Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of The Body.

In the aftermath of a team initiation ritual gone wrong on Halloween night, the members of the St. Mark’s Catholic school all-girls dance squad find themselves at the center of a townwide mass hysteria event. Or, perhaps the visions of the Lions’ comatose new recruit Grace (Sofia Wylie) are actually a sign from God.

That’s the tension at the heart of Netflix’s The Body, all eight episodes of which are now streaming. But it’s certainly not the only conflict at play in the 2004-set raunchy teen psychodrama. Created by Quinn Shephard (Under the Bridge)—who has described the series as a love letter to Y2K-era teen movies and erotic thrillers like Jennifer’s Body and Heavenly Creatures mixed with the collective paranoia themes of The Crucible—The Body explores the relationships between the teens as they navigate the buried secrets shaping their lives.

By the time the finale rolls around, Lions captain Anya (Kristina Bogic) has pulled back from her forced friendship with outcast-turned-chief team manipulator Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros) in favor of preserving her secret romance with her best friend and co-captain Elise (Sara Boustany). The problem is, Lisbeth is still the only person who knows Anya was the one who found Grace passed out in a drug-induced stupor at the Halloween party, gave up on her plan to take Grace to the hospital after she appeared to stop breathing, and, at Lisbeth’s suggestion, snuck Grace’s body back inside her house to try to make it look like she had never been out with them. Meanwhile, a desperate Lisbeth is ready to use this information to blackmail Anya into letting her and her brother Leo (Jackson Kelly) live with Anya’s family so they aren’t forced to return to their West Virginia hometown with their mentally unwell religious zealot mother Catherine (Louisa Krause). Lisbeth also threatens to out Anya and Elise to get her way, an outcome that terrifies Anya more than anything.

“I’ve always been interested in the idea of girlhood as a religious experience. This story is definitely my way of putting a playful spin on all the nightmares of my own teenage-dom,” Shephard told Netflix’s Tudum. “I think that the emotions of trying to figure out who you are, how to love your identity, where you align with your belief system, and wanting to be loved [don’t] ever really go away. I think that the truth is that as much as we’d like to think otherwise, we don’t ever stop coming of age.” 

The truth comes out

After it’s revealed that Grace had ecstasy in her bloodstream—something the doctors initially missed because it wasn’t part of their standard testing panel—and that the Lions were lying about Grace appearing to them in visions, St. Mark’s head priest and Grace’s uncle Father Franklin (Nnamdi Asomugha) comes to understand he sanctified a miracle that had no basis in fact. But with Grace’s father Michael (Motell Foster) convinced he also had a vision of Grace and a crowd of Grace devotees, including Leo and Grace’s best friend and fellow Lion Maddie (Shirley Chen), gathered outside Grace’s home to pay witness to her, the situation has spiraled completely out of Father Franklin’s control.

Across town at the big debutante ball, Anya’s conscience finally gets the best of her after Elise confronts her about the fact that Anya was seemingly willing to let both her boyfriend Steven (Orlando Norman) and Elise herself take the fall for what Anya and Lisbeth did to Grace. After Anya flees the ball, Lisbeth, in what appears to be an attempt to secure her position on the team and protect herself from Anya’s accusations, decides to spin the truth of what happened on Halloween night to make the Lions believe Grace would’ve died if Lisbeth hadn’t managed to resurrect her. Meanwhile, a deteriorating Catherine is busy at home taking part in the same Pentecostal cult ritual that killed Lisbeth and Leo’s father: drinking poison and dangling a live rattlesnake in front of her face.

Reeling from everything that’s happened and believing Grace is dead, Anya rushes over to Grace’s house and confesses her sins to Father Franklin. However, it’s at that moment that Grace at long last rouses from her incapacitated state and shocks her parents, uncle, and Anya with her waking declaration: “I’m God.”

What’s next?

While The Body hasn’t yet been renewed for a second season, the Season 1 finale certainly seems to indicate Shephard has more of this story to tell. Not only does the show leave the true nature of what’s happened to Grace up for debate, but Season 1 also ends with the fates of several main characters hanging in the balance.

Will Lisbeth take over as the Lions captain now that Anya and Elise have lost the team’s trust? Is Anya going to try to pin the blame for everything that happened on Lisbeth? Will Anya ever come to terms with her sexuality and repair her relationship with Elise? Is Catherine dead? Is Grace just repeating what she heard everyone saying about her while she was in a coma, or does she really believe God is moving through her? Is any sort of divine intervention actually at play?

For answers to these questions and more, all we can do now is put our faith in Netflix to bestow us with another season.