The <i>We Were Liars</i> Plot Twist Leaves a Major Question Unanswered

Spoilers below.

In an addendum published in the deluxe edition of E. Lockhart’s 2014 bestseller We Were Liars, the author mentions The Sixth Sense as one of several inspirations for the memory loss that protagonist Cadence Sinclair endures throughout Lockhart’s story. As it turns out: Cady does, indeed, see dead people.

This revelation will come as little surprise to fans of the book. The plot twist is exactly what propelled We Were Liars to infamy amongst readers, especially BookTok acolytes, who pushed the title back onto the bestseller list during the pandemic. But for those watching the new Prime Video adaptation without this context, the finale is likely to land much harder.

Episode 10, “My Friends Are Lying in the Sun,” at last pulls the curtain away to reveal a horrible truth: There’s a simple reason the Liars—Gat, Johnny, and Mirren—didn’t call Cadence for months after the events of so-called Summer 16. They weren’t alive to do so.

Short answer: As Johnny later puts it, the Liars “really didn’t know how to do arson.”

Long answer: By the end of the Summer 16 timeline, the Liars have uncovered enough family secrets, backstabs, and betrayals to convince them they can no longer willingly participate in the Sinclair legacy. They decide they want to make a statement. They want to prove the family’s obsession with inheritance is fickle, cruel, and unjustified. They want to, literally, burn it all down.

They decide to set Clairmont—the main house on Beechwood Island—ablaze. (It’s worth mentioning that they are also a little drunk.) As they wipe the wood floors with gasoline and craft Molotov cocktails on the gleaming marble countertops, they execute a reckless plan. Gat takes up his position at the boat station. Mirren turns her mother’s bedroom into a tinderbox, while Johnny tackles the attic and Cadence the downstairs. At midnight, they strike their matches, but both Johnny and Mirren get distracted: Johnny by a picture of their grandfather, Harris, and Mirren by a painting in her mother’s bedroom. By the time they attempt to run out of their rooms, the smoke has become too thick for them to see where they’re going.

Delacorte Press We Were Liars

Meanwhile, Cady successfully escapes the house, only to go charging back when she hears her family’s golden retrievers whining from inside. The Liars have forgotten that Cady’s mother locked the dogs in Clairmont to keep them calm during the evening’s planned fireworks. By the time Cady reaches the goldens, everything around her is burning. A falling wooden beam smacks her across the head—likely causing the injury that will trigger her memory loss—and she can only listen to the dogs’ cries as they succumb to the smoke. (If I can go through life without ever having to watch a scene like this again, I’ll be thankful.)

The loss of the dogs is horror enough on its own. It’s an unspeakable, avoidable mistake, a terrible act of negligence and a betrayal of the animals’ trust and innocence. Remembering this tragedy in the Summer 17 timeline, Cady is overcome with grief, sobbing as the Liars hold her close. But it doesn’t take her long to recall the rest, and somehow, it’s worse.

Not only did Cady forget to let the dogs out, but she wasted precious time stealing her grandmother’s black pearls from Clairmont’s clutches. Doing so means Gat doesn’t see her when he comes sprinting inside the building, desperate to save his would-be step-cousins. Soon, Gat, Johnny, and Mirren are all trapped inside the smoke and fire, while Cady runs out onto the beach. “We didn’t even think about the gas line,” the ghost version of Gat says in the Summer 17 timeline. And so we watch in flashbacks as the house blows up, and the force of the explosion knocks Cady back into the ocean, likely compounding her brain injury and the resulting amnesia. Gat, Johnny, and Mirren all die in the blast.

They are definitely not flesh-and-blood humans, but—as Johnny makes clear—neither are they figments of Cady’s imagination. They seem to be ghosts, “haunting” Cady because she is not yet at peace with their deaths, and neither are they. No one but her seems capable of seeing these spirit-Liars (at least until the final scene, when we learn Johnny appears before his mother, Carrie).

Cady interacts with each Liar once more after learning their fates: with Johnny, who admits his own fear of hell but believes Cady will spend the rest of her life doing good things to earn a tier in heaven; with Mirren, who wishes they would have “let themselves be messy sometimes” so that they “actually could have seen each other”; and with Gat, who isn’t sure if he’s “real” but knows he loves her still. The ghosts only finally disappear after all four Liars jump off the dock together one last time.

Cady’s grandfather, Harris, has eyed Cady as the next heir of the Sinclair empire. When she rejects his gift—her grandmother’s black pearls—she thereby rejects his symbolic passing of the baton. Harris decides, then, to threaten her.

He reveals that a Time reporter will soon arrive on the island to interview him about his legacy. If Cady does not accept her place in the Sinclair family tree, Harris claims he will tell the journalist what he knows about what happened that fateful night in Summer 16. Cady’s relatives believe she was a tragic heroine, the sole survivor who attempted to save her cousins from a terrible (accidental) fire. Harris knows the truth: The “arson, animal cruelty, and involuntary manslaughter” will characterize the rest of her life, should it become known to her family, her friends, and the general public. “When the reporter comes on Saturday, you keep that in mind,” he tells her.

But after bidding the ghost-Liars goodbye, Cady doesn’t seem to care what comes next. When the reporter eventually asks for her take on the Sinclair story, Cady says she’s “just really not into fairytales anymore,” and runs off to steal her family’s boat and flee the island. Her mother and aunts watch from afar, proud to see her breaking free.

We Were Liars ends its first-season run not with a scene between Cady and her Liars but between Aunt Carrie and the ghost of her son, Johnny. As Carrie prepares to leave Beechwood at the end of the summer, she walks back inside her kitchen, only to find Johnny—or, rather, his presence—waiting for her. When she says she’d thought he’d “left” by now, he replies, “I don’t think I can.” The screen then cuts to black.

That leaves one major question unanswered. Forget whether or not the Liars are “ghosts” or “spirits” or hallucinations. We know they’re dead. But if one of them “can’t leave” Beechwood, does that mean he’s stuck forever? And if Johnny is stuck, are the other Liars stuck, too? With Cadence gone, can they “pass on” without her? Or will Carrie take up the mantle as their sole witness?

Such a cliffhanger is certainly set up as a lead-in for a potential We Were Liars season 2, which could draw material from Lockhart’s prequel novel, Family of Liars. (That book indeed centers Carrie and her sisters as teenagers on Beechwood.) Still, there’s no guarantee yet whether Prime Video will end up renewing the series. For now, Johnny will just have to wait.

Family of Liars: The Prequel to We Were Liars