Warning! Major spoilers for Servant below.
Apple TV+’s Servant has turned out to be a big success for the streaming service and some of M. Night Shyamalan’s best work in years; season one's finale already has fans speculating on theories regarding the second season.
Shyamalan’s Servant tells a tragic story that mixes grief and pain with fantastical elements to create an unusual hybrid that’s unlike anything else on television. Like lots of Shyamalan’s past works, Servant is full of secrets and clues and it’s created a story that has audiences talking and eager to put this complex puzzle together. Servant has already been renewed for a second season by Apple TV+, but the season finale for the show’s first season just aired and it brought with it some seismic changes to the series’ status quo.
Servant centers around the Turner family and even though they’re the main characters in the series, they’re largely passive figures that are forced to roll with the punches that everyone else heaps on them. Both Dorothy and Sean carry serious burdens for the entire season and viewers are practically waiting for the pressure to get too immense for Dorothy and her inevitable breakdown. “Balloon,” Servant’s season one finale, revolves around Baby Jericho’s baptism, but with it comes a drastic dose of truth that affects Sean and Dorothy in very different ways.
Sean Commits To The Cult’s Way Of Thinking As Dorothy Comes To Her Senses
Throughout the entire season of Servant, Sean has suffered from a number of increasing ailments. At first he experiences bizarre splinters, then he loses his sense of taste, and in Servant’s finale, it looks like Sean can’t feel anything at all. He holds his hand over an open flame and seems to be numb to any kind of pain. Sean is incredibly vulnerable during this time and Leanne’s Uncle George takes advantages of this. He tells Sean to commit to the Church of Lesser Saints’ way of thinking and that if he wants to have his baby back then he needs to experience pain and suffer proportionate consequences. Sean buys into all of this and it wouldn’t even be surprising if Servant’s second season saw Sean joining the cult or becoming more interested in it.
Servant plays around with the theory that Leanne could be responsible for Sean’s pain, but the more likely explanation is that something natural is the cause, like he has a brain tumor. Regardless, suddenly the stable one in the Turner household is in a much more submissive, fragile position. Right when Sean starts to believe in what George has to say and he gives into the whole Jericho myth, Dorothy surprisingly snaps out of the stupor that’s taken ahold of her for the entire season since Jericho’s passing. She’s downright mortified to see that she’s holding a doll and she has a vivid flashback of a paramedic in a hazmat suit that takes out Jericho’s remains from the crib. Sean finally makes use of Dorothy’s placenta from Jericho and bakes it into some food that Dorothy eats.
It’s said that eating placenta helps with post-partum depression, so it’s entirely possible that this, paired with other events like Dorothy holding another girl’s doll earlier and the entrance of Aunt May all helps pull Dorothy back to reality. With Dorothy now thinking clearly and Sean falling into delusion, the second season of Servant promises a very different dynamic between the Turners that should lead to some exciting developments.