The Midnight Club's Book Ending Explains That Finale Cliffhanger
So that's why those ghosts are important.
If you were confused by how The Midnight Club ended, you’re not alone. The ghostly horror series left a lot of its mysteries open-ended, including the truth about the two elderly spirits that seemed to haunt only Ilonka and Kevin. Thankfully, you don’t have to wonder about them too much, though, because showrunner Mike Flanagan actually has some answers. All you have to do is brush up on some reading, because The Midnight Club’s book ending helps explain the show’s Season 1 finale.
Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers from The Midnight Club’s finale. The final scene of The Midnight Club Season 1 seemed to hint at the identity of the two ghosts haunting Brightcliffe Hospice, but didn’t really reveal why. A quick shot in Dr. Stanton’s office suggested the ghosts are the spirits of Stanley and Vera Freelan, the founders of Brightcliffe. But why are these phantasms so obsessed with Ilonka and Kevin, while nobody else in the hospice has ever seen them? Well, Flanagan dropped a hint that the answer to that question lies in Christopher Pike’s 1990 novel The Midnight Club, on which the series is based.
“If you haven’t read The Midnight Club book, the epilogue of the book is very important to us,” Flanagan said when asked about the ghosts at a press conference attended by Elite Daily. “That’s as much as I can say about that.”
That statement is more than enough. The book focuses much more on Ilonka and Kevin’s romance than the show does, even going so far as to reveal the two are cosmically linked — forever reborn in new bodies and destined to fall in love with one another again and again. Yeah, it gets pretty weird. The epilogue that Flanagan mentioned travels thousands of years into the future, where new versions of Ilonka and Kevin are living out their happy ending together as lovers.
This allusion to the novel’s ending also offers a convincing explanation about those two ghosts. Sure, they may be the spirits of Stanley and Vera Freelan, but they are also very likely the same souls as Ilonka and Kevin. As in the book, Ilonka and Kevin are just one incarnation of a pair of eternally connected souls — so it’s likely that they were once Stanley and Vera in their past lives before dying and being reborn as Ilonka and Kevin. That would also explain why Ilonka and Kevin would always find themselves drawn to one another whenever they encountered the ghosts.
Since there are plans for The Midnight Club Season 2, this cosmic connection will very likely be explored in future episodes (should Netflix renewed the series, that is). But at least now anyone who was wondering what was up with those ghosts can rest easy until then.
