Warning: SPOILERS for We Were Liars are ahead!
If you just binged all eight episodes of Amazon’s We Were Liars TV show and need all the answers, this is just the place to turn to. I know I was excited to see the book adaptation arrive on the 2025 TV schedule, but now that I’ve experienced the twisty thrill ride that is We Were Liars, it’s impossible to simply move on. There’s a lot of questions to talk through, and thankfully when I had the chance to interview the cast and showrunners about the big things about the story that is keeping me up at night.
If you read the novel of the same name you knew what was coming, but whether you’re an avid reader of all the big upcoming book adaptations including this one or went into the series blind, there’s a lot to unpack about what really happened to Cadence Sinclair and the other “liars” during Summer 16. Let’s get into it.
What Happens At The End Of We Were Liars
Starting with the premiere episode, there was an ongoing mystery regarding what happened to Cadence at the end of Summer 16. We knew she was found washed up on the beach stripped down to her underwear and sustained a serious head injury that caused her to forget most of the summer. We’d been curious about what exactly happened and why the other “liars,” the group she hangs out with, consisting of her cousins Johnny, Mirren and the nephew of her aunt’s partner, Gat, didn’t check on her in the time between the two summers. In the finale, we find out for sure.
As the series unveils, the “liars” decide to burn down the Cadence household themselves after dealing with all the drama associated with the families over the years – especially in regards to the sisters fighting over who is worthy of the estate after the death of their mother. However, the teens are not very smart over their on-a-whim plan and Johnny, Mirren and Gat die in the fire.
Cadence is the sole survivor of the fire, and the reason why the “liars” never checked in with her and it has been hard for her to remember is because she lost some of the closest people to her. Summer 16 was the final summer she and the “liars” spent together, and she’s the only one left. Talk about a mind-blowing TV twist!
Were The Liars Ghosts Or Cadence’s Hallucinations After The Fire?
This leads me to the first question I asked some of the cast members of We Were Liars during the show’s press junket. I was curious what their thoughts are on whether the dead “liars” that Cadence sees after their deaths when she is trying to piece together what happened are actual ghosts are hallucinations the teen was seeing the whole time. Check out the varied opinions of some of the cast:
Esther McGregor (Mirren): "Spirits definitely. Derived obviously from Cadence's brain, but I do think that they were existing in there and still like their own humans."
Joseph Zada (Johnny): "I think I was a ghost. Yeah. I saw myself as a ghost."
Mamie Gummer (Carrie/Johnny's mom): "I think it's interesting how Carrie and Cadence have some, you know, foils for one another and that they're both addicted to opioids, so that might also have something to do with it."
Caitlin FitzGerald (Penny/Cadence's mom): "I mean Cadence is an untrustworthy narrator, and the machinations of her brain are influenced by a lot of things, I think, so whether it's memories, drug abuse, or ghosts, I think it just is part of the mystery of the show and kind of the melancholy too."
Interesting, huh? It seems that the open-ended nature of the show meant that there’s different ideas about the “liars” after their deaths. Both Esther McGregor and Joseph Zada, who play Mirren and Johnny in the show, think of themselves as “ghost” or “spirits,” as McGregor likes to refer to it as who were very much their characters rather than a projection.
On the other hand, Mamie Gummer and Caitlin FitzGerald had different perspectives. Gummer, who plays Cadence’s aunt and Johnny’s mother, thinks the fact that Cadence is addicted to opioids during that summer can account for why she sees the liars. FitzGerald wanted to leave things more mysterious, but makes a good point about Cadence being an “untrustworthy narrator.” All in all, these responses tell me that the cast didn’t decide on one answer, and it really is up to the viewer what they choose to believe.
Did Cadence And Gat Really Have A Chance At Love?
Another aspect of We Were Liars I was curious about is whether its main actors think that Cadence and Gat’s romance during Summer 16 was the real deal, or if it would have fizzled out due to their differences that caused contention within the Sinclair family. Here’s what the Cadence actress, Emily Alyn Lind, told me:
I think it might've happened anyway… The only thing that I think really did put her over the edge though, was loving someone so much and then finally opening her eyes a bit more and seeing how [Gat] was treated, and it maybe made her go a little crazy, and I think that that definitely influenced [what happened].
Lind also got into how she thinks Cadence and Gat’s attraction is undeniable between them, and wasn’t going to go away under other circumstances. She continued:
I always go back to the point of like, they would've never just been friends. You know? They loved each other from the moment they met. Like they might've been, you know, eight years old, but they were going to fall in love. And so whether or not that happened now or when they were 30, you know, maybe, the bad thing wouldn't have happened, but I still believe that it would've [for them].
The whole thing certainly lends itself to a tragic romance we’ll never get to see actually play out aside from that summer due to Gat’s death. It’s so sad, but Lind makes a good point that the pair were always going to be drawn to each other no matter the circumstances.
Does The We Were Liars Final Scene Set Up Season 2?
That leads me to the final moments of We Were Liars, which felt somewhat like a cliffhanger to me. In the closing scene, Carrie is about to leave the island with Ed and her son when she sneaks in an opioid before the trip. Once she swallows it, she sees her dead son, Johnny (played by our future Haymitch, Hunger Games fans). She says she thought he’d left, but Johnny answers “I don’t think I can” before the show officially fades to black. It seems to suggest there’s some unfinished business on the island.
When I asked the showrunners Julie Plec and Carina Adly Mackenzie about this, they let me know that their intentions very much have to do with wanting to continue the We Were Liars story. In Mackenzie’s words:
I mean obviously we don't wanna reveal too much about where we're going and why, but that scene is very similar to the first scene of the prequel family of Liars. So you can get an idea of maybe some of the things that Carrie is about to talk to Johnny about.
Now, the next We Were Liars book is actually a prequel which follows Carrie Sinclair’s experiences on the island back in the 1980s when she was a teen herself. Based on their comments, it sounds like the ending of the show is setting up her retelling her own storyline, perhaps while grieving over her son and dealing with the return of her addiction. Here’s what Julie Plec added:
I would say honestly We Were Liars as a novel and as an adaptation to television is a really beautiful limited series. And we believe because of the prequel and because we love these characters so deeply, that there are so much more story to tell. And that was our way of just saying to the audience, ‘Hey, like if you liked this, we can do it again, and we wanna do it again.’ And if for any reason we're not able to do it again, then it still is a beautiful fully realized journey that the audience can tuck away and take with them. But, yeah, it's our hint of like, ‘There's more.’
I love the idea of Family of Liars being adapted next, but of course it’s dependent on the success of We Were Liars. I learned so much and gained a lot of clarity about how the show ends thanks to my interviews with the cast and showrunners.
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