Naomi Watts Explained The Watcher's Ambiguous Ending (Sort Of)

Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers from The Watcher’s finale. If you were hoping to finally find out who the Watcher is in the Netflix miniseries’ climactic finale, you were probably left with a lot of disappointment. Like the real-life case its based on, The Watcher left things open-ended, never actually solving its central mystery. Although the final scene didn’t include a big reveal, series star Naomi Watts shared that it did communicate the show’s core message. After the controversial finale split fans, Naomi Watts’ quotes about how The Watcher ended could help provide a bit of insight.

After seven episodes of paranoid suspense-building, the final scene of The Watcher ended without a long-awaited reveal. Instead, those last moments showed an obsessed Dean Brannock returning to 657 Boulevard to stare jealously at the new owners of his dream home, as his wife Nora secretly pulls up behind him, realizing her husband’s obsession has gotten way too out of hand.

“Now, they're just trying to figure out who the other [really] is,” Watts told Entertainment Weekly of the ending. “The cycle continues, and we've gone too far believing in this American Dream with such entitlement and the fear of no longer being relevant anymore if that dream isn't realized. It's a vicious cycle.”

Watts’ statement about a torturous cycle lends itself to the theory that Dean may have become the Watcher himself by the show’s end. In reality, the Watcher case was never solved, and the real-life Broaddus family left their dream home without ever finding out who was sending them threatening letters. Watts revealed that The Watcher’s actors were just as curious about who the show might reveal as the anonymous antagonist as viewers were.

“We were all constantly speculating and finger-pointing to each other, trying to see what stories lined up,” Watts said. “That's fun, and it helps to our advantage as actors to keep up the mystery as we played it. Not knowing is the beauty of it, and it adds to the tension of how you play it. It wasn't spelled out to us, either, so our guessing was just as fun as yours!”

The Watcher is now streaming on Netflix.