The final episode of The Stranger, Episode 8, answered most of the big questions viewers would have been asking throughout the show with some explosive revelations about The Stranger (played by Hannah John-Kamen), Corinne Price (Dervla Kirwan) and Tripp (Shaun Dooley).
Although the show has been billed as a mini-series, The Stranger ending also set up a potential Season 2 of the show on Netflix that would continue to follow the woman we now know to be called Christine Killane.
What happened at the end of The Stranger?
The finale is best looked at split into two parts, with the first half revealing who The Stranger is, and the second half revealing what happened to Corinne, before the last scene brings to two plots together again.
Who is The Stranger?
At the end of Episode 7, we learned that The Stranger was the daughter of Martin Killane (Stephen Rea), the former police detective who is helping Adam Price (Richard Armitage) find his wife. However, the biggest revelations were kept for the finale.
First though, the episode sees Johanna Griffin (Siobhan Finneran) held at gunpoint by bad police detective John Katz (Paul Kaye) after she found out he killed her friend Heidi (Jennifer Saunders). When his ex-wife comes to the house to find out what John has done with their daughter, Johanna gets away and calls the police, though not before Katz escapes in his wife’s car.
Meanwhile Adam gets told that The Stranger’s name is Christine Killane, and gets her home address which he goes to—though not before texting the address to Johanna’s phone, which Katz took with him when he fled.
Katz starts heading to the address but Adam gets there first. After being knocked out by Christine’s employee, he wakes up chained to a table and finds Christine waiting for him. Then, she tells him her story.
She tells Adam she is a professional blackmailer, who got drawn into her job after her family life was torn apart by secrets when she was a younger girl. For years, she believed her mother had left her for life with another man. However, she later discovered that her father had actually killed her mother when she tried to leave. What’s more, she discovered that Martin was not actually her father—instead, she was the child of the man who her mother was having an affair with.
That man’s name? Edgar Price (Anthony Head), making her the half-sister of Adam. This answers two questions left unanswered by earlier scenes of The Stranger—why Christine did not ask for any blackmail money from Adam (she was telling him about his wife’s fake pregnancy because she was hired to do so but also because she wanted her newly-discovered brother to know about his wife’s deceptions) and who the second child she told Edgar he had was (her).
Before we have any time to think about these implications, however, Katz storms in with a gun, shooting Christine as she tries to protect Adam. Luckily, Johanna and the rest of the police are close at hand and come and arrest him for the murder of Heidi.
What happened to Corinne?
With The Stranger identified, the Netflix series still has one big question to answer—where is Corinne? Adam begins to investigate, and his questions lead him to the football coach, who tells him that he heard from Tripp that Corinne had stolen thousands of pounds and was planning to pin it on him.
Adam thinks that Tripp might be trying to hide his own embezzlement, so he goes to confront him and discovers that he did take the money and try to pin it on Corinne. Then, when she confronted him, he killed her with a hammer and buried her in the woods, sending Adam a text from Corinne’s phone saying she need to get away from him and then planted her phone on a bridge to make it look like she had committed suicide.
Johanna is tracking Adam via the locations app on his phone all this time, but she does not arrive in time to stop Adam killing Tripp.
The Stranger then cuts to six months later, where Johanna comes to visit Adam during one of his son’s football games. She tells him that Christine is still missing, and that she covered up Adam’s killing on Tripp by hiding the gun at Katz’s flat for the police to find.
Though the show was billed as a limited series, these final moments set up a potential Season 2. After all, Adam has got away with murder (a pretty big secret), and Christine is still around and presumably still trying to reveal people’s dark pasts, suggesting the pair could face off again in another season even if they now know that they are siblings.
Even if the story of Adam has ended for now, the show could continue with Christine in another community, blackmailing her way through another set of secrets. This was possibly hinted at in the final moments of the Netflix show, where it was revealed that Christine was watching the football game from a balcony—but when the camera cut back to her she had gone.
The Stranger is streaming now on Netflix.
