The Biggest Unanswered Questions From Midnight Mass

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for "Midnight Mass."

"Midnight Mass" is already getting massive critical acclaim, and it's largely because it is not a series interested in clean answers. The Mike Flanagan story may, on its surface, deal with one of the most classic movie monsters of all time, but it's not really about monsters outside of humanity so much as it is about the monsters within each one of us and how we deal with them.

"Midnight Mass" begins with Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) getting drunk behind the wheel and accidentally killing an innocent woman. After Riley spends four years in prison for his crime, he has to do something far scarier than die in a cell, and that's living with the guilt of being a murderer. He lives that life on Crockett Island, a place where an impoverished few struggle to survive, with only their community and the Catholic church keeping them going.

"How do you live with yourself when you've taken an innocent life" is only one of the impossible questions Mike Flanagan tries to answer in "Midnight Mass." In addition to the AA meetings between Riley and Father Paul (Hamish Linklater), there's also an entire, very long sequence where an atheist and a Catholic go into deep detail over what they think happens when we die. The events that lead up to that conversation and the aftermath of it serve only as reminders that many of life's questions can only be hypothetically answered in death.

There are, however, some regular, narrative-related questions we're left with at the end of "Midnight Mass" that are worth examining, too.

Riley Flynn is not the only person on Crockett Island struggling with alcoholism. While Riley has had four years of hard time and some kind of support structure to help get him sober, Joe Collie (Robert Longstreet) is afforded no such aid. While Riley's victim is dead, Joe lives on an island every day with Leeza (Annarah Cymone), a girl whom he drunkenly shot, leaving her unable to walk. Joe isn't just hated by Leeza and her parents, he's despised by the whole town — and he hates himself, too. As a result, Joe spends a lot of his time in the drunk tank and the only real friend he has is his dog Pike.

However, when Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli) lets Joe out of his cell after another long night, Joe's dog Pike is barking at Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan), the closest "Midnight Mass" ever gets to a true villain.

Bev complains that Pike and Joe are both menaces and that the sheriff ought to do something about them. One episode later, Pike is dead from rat poison that Bev apparently put out to take care of a rodent problem on the island. Joe believes Bev intentionally killed Pike and the sheriff is inclined to believe him, but we never get official confirmation that Bev is actually guilty.

The closest proof we have is that, after being questioned over the potentially intentional murder of an innocent animal, we do see Bev return a stray bottle of rat poison to the community space where the poison is kept. So while we are never told directly and the question isn't officially answered, it is probably safe to say that Bev Keane is a cold-blooded murderer of dogs.

Crockett Island doesn't exactly meet with the happiest of endings. The regular parishioners at St. Patrick's die and become vampires before spending the rest of that same evening dragging the non-believers out of their homes and devouring them. There are even some people who become vampires as well. An area cut off from the mainland awaits its chance to escape its confines and spread vampirism across the world in what can only be considered an unholy crusade. All that begins when the monsignor brings one vampire to the island.

We know vampires can die because we all know the rules. While it's safe to say, with all boats and homes on the island burned to the ground, that the newly minted vampires will burn up with the sunrise, the fate of the original vampire is less clear since he has wings. All we know for sure is that as that vampire drains Erin Greene (Kate Siegel) of every drop of blood she has, Erin is able to use a knife to cut holes in his wings.

As "Midnight Mass" ends, Warren Flynn (Igby Rigney) and Leeza stare at Crockett Island from a small boat and see the vampire struggling to fly away from the burning island. The pair wonder if he can outrace the dawn in his injured condition. And though we never get our answer, we do know that in horror stories, you should never assume a death if you don't see a body.

Horror movies do not typically yield many survivors — or any of them, for that matter. Often there's only one, hence the "final girl" trope's commonality, especially in slasher movies. And "Midnight Mass" is similar in this respect because the only two people we know have survived the fiery, bloody end of Crockett Island are Warren and Leeza — and they are completely alone out in a vast sea on a tiny boat.

The final words of "Midnight Mass" are spoken by Leeza to Warren, and they are, "I can't feel my legs." If you weren't paying careful attention, you might not know exactly what it means for Leeza's legs to suddenly stop working, as it's something that is only hypothesized about earlier in the series. As we mentioned earlier, Leeza lost her ability to walk after a drunken Joe Collie shot her in the spine. We're told that Leeza's parents spent so much money on doctors and experimental treatments (none of which worked) that they can't afford to leave Crockett Island. When Monsignor Pruitt returns to the island posing as Father Paul, he begins putting vampire's blood into the sacramental wine. In addition to making others younger and healthier, the blood also gives Leeza back the use of her legs.

However, there is an obvious problem with drinking vampire blood — it eventually turns you into a vampire! However, when Dr. Sarah Gunning (Annabeth Gish) first discovers that some people's blood burns in sunlight, she concludes that the process could be reversed if the contagion is filtered out. When Leeza says she can't feel her legs, it's possible that her body successfully filtered out the vampire's blood and she is no longer in danger of becoming one.