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Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Midnight Club season 1.
Out of all the meta-character stories in Mike Flanagan's The Midnight Club, Kevin's tale of a serial killer named Dusty is the longest - here is what its end means for both of The Midnight Club's characters. Broken into three parts, Kevin's story ends twice with a disappointing "to be continued..." caveat. However, when it finally reaches its conclusion without being rushed, it proves to be one of the most thought-provoking narratives featured in The Midnight Club. By drawing some inspiration from serial killer tropes and Ilonka's research about The Midnight Club's Paragon cult, Kevin sets the stage for his story's central character, Dusty.
During the day, Dusty is as perfect as a school student can be. However, by night, he ruthlessly murders people using a hammer and buries them in a secret cave. At every crime scene, Dusty also leaves a business card with the Paragon cult's hourglass symbol embedded on it. As normal as he appears to the rest of the world, Dusty is always haunted by the ghosts of his dead victims and his silent mother, who only utters the names of the ones he must kill next. Dusty's violent endeavors take a complicated turn when he befriends Sheila, a close friend of his last victim Nancy, who eventually leaves Dusty stuck in prison.
What Happens To Dusty In Kevin's Story
Hoping to find the whereabouts of her missing friend, Sheila visits Nancy's place with Dusty. When she finds nothing there, she calls the cops, whose interrogation makes it evident that a serial killer murdered Nancy. Despite the revelation, Dusty remains far from being a suspect because the leading detective involved with the case believes that the serial killer with the Paragon business card has been active for four decades. While the detective (portrayed by Brightcliffe Hospice's Georgina Stanton) keeps reaching out to Dusty to learn more about the online presence of his generation, Dusty and Sheila start warming to one another. Unfortunately, to Dusty's dismay, his mother announces Sheila as his next victim one day, and with a heavy heart, he conforms.
Dusty invites Sheila home, tells her about his family's generational killing spree, and then raises his hammer to hit her. However, his feelings for Sheila get the best of him and hold him back from killing her. When his mother senses his failure and crawls into the room to force him, he stops her by striking her with his hammer. By doing so, he not only liberates the spirits of his previous victims from their state of limbo, but also frees the evil force that possessed his mother throughout The Midnight Club story (played by Veronika Hadrava from the cast of Resident Alien). The evil force then enters his body and coerces him to finish the job, but Dusty still resists by stabbing himself with his hammer's claw. To save Sheila, he asks her to kill him for good, but she spares him by only knocking him out and sending him to prison. In the end, Dusty spends the rest of his life in solitary confinement, where he struggles to tame the wicked voices in his head till the end of time.
Dusty's Killer Motivation & Story Ending Explained
Dusty's story is Kevin's real life wrapped in a fictional yarn. Just like Dusty cannot help but follow his mother's orders to kill in The Midnight Club story, Kevin finds it hard to escape the shadow of the perfect image that his parents have of him. Every time Kevin's parents visit him at the hospice, they only talk about how great of a student he used to be at school. Kevin, like Dusty, wants to break free from these ideal expectations of his parents, but struggles to do so. Dusty's killings reflect how Kevin is weighed down by the convictions and commitments of his life before he joined the hospice. Kevin wants to break up with his girlfriend and avoid returning to his old school, but he fails to find the right words to end his past relationships and start afresh.
The ghosts of Dusty's victims in the Netflix horror series allude to all the people Kevin has kept hanging because of his fear of hurting them. Even though Kevin (played by Igby Rigney from Midnight Mass's cast) realizes that his relationship with his girlfriend has not stood the test of time, he keeps her in a limbo by not breaking up with her. When he finally does end his relationship, he feels terrible and blames himself for hurting her. This, in turn, reflects in his story's ending, where Dusty chooses a life of sacrifice and isolation instead of giving himself a second chance with Sheila. Towards the closing moments of The Midnight Club, Ilonka helps Kevin understand that he may always hurt the people he loves in one way or another, but that does mean he should be alone. With this, The Midnight Club season 1 ending shows Kevin realizing that although he and Dusty still fell the burden of the commitments and blunders of their past, they deserve a new beginning.