Content Warning: This article contains MAJOR SPOILERS for the finale of The Flight Attendant. It also includes discussions of alcoholism and addiction; reader discretion is advised.
The Flight Attendant’s series finale “Arrivals and Departures” brings the series skillfully to a close, wrapping up the twists and turns of the central murder mystery while also addressing the show’s larger emotional themes and character arcs. The HBO Max miniseries follows alcoholic flight attendant Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) as her life spirals out of control after a drunken night out with a passenger named Alex Sokolov. When she wakes up beside his dead body the following morning, she gradually finds herself embroiled in a much larger conspiracy that threatens her sanity and her life.
A prime suspect in Alex’s murder, Cassie spends The Flight Attendant season 1 desperately searching for information that can exonerate her. While trying to track down Miranda Croft (played by Michelle Gomez), Alex’s business associate, Cassie discovers a complicated conspiracy surrounding Alex’s death and realizes her own life is in danger. Despite her initial belief that Miranda killed Alex, Cassie finds an unlikely ally in her. Miranda explains that Felix, an assassin working for her boss, Victor, is the one who really killed Alex, and that he will be coming after Cassie next. While on the run, Cassie realizes that her boyfriend Buckley is actually Felix, who has been stalking her like he does all his marks. Miranda and Cassie make a plan to go to Rome and trap Felix so Miranda can kill him. Miranda makes a pit stop to kill Victor and ensure her own freedom, but is injured and misses the flight, throwing their plans off balance.
In Rome, Cassie narrowly escapes an encounter with Felix, has a heartfelt and revealing conversation with Megan, and enlists the help of her Roman friend Enrico. A conversation with Enrico’s grandmother helps Cassie to make a major breakthrough in regards to the childhood trauma that drove her to drink. She abandons her several little. bottles vodka that she keeps hidden in her purse, seemingly resolved to quit drinking. When Cassie and Enrico return to her hotel, Felix nearly kills them both, but Shane, one of Cassie’s fellow flight attendants, arrives unexpectedly to save the day. Everyone (even Felix) survives the incident, leaving Cassie to return home and take control of her life again. With Shane, Annie, and her brother Davey in her corner, Cassie looks toward a future that will be inevitably bumpy, but ultimately brighter than ever before.
Who Is Felix, Alex’s Real Killer?
While the revelation that Cassie’s boyfriend Buckley is actually psychopathic killer Felix occurs in the penultimate episode of The Flight Attendant, “Hitchcock Double,” Felix’s journey is never chronologically explained until the series finale. Miranda tells Cassie she believes Felix is the one who killed Alex, but the audience doesn’t receive concrete confirmation until “Arrivals and Departures,” when Victor, who ordered the hit on Alex, relays the details. He confirms that Felix did indeed kill Alex, but did so before getting a hold of the money Alex took. Cassie, having already taken it, left Felix empty-handed and unwittingly set the events of the series into motion. Later, when he is about to kill Cassie, Felix retraces his steps, revealing to the audience that he began stalking Cassie as early as Bangkok, following her everywhere after her night with Alex. Cassie never saw him following her because she was always too drunk or distracted to notice him, highlighting the ways in which Cassie's alcoholic nature can have unexpected consequences.
Felix also confirms that he killed Sabrina and Agent Chavez, two victims viewers previously believed were killed by Miranda. Disturbingly enough, Felix also seems to indicate some actual romantic attachment to Cassie. He seems to be motivated not just by a sense of duty to Victor or his own bloodlust, but also by anger at Cassie for ending their relationship. Whether this anger is genuinely felt or is just an intimidation tactic is unclear, but it is indicative of just how dangerous and unhinged he is. It also displays the way in which Felix put pieces of himself into the Buckley persona, making him a true "Hitchcock double." Though it's an upsetting experience that is more complicated than expected, Cassie and the audience finally learn the whole truth about Felix.
Shane Is With The C.I.A
With Enrico incapacitated and Cassie at a physical disadvantage against a trained killer, it is Shane who ends up saving the day, arriving unexpectedly at Cassie’s hotel room with a gun and taking down Felix. While Cassie recovers from the shock at the back of an ambulance, Shane reveals to her that he works with the C.I.A, and originally began working with Imperial Atlantic to monitor Megan, who has committed treason. Shane’s involvement with the C.I.A comes as a shock, but it makes sense that a federal agency was looking into Megan, given that she had been committing illegal activities for a long time and on an increasing scale with no real ability to hide her identity or actions from possible government surveillance.
Shane's presence reaffirms that there are indeed people looking to protect others from harm, even if it often seems that people like Cassie are on their own, at risk of being lost in the system, helpless. Similar to Shane in this regard is Kim Hammond, an FBI agent who, when Cassie seems the most likely suspect, refuses to accept the easy answer, and pursues the truth of Alex's death even when it seems impossible.
What is Going To Happen To Megan?
Megan does not get as uplifting an ending as Cassie does in The Flight Attendant’s finale. While she and Cassie finally come clean to each other about the secrets they have been keeping, Megan reveals a lot about what motivated her to steal and sell information from Bill’s company to the North Korean government. While at first, Megan thought there would be no harm in her actions, the conspiracy began to grow bigger and bigger until it had spiraled out of her control. This loss of control mirrors the effects of alcoholism in Cassie’s life, and the two women share a significant moment of understanding.
Megan also describes feeling invisible to those around her, most painfully to her son. She tells Cassie about the incredible feeling she got from committing espionage, doing something that “only [she] could do.” Though Cassie reassures her that everything will be okay, Megan responds, “Not everyone gets to be okay.” Because of her super spy endeavors, Megan has to sacrifice everything to get her family out of trouble. She leaves behind a large sum of money and the flash drive she used to steal information, which will presumably incriminate her but exonerate Bill. Unfortunately, that means she can never return to her life at home. After saying a tearful goodbye to her son on the phone, she boards a train in Italy, presumably beginning a life on the run.
What Is Next For Cassie?
Cassie has a major breakthrough in “Arrivals and Departures” after a conversation with Enrico’s grandmother that sets into motion several significant changes in Cassie's life. While talking. with Cassie, Enrico’s grandmother asks her one of the biggest questions of the series: “Who of us has the space to carry other people’s choices?” The sentiment forces Cassie to confront the ways in which she has taken responsibility for her father’s actions, and allows her to finally forgive herself for his death, comforting her younger self in a memory of the accident. Back in the real world, Cassie takes all of the vodka out of her purse and leaves it behind, taking the first step on her road to recovering from alcoholism.
Cassie returns home ready to make some major changes in her life. She reassures a concerned Davey (played by Grey's Anatomy's T.R. Knight) that she will be okay, “for real this time,” and when she later meets Annie at a diner, Cassie reveals that she has begun attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. She shows Annie a first milestone chip, representing that she has been sober for what is often a minimum of 24 hours. Though she acknowledges that it will be difficult, Cassie is moving in the right direction. She resists the urge to take a drink onboard a new flight, and Shane mentions possible work for her as a “human asset” with the C.I.A, highlighting possible new horizons for Cassie’s future, and an opportunity to do something good.
Finally, Cassie strides through the now mostly empty hotel room in her mind, reflecting on her journey and potential C.I.A career. The lights shut off as she exits each room, finally arriving in the bedroom, where Alex’s copy of Crime and Punishment lies on the bed. Though she considers leaving it, Cassie reaches for the book as the lights go out, signaling that, while she can’t leave her experiences behind, she also doesn’t want to because they have allowed her to heal and to grow. The final frame shows Cassie smiling, a combination of relieved, hopeful, and excited for her future.
Why Is Alex in Cassie’s Head?
Alex and the hotel in Cassie’s mind play an enormous role throughout the series, and though their respective meanings are never explicitly stated, it’s possible to tease them out. The hotel room in Cassie’s mind is in constant flux, and is reminiscent of other constructed inner worlds, like the "mind palace" in the BBC series Sherlock. The hotel room is filled with funeral regalia when she visits Alex’s memorial and supplies a visually impressive tower of vodka bottles when Cassie feels that Alex is judging her for drinking. Other small visual cues, like lights flickering during moments of epiphany, indicate that the hotel room is a visual representation of Cassie’s lived experience. Influenced by all that she encounters, the room often depicts things that Cassie is unable or unwilling to put into words.
Alex, in contrast, exists both within and separate from the hotel room. Most notably, he often appears to Cassie outside of her mind in the real world, giving her advice or asking questions, signaling that he is more than a manifestation of her experiences. As early as the first episode of The Flight Attendant, Alex (played by Game of Thrones's Michiel Huisman) struggles to understand his presence in Cassie’s head, but he still expresses something vital when he says, “I think we both get that I’m not exactly the Alex you were with that night.” Alex is aware that he isn't actually Alex, a critical clue to identifying who or what he is.
He seems to know Cassie intimately as soon as he arrives and has unfettered access to her mind, which both surprises and upsets Cassie. Over the course of the series, the two form an intense relationship, and in the finale, Cassie tells Alex she has fallen in love with him. Alex corrects her, saying, “Honestly… it wasn’t me you were falling in love with.” Though Cassie cuts him off, it seems to be understood that over time, Cassie has come to love not Alex, but herself. Alex is simply a way for Cassie’s mind to process and understand what she has been grappling with all season: her own intimidating complexity.
The Flight Attendant’s Most Important Story Is About Trauma and Addiction
While The Flight Attendant is an exciting murder mystery, it is, at its heart, an exploration of how trauma and addiction can affect a person. The series is an in-depth study of Cassie, touching on her formative years and how her experiences and her pain impact her as an adult, and how she copes with much of that hurt by abusing alcohol. Alex represents the way Cassie often feels split in two, unable to truly confront the ways in which she is at odds with herself, especially in regards to her denial that she is an alcoholic despite knowing it deep down. But Alex also represents an internal conflict that is good – one that challenges Cassie to think more clearly and to demand more of herself. He also represents the way in which Cassie has had to learn to care for herself in a way that her father never did, due to his own taboo addiction.
The message that “Arrivals and Departures” telegraphs, however, is that it’s never too late to heal. Despite all that she has been through, Cassie has the power to confront her traumas, to grow from them, and to be okay. Though it takes the most dangerous circumstances to make Cassie grapple with her addiction and its root causes, she is able to take steps to work through those issues, to get sober, and to repair the meaningful relationships in her life. Cassie learns how to take responsibility for her actions, but also learns to stop punishing herself for the actions of others. While The Flight Attendant seeks to entertain its viewers, it also takes an honest and ultimately hopeful look at trauma and addiction, showing audiences that nothing is insurmountable.