Warning: Contains spoilers for The Midnight Club season 1. Mike Flanagan's Netflix series The Midnight Club had an uncharacteristically open-ended finale, suggesting that there's more to come. Based on the novel by Christopher Pike, The Midnight Club centers around a group of terminally ill teenagers, who meet at midnight to share scary stories with one another. The anthology elements of each member of the club's horror story run alongside the larger story of the mystery behind the Brightcliffe Home hospice, which has historic connections to the mysterious Paragon cult.
The mystery of Brightcliffe and the Paragon cult isn't resolved at the end of The Midnight Club, which is at odds with the self-contained storytelling of earlier Flanagan miniseries like The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass. While those shows may have had endings that were open to interpretation, they didn't have the loose ends of The Midnight Club's finale. Instead of tying everything up, this time Flanagan and his co-writer Leah Fong leave their biggest reveal to the very end of the Midnight Club finale: that Dr. Georgina Stanton is herself a former or current member of the Paragon cult. This final shot drastically shifts how audiences perceive Stanton's actions across the series, leaving them with many more questions and a desire for further episodes of The Midnight Club.
The Midnight Club Sets Up A Potential Season 2
The mystery surrounding the Paragon isn't the only thread left dangling in The Midnight Club's finale, and there are a lot more plot points that remain unanswered, implying that a Midnight Club season 2 is a distinct possibility. Netflix has yet to confirm this, but Mike Flanagan has already stated his desire for future seasons of the show. If commissioned, The Midnight Club season 2 will presumably further explore Dr. Stanton's backstory and probe further into her reasons for establishing the Brightcliffe Home hospice. It's been speculated that the dying teenagers could be prolonging Stanton's own life, but that remains to be seen.
Another unanswered question from the end of The Midnight Club season 1 that will surely form a big part of season 2 is who the ghosts that follow Ilonka and Kevin are. The old man and the woman have been seen by Kevin and Ilonka, respectively, in their waking moments. In the original Midnight Club novel, Ilonka is plagued by dreams of someone called the Master. It's implied that Ilonka and the Master are two lost soulmates who are doomed to be constantly reincarnated. When Ilonka and Kevin first meet, they have a strange sense of deja vu, suggesting that this element of the novel will be explored further through Ilonka and Kevin's burgeoning relationship.
An additional plot thread that could factor into season 2 is what exactly happened to Anya after she died. The final episode of The Midnight Club season 1 suggests that Anya may be communicating with her friends from beyond the grave, sending them a signal in the form of her fixed ballerina statue. It's likely that this is a typically enigmatic detail from Mike Flanagan, another mystery that gives the kids at Brightcliffe a semblance of hope as they approach the end of their corporeal lives. Alternatively, it could play a larger part in season 2 and further explore The Midnight Club's central themes of how faith and science treat the concept of death and an afterlife.
Why The Midnight Club Season 2 Is A Shocking Prospect
Aside from Doctor Sleep, his sequel to Stephen King's The Shining, Mike Flanagan doesn't do follow-ups to his projects. That's why the ending of The Midnight Club feels so abrupt, as Flanagan's audience is used to his projects having clearly defined endpoints. A series about eight terminally ill teenagers who tell one another scary stories to keep their spirits up could also be seen to have a clearly defined endpoint, but Flanagan avoids bringing the stories of The Midnight Club's kids to an abrupt ending. In doing so, he avoids making terminal illness a tacky horror trope and allows each character to have satisfying arcs across multiple seasons.
Another reason The Midnight Club season 2 is such a surprise is that Christopher Pike's source novel is, like Flanagan's previous shows, a standalone tale. Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong have expanded upon the source material, drawing inspiration from Pike's other work. For example, the stories that the Midnight Club members tell one another are drawn from other works by the prolific YA author. Only one story from the original book appears in the Netflix series: Anya's story entitled "The Two Danas."
This means that, rather than being starved of material for The Midnight Club season 2, Mike Flanagan and Leah Fong still have the four stories told by the other Midnight Club members in the novel. On top of these, they also have the extensive back catalog of Pike's work to draw from as the kids continue to tell each other stories. The concept of a continuing Mike Flanagan show may be an alien one to both his fans and Netflix subscribers, but it's an exciting prospect that will hopefully come to fruition.