[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR SPOILERS for all six episodes of Harlan Coben‘s Lazarus.]
The twists and turns did not stop coming in Harlan Coben’s Lazarus. The six-episode mystery-thriller, which premiered in full on Prime Video on October 22, kept audiences guessing from the very first scene until its last… and beyond that, too.
Chances are, many fans will still have some big questions about what happened at the end of the series, particularly since the final moments throw everything we thought we knew into chaos — and just when it seemed the mystery was solved, too!
That effect is totally intentional, Coben admitted. “We wanted to clear the deck so that you sort of go, ‘Okay, it’s over. We solved the mystery. Oh, wait, maybe we haven’t,’” he told TV Insider. “Where you thought you sort of had an answer, all the way through six episodes… It’s a lot of, ‘Oh, that’s the answer. Oh, wait, no, that just leads to more questions.’”
So if you’re ready to find out what the stars and creatives behind Lazarus had to say in response to our most burning spoiler questions, read on.
Was Laz experiencing a psychotic break or true supernatural encounters?
Throughout Lazarus, Joel Lazarus a.k.a. Laz (Sam Claflin) experiences encounters with ghosts whenever he’s alone in his father’s office. He routinely talks to his recently deceased dad, Dr. Jonathan Lazarus (Bill Nighy), but on occasion, he’s also visited by people from his dad’s past — patients, mostly — who lead him down rabbit holes to other mysteries. In one case, he solves a decades-old cold murder in which a woman killed her abusive ex right there in his dad’s office and hid the body away in her attic. In another, he unravels the mystery of his little sister’s brutal slaying thanks to a ghostly visit from her that led him to her old boyfriend.
Was it all really happening as Laz saw it, though? The question is left unanswered, but there’s good reason to doubt it; in the final moments of the show, we see Laz’s sister Jenna (Alexandra Roach) uncover a treasure trove of audio tapes from her dad’s office, and in them are the same discussions Laz witnessed in his supernatural episodes.
When asked if his lead character was really experiencing visits from the beyond or simply having a psychotic break, co-creator Harlan Coben said simply, “Yes,” with a chuckle. “It could be what you wanted to be,” executive producer Nicola Shindler then added. “I know how I see it, and I have one very definite opinion, but I think that we all have different opinions as to what really happened to him.”
For co-creator Danny Brocklehurst, that final shot of Jenna gives audiences a choice. “We talked amongst ourselves quite a bit about this, and we were happy in the end that we provided a source of answer, and the audience can make their own mind up.”
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“We want this to be we want this to be the water cooler talk,” Coben added. “We don’t want to put a stamp on it so we have a definitive answer. We all actually have answers to it. Some of us feel differently, but that’s exactly it. The fact that you’re asking that is very flattering. It means that we sort of accomplished what we wanted to, and we hope that people will have spirited discussions about that and then go from there.”
For Sam Claflin, the sight of Jenna with those tapes gave him an idea for a potential follow-up, as he told us, “I think it’s a really important thing. And you don’t know what that might be setting up, if there was ever a Season 2, whether she would then start being able to kind of connect with the outer world. But you get the idea that Joel has been obsessing over these tapes… She kind of stumbles across them, and maybe she puts two and two together and realizes that’s how and why he went through what he went through.”
Alexandra Roach thought the open-ended nature of that reveal was a powerful storytelling device, saying, “What I loved about the ending was that it’s so ambiguous, and I love how it doesn’t clarify anything, really. And it’s much the same when somebody says, ‘Oh, have you ever seen a ghost before?’ … It’s kind of left to the audience to kind of sit with. It puts the power back on them.”
Can Laz move on after finding out the truth of his father’s death?
Whether his experiences are mental machinations or real visits from beyond the grave, Laz gets the answers he needs about his dad. He discovers that his father, upon being confronted by the formerly friendly Detective Brown (Kate Ashfield) about his involvement with the suspicious deaths of several patients, decides to die by suicide rather than being exposed for his crimes.
As devastating as it is, this solves the question of what really happened to Laz’s dad. And since Laz also gets answers to questions about Sutton’s murder, and he even receives an apology from ghost dad, he seems ready to move on. But can he ever truly recover from this?
Said Claflin, “The one thing I’ve learned in the last year is you should never wait for someone else’s apology for closure… You have to find that within yourself. … I think it doesn’t really matter what his father said. I think he was ready to let go because his view of his dad has completely changed.”
For Coben’s part, he guessed, “I think his life has changed forever, maybe. I think he has insight that he didn’t have before.” Shindler, meanwhile, had a rosy take, saying, “I think now that he has those answers, he’s able to heal so he can become a whole person — definitely a changed person, but whole — and hopefully have relationships which he couldn’t have before, and absorb his guilt about his sister, which I think, it has defined him for the last 20 years. So I think this will enable him to move on from that.”
Meanwhile, Jenna will have some soul-searching to do as well, since she was the one who covered up the truth of what happened on the night Sutton died — namely, that she kissed her sister’s boyfriend, albeit without consent due to him intoxicating her — and left Laz to shoulder the burden of guilt for decades. “As a sibling would, and as a woman in this family, I think she takes on a lot of this blame and guilt herself, and seeing her brother unravel, and knowing that she had a part in that in some way, down the line, I think will sit in a really thorny and uncomfortable place for her, and she’ll probably beat herself up over that as well.”
What did Aiden do to Laura?
Laz’s biological son, Aiden (Curtis Tennant), grows closer to him throughout the events of Lazarus — and Coben & Co. fully confirm his DNA test was the real deal, by the way — but in the end, he proves to be possibly more like his grandfather. Aiden shows up at the house of Laura (Roisin Gallagher), Laz’s love interest, and the next thing we know, her house is wrecked, and he’s holding a weapon with Laura nowhere in sight and saying he’s sorry.
Shindler, when asked if Laz has inherited his father’s dark side, said it’s more likely Aiden has done so: “It’s really interesting, isn’t it, because the question is, ‘Is there such a thing as inherited evil or inherited psychological problems?’ … I would say it skipped a generation,” she mused.
Claflin took it even further, saying, “I like to think Aiden would just go and hand himself into the police and say, ‘I’m sorry I did some bad things.’ I don’t think it’s that simple. I feel like with Laz, his desire and obsession with trying to understand people, he would want to understand and also stay connected to his son. So, whether or not he ends up getting involved with trying to cover up or does the right thing, I just feel like he makes a lot of bad decisions… I think what’s great about the ending as it is — because they definitely tried different variations of the ending, whether he had a knife and whether he didn’t have a knife — and I think the way that they’ve ended it is sort of definitely suggestive. I think there’s even blood on the knife as well, which suggests that Laura has passed on.”
Find out more about what the cast and creatives on Harlan Coben’s Lazarus had to say about the series in the video above.
Harlan Coben’s Lazarus, all episodes now streaming, Prime Video