Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes' 2nd Trailer Teases Its Somber Finale In Plain Sight

It takes a whole lot of bad to make a man as wicked as future Panem President Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth). "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" explores how Snow turns into the sort of fellow who would cheerfully send hundreds of children to their violent, nationally televised deaths. And the film's second trailer strongly hints that the book's chilling, action-packed ending remains intact.

To wit — in the trailer's final sequence, we see a panoramic shot of a pristine lake in the middle of a wooded glen. There's an image of Snow looking pensively over his shoulder, backlit by blue lighting, and then a final glimpse of Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) standing in the doorway of a cabin, holding a large hunting knife. In voiceover, Donald Sutherland — who plays Snow in the "Hunger Games" film series — says, "It's the things we love most that destroy us."

This appears to be a part of the book's final sequence, in which Snow and Lucy nearly escape together from District 12 with a band of rebels in the wake of Lucy being framed for some high crimes. Snow's paranoia does his love for Lucy in; he becomes convinced she plans to murder him when she takes too long coming back from a mission to cut down some katniss plants before they trek northward. He decides to get the drop on her before she can lay him to rest. But he's unsuccessful in tracking Lucy down; in the end, he goes back to the Capitol, where he is groomed for a successful political career.

While everyone knows that Snow eventually gains a seat of ultimate power within the Panem government, ruling over the Hunger Games until Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) sparks up a revolution, Suzanne Collins has not yet revealed what happens to Lucy Gray Baird. It's possible that she dies while hunting for the plants; it's possible she senses Snow isn't really committed to the rebel cause and runs off. It's possible that she is kidnapped, or that she meets with the rest of the rebel band and goes north, expecting Snow will follow. 

Readers know only that she leaves nothing behind with Snow but a scarf — under which he finds a snake hiding. Though it's not as poisonous as the ones Lucy used to defend herself during the games, Snow is bitten and immediately hallucinates as if he's been poisoned. 

Lucy's disappearance is a plot point that might be resolved in the movie version of "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," but it likely won't be. Some mysteries are, after all, best left unexplored. The audience will have a chance to delve into the mystery when "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" is released in theatres on November 17.