Had Ryan not actually killed Erin - had he simply been an angry young man who was willing to, say, beat her - we see in Kevin’s story where things might have led. Mare has recalled his brutalizing her for money for drugs, as well as his death by suicide in her attic she misses him desperately, to the point that she cannot enter the room in her house where he died. While Ryan’s anger was extreme, it was not unique: In his story, we see a parallel to Mare’s late son Kevin, a young man lost in rage, confusion, and isolation. We had seen Ryan’s propensity to turn to rage before, when he violently defended his sister in what we were meant to understand was displaced rage over his father’s infidelity.

Ryan Ross was drawn into the morass of family drama and sorrow at a tender age at a time when he might otherwise have been looking ahead, he found himself obsessively working over hurts in his family history. It also completed a statement it had been making from its first episode. “Mare of Easttown” thus gave us a genuinely surprising conclusion that satisfied the viewer desire for memorable, twisty shock. Not merely was Erin McMenamin dead, but her killer’s future was over. What this added up to, though, was a double tragedy of lost youth. Her responsibility to her perception of justice outweighed her responsibility to the Ross family. This was elegantly dealt with, a realization that dawned for Mare on a standard work call, and Winslet did some of her best acting of the series processing it all for a long moment. Then, suddenly, came the second reveal - that John had been covering for his son Ryan, the real killer. This was all so neat that viewers could be forgiven for not quite realizing the mystery portion of the series seemed completely wrapped up with some half an hour of the finale still left to air plotlines, like Guy Pearce’s gentleman caller leaving town, were being wrapped up with a lovely melancholy.

To deal with the specifics of that ending before moving on to grander thematic concerns: The notion that John Ross had been the killer of his former lover Erin was an elegant reversal of suspicions that had been placed upon his brother Billy.

Mare of easttown finale