tim will do in Season 2. First things first, he needs to punch the hell out of Norbert, because he is the one who ratted out his and Luke’s location to Stackhouse, which then led to Ashworth’s death. Then he needs to let the whole town know that the place is probably going to be turned upside down by the higher-ups of the facility because they’ll want to make sure that nobody who lives there knows what went down there and has a chance of exposing them. After that, they need to leave Dennison River Bend and find someone trustworthy enough to help them find all the spots in the USA from where kids are being kidnapped and the locations where weird establishments are doing such mysterious work that nobody is being allowed to enter there. Once America has been rid of all Institutes, the man can rest and let someone more capable than him lead the way during the international anti-Institute expedition.
The Man On The Phone
The Institute’s ending gave us the slightest of glimpses at the Man on the Phone. Since Stackhouse had given him a call regarding the fiasco at the facility in Dennison River Bend, he was watching the chaos unfold through the CCTV cameras installed there. When Luke finally choke-slammed the entire building, he called someone and told them to send a “burn” team to the location to make sure there was no evidence there that could help the investigators trace things back to him. After he put down the phone, he went into his palatial home’s backyard to play with a bunch of kids that could be his grandchildren or a couple of talented precogs that he keeps close to him so as to always be one step ahead of his enemy. The reason why I say that is because, based on the attitude of all the adults working at the facility towards the kids, I don’t buy their “save the world” agenda. If they were so selfless and superheroic, they would have been kinder to the people who are helping them keep the world safe. Hence, I think they are creating these telepaths, telekinetics, and precogs for their own selfish reasons. They are using them to serve the highest bidder and then themselves. If you think about it, as a villain, which I am sure is what the Man on the Phone actually is and not some messiah, wouldn’t you like to have someone who can alert you to how your enemy is going to attack you? Yes, we are supposed to think that those are his kids, and it might be that I am overthinking this. If I am not, though, I am not going to be surprised if future seasons of the show reveal that those kids were kidnapped and brought to the facility, and once they proved their worth, the Man on the Phone kept them in his house.
Sigsby Escaped
Sigsby managed to get out of the crashing building, hike all the way to the highway, and hitch a ride to god knows where. I think she also has the flash drive that Maureen made, which was passed on to Luke, who then gave it to Ashworth, after which it was presumably retrieved from his dead body during a sweep of the crime scene. Or it could be a completely different flash drive, which is full of Institute-related data that was in her workstation. Either way, what does Sigsby plan to do with it? Well, she knows that her bosses are not going to let her live after the debacle at Dennison River Bend. So, that flash drive is going to be her insurance. If her bosses try to kill her, or even get close to her, she’ll use it to threaten them and keep them at arm’s distance. The second option is that she’ll go to the Institute’s competitors and use that flash drive as payment to get a position in their company. The third (and frankly implausible) option is that she’ll have a change of heart, she’ll realize the error of her ways, and she’ll go to the press or the feds to blow the whistle on what the Institute has been doing. But before doing any of that, she has to make sure that her father can’t be used as leverage against her. If the Institute gets to him, and if Sigsby really cares about him, then she’ll have to give herself up as well as the flash drive. By the way, I want to make it clear that I am not buying Sigsby’s “save the world” spiel, and I am not rooting for her either. Even if she is saying the truth about averting Armageddon, I want her to die a bloody death for mistreating innocent kids. Anyway, those are just my thoughts on the ending of The Institute Season 1. What are your opinions on the same? Feel free to share them in the comments section below.
