Well, spoiler alert, if you have finished watching the first season of We Were Liars, then you already know that Mirren, Johnny, and Gat are dead. But that’s not the tricky part here. I guess what you might be pondering is why Cadence was still seeing the ghosts of the past. After the arson, Cadence, or Cady, had completely erased the memory of her 16th summer as her mind wasn’t strong enough to cope with the tragedy and accept what had happened. The doctors told Cady’s mother, Penny, that in order to let her daughter get over the traumatic past, Cady should remember things on her own. And hence, Cady needed to go step by step and recollect her memories one thread after another until she finally arrived at her destination: her last day on Beechwood Island when things got messy and went completely out of hand.
Cady imagined Mirren, Johnny, and Gat
So basically, when Cady arrived at the family’s beach house during her 17th summer, she wasn’t aware of the fact that Mirren, Johnny, and Gat were dead. This was why none of them wrote her letters or replied to her texts and went completely AWOL. But the black-haired Cady didn’t know that, and she would have found it quite suspicious if her cousins, Mirren and Johnny, weren’t around on the island. Once again, this would have come as a shock to her feeble mind, which likely was the reason why she started filling the gaps in her new reality with figments of her imagination. Her mind created versions of Mirren, Johnny, and Gat who acted and reacted in the way Cady wanted them to. No, they weren’t ghosts. I mean, there’s no such thing, and We Were Liars is not a supernatural show. It’s a psychological thriller where the protagonist is trying to come to terms with a really disturbing event in their past. Well, we all saw Tyler Perry pulling off a similar narrative twist last week with his Netflix film, Straw, where a grieving mother defended a reality to fill in her daughter’s absence.
In Cady’s case, her dead mates behaved in the way she remembered them from the past. They didn’t share any new information or create any new memories with her. They mostly said things Cady wanted them to say. You could see them as a mere bouncing board that, from time to time, confirmed Cady’s beliefs or her fears. There were things she couldn’t share with her mother or any other person on the island, and that was why she needed her mates more than ever. They say ghosts return to the human realm because they have some kind of unfinished business, but here, Cady brought her friends back from the grave because she had left a lot of things unsaid. She imagined talking to them because she wanted to speak her heart out and share the confusion in her mind before finally putting them to rest and bidding them a final farewell.
The pills messed up Cady’s brain
And because I am looking at things from a relational perspective, I have to consider the fact that Cady also had a severe brain injury, which might have made matters worse. In We Were Liars’ ending, when Cady returned to the family mansion to save the dogs, a burning log of wood had fallen on her head. I am not saying that this brain injury was the cause of her amnesia or her constructed reality, but I do believe that the pain medication might have messed with her brain a little. Considering the possibility that the doctors might have prescribed her heavy doses of codeine, there’s a chance that she started hallucinating because of those medicines. This was further confirmed in season 1’s ending, when we saw Carrie Sinclair, Cady’s aunt and Penny’s sister, popping a pill before leaving the newly built beach house. As soon as she put the pill in her mouth, she saw her dead son, Johnny, in front of her, further implying that it was because of the codeine that the Sinclairs were seeing the ghosts from their past. If I remember correctly, it was in episode 7 that Johnny found that his mother was taking Percocet tablets prescribed to Carrie’s dead mother, Tipper, for her knee. Well, a little book spoiler here, the prequel book suggested that Tipper also used to see the ghost of her dead child, Rosemary, the youngest daughter of the Sinclair family. With that said, I think we can consider the fact that this pain medication, mixed with unforgettable tragedies and unbearable generational trauma, could wire one’s mind into seeing things that aren’t real.
Cady had weaved a fairy tale around her so she didn’t have to suffer the loss of her friends or take responsibility for their deaths. It was her idea to burn the beach house to the ground in order to end the evils of the family’s patriarchy, but the Sinclairs have struggled to accept the truth. They always fill their lives with well constructed lies and fabricated stories, so that they don’t have to bear the consequences of their actions or face the ugly truth. But Cady no longer wanted to end up like her mother or her grandfather. It took her almost a year to realize that life doesn’t always have a fairy tale ending. Reality is much more complicated and a lot messier. Innocent people die in the flames of the revolution, and those who survive have to take responsibility for the ones they left behind. She could not undo what was already done, but she could treat it as a lesson and build a better future in the memory of her friends. In We Were Liars’ ending, she told her mother that she wanted—she needed—help to stop taking those pills, which she no longer wanted to delve into the past or see the ghosts of her dead mates. Additionally, she left the beach house, most likely never to return again. The island was the only place where Cady, Mirren, Johnny, and Gat reunited for the summer every year to create new memories, but with them gone, she really has no particular reason to return. Furthermore, it was on the island that she started hallucinating them, which suggests she has buried her past in that very place itself and won’t be talking to Mirren, Johnny, and Gat in public. Well, she will remember them in her memories.
