Your Guide to Netflix's ‘Eric’ and It’s Wild, Winding Ending
Netflix’s ambitious new limited series, Eric, dropped on the streaming platform on May 30, and as professionals, we’ve already finished all six episodes. The miniseries comes from Welsh playwright Abi Morgan and stars the ever-talented Benedict Cumberbatch. We’d recommend pretty much anything Cumberbatch stars in, but this time, we really mean it. Eric is bursting at the seams in the best way. The psychological thriller blends the worlds of puppetry and the crime-riddled 1980’s New York City, held up by two of our most talented working actors – Gaby Hoffman stars alongside Cumberbatch’s Vincent as his wife, Cassie.
Vincent is a puppeteer and the creator of a popular kids television show in New York called Good Day Sunshine, a functioning alcoholic, and the estranged son of billionaire real estate developers. At the start of the series, Vincent’s son Edgar goes missing while walking himself to school, his parents being caught up in yet another heated argument. A media firestorm blazes across the city, the backdrop of a tangled police investigation, the dissolution of the Anderson’s marriage, and the exacerbation of Vincent’s substance abuse issues. All of this, plus puppets!
Watch 'Eric' on Netflix
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Before going missing, Edgar lets his dad into his imagination, showing him a potential puppet of his own creation, a 7-foot-tall blue monster named Eric. When Edgar goes missing, Vincent sets himself on a mission to get Eric on television, hoping that will somehow bring his son home. All the while, investigators are prodding every corner of their lives, from their neighbors to Vincent himself.
By episode three, it is revealed that Edgar is not dead, but actually alive in the subway tunnels of New York. It is also revealed that Vincent struggled with some schizophrenic-type behavior throughout his life, which explains the recurring giant puppet that enters almost every scene from Vincent’s POV.
So much of this story is about the socio-economic gap that existed in 1980s New York and still does today. The puppets we’re introduced to in the first minutes of the series are living in a world plagued by racial injustice, the AIDs epidemic, white collar crime, addiction, and all the other shiny pretty things. The team behind Eric has shoved a lot of monstrosity (literally) into these six episodes, so let’s get right to that ending.
What happened to Edgar?
Episode six opens with Vincent passed out in the subway tunnels looking for his missing son, Edgar, who followed a man underground and never came back out. Edgar is not your typical runaway, he’s a kid in search of sanctuary. Early in the season, it is revealed that when his parents would fight, Edgar would go down to the basement of their building and spend time with his neighbor. Here, he’s done the same. No one has actually taken Edgar. He was simply in search of sanctuary and he found it within a community of homeless residents underground.
While underground, Edgar used chalk to draw pictures of his puppet, Eric, on the walls of the tunnels. Vincent, down horrendously but determined to find his son, sees the pictures and dashes to the Good Morning Sunshine studios to reignite his plan of getting his son’s puppet on television. He steals the Eric costume and interrupts a protest, broadcasting himself in his blue monstrous garb in front of a TV crew, sending a coded message to his son, “race you home.” Why are we crying?!
The message reaches Edgar from his seat at a diner and he races home in tandem with his father, and the two are reunited outside of their home. With Edgar home safe and sound, Vincent tells his estranged wife that he will be going to rehab. He’s finally figured out who the real monster is. Get it?
In the end, Vincent and Cassie split, Cassie being pregnant by her secret lover, but they resign to peace. They meet at a taping of Good Morning Sunshine, where Eric is the new star of the show, and literally all is right in the world.
All episodes of 'Eric' are streaming on Netflix.
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