The English ending explained – did Cornelia get her revenge?
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The English season 1 major spoilers follow.
The English saw BBC One and Amazon Studios team up, unite that nice Emily Blunt with Chaske Spencer from the Twilight movies, and throw them in the middle of a violent, bloody saga of brutality and revenge.
Based in the late 19th century, The English follows Blunt's grieving Lady Cornelia Locke as she arrives in a middle-of-nowhere-town in Kansas to start tracking down the man who killed her son. Intending to make her way north to Wyoming, she engages the help of Pawnee scout Eli Whipp (Spencer), asking him to accompany her on the treacherous journey.
And treacherous it certainly was. Over the course of six episodes, the pair endured numerous gruesome moments as they rode across the American West, encountering outlaws with a penchant for scalping, discovering an orphaned child and newborn, and meeting the sole survivors of a massacred family of Mennonite settlers.
But even those who seemed friendly enough to begin with – like that nice farming couple – turned out to be deadlier than Cornelia and Whipp could have imagined.
So who made it out alive? If you didn't stick around for the end (or found it a bit confusing as there was a lot going on to be fair) then we're here for you.
The English ending: What happened in the finale?
Something was bothering us about Lady Cornelia for a while. Those fainting fits never did seem in character for such a tough woman – and it turned out there's a reason for them. But we'll get to that.
In the final episode, rancher Thomas Trafford's factotum Thin Kelly is warned that Rafe Spall's Melmont is behind the wholesale takeover of the Wyoming territory, and that he has "a thing" that does his violent bidding – such as the butchery of Thomas' cattle earlier in the series.
Sheriff Marshall (Stephen Rea) meanwhile, is tracking Melmont's connection to the Chalk River massacre, when he and some rangers overstep their orders by murdering, scalping and mutilating a caravan of Cheyenne.
(Interesting fact: this event is actually based on the real-life Sand Creek massacre of November 1864, which is referred to in The English novel).
Thomas was a witness – though unconscious at the time – and, we discover, he later branded Billy Myers and Timothy Flynn as punishment for their part in it. But he didn't kill Myers – something else did that. Melmont's town of Hoxem, he reveals, is built on the buried bodies of the Chalk River victims.
Deputy Red Morgan, meanwhile, traces the clues from the massacre to a former sex worker once employed by the murderers, who now goes by the name of The Black Widow. In a grim reveal – even for this show – we discover she is now part of a travelling freak show. The reason for this? She has tertiary syphilis and her face is eaten away by the disease. (This also makes her look confusingly like the bandit and scalping victim Black-Eyed Mog from earlier, though there's no connection.)
She gave the disease to Melmont and perhaps his co-conspirators.
As a result, Lady Cornelia, who was raped by Melmont, and the baby she subsequently carried got infected too. While Melmont's case it is latent, hers is returning in its tertiary stage.
She consults the kind travelling doctor Flathead Jackson and shows him a picture of her boy, who died at 14 from the disease. This explains her original reason for coming to the States – to find the man responsible for her boy's death.
When Jackson doesn't flinch at the picture, she entrusts him with the care of White Moon, the infant son of murdered "renegades" Touching Ground and Running Hawk, and gives him her remaining cash as payment.
Cattle widow Martha Myers reveals to Sheriff Marshall that she too was raped by Melmont, and that her teenage son is his boy. Thin Kelly turns up shot at the same time as Cornelia and Eli, who have come in search of Sheriff Marshall.
Eli, as we know, witnessed the aftermath of the massacre, and is able to confirm that all the shot men – Myers, Flynn and Kelly – were present, and that only Melmont and McLintock remain. Meaning that McLintock must be the supernatural "thing" that does Melmont's murderous bidding.
Kelly warns that McLintock's on his way with the Gatling gun – but he's too late. McLintock takes to the roof and shoots the place to pieces. Eli eventually chases him off, but not before we see that he too has a terrifying face destroyed by syphilis. Myers' son chases him into the prairie.
Trafford's manager arrives and reveals Trafford drowned himself and his herd in a flood on the way to Alberta. (Or if he didn't, he wanted everyone to think he did.)
They pursue the wounded McLintock, and Eli and Cornelia find his body at Chalk River, the site of his original evil.
Melmont is waiting for them, having tied the Myers boy to a scaffold. He taunts Cornelia, but she is unable to shoot him (perhaps, as he suggests, because he represents the living part of her late son).
Too bad though, Melmont – Martha Myers shoots him in an ambush and Eli finishes him off, painfully. (Yay!)
Sheriff Marshall concocts a story that explains the killings so that Cornelia, Martha and Eli can all escape arrest and the possibility of lynching, but the cost is that Eli has to disappear forever, away from Cornelia. As a parting gift she gives him wheat seed, for the day he finally finds peace and a place to settle; in return, he gives her the bird skull from his medicine pouch and says that he already found his peace with her. [EVERYONE SOBS.]
Thirteen years later, Flathead Jackson's travelling show has come to Berkshire, England. A wheezing Cornelia, veiled, makes herself known to White Moon, now a young man. He reveals that he has seen the world and lives a good life playing the valiant Sgt Whipp in the Wild West show. Cornelia gives him the bird skull. He lifts her veil and kisses her without flinching.
"The shame" she says.
"But not for you," he replies, and returns to the showground.
The final shot is of the present day, in the parking lot of Melmont's superstore ("Home of the homemaker – Est. 1890"), built over the graves of the murdered Cheyenne. Just in case you were in any doubt about this show's message: that America was founded by the Melmonts of this world, and the past is far from history.
The English is now available on iPlayer in the UK and Prime Video in the US.
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