Major spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t watched the entirety of Peacock’s The Resort, so be warned!
As the home of Jurassic World Dominion, two future Kaley Cuoco projects (including her Flight Attendant follow-up series), and all WWE pay-per-view events — among many other projects — Peacock is clearly in the streaming wars for a reason. But one of its best original projects yet is one that has no doubt floated beneath the radar of many potential viewers: the darkly comedic, relationship-driven mystery The Resort. And thankfully, creator Andy Siara & Co. delivered a fantastic Season 1 finale that strengthens the show’s impact, even if it may have seemed a little confusing while watching.
Which is why we’re here now: to figure out exactly what The Resort’s trippy ending meant, and how it all played out for Cristin Milioti’s Emma, William Jackson Harper’s Noah, Luis Gerardo Méndez’s Baltasar and the rest. Not to mention digging into what that elusive final scene meant. So without further ado, let’s hit the jungle paths running.
What Is Pasaje?
As The Resort’s episodes went by, taking both viewers and characters deeper into the central mystery, the seemingly mythical location of Pasaje took center stage, as Emma, Noah and Baltasar realized that it was indeed the final destination of the young lovers Sam (Skyler Gisondo) and Violet (Nina Bloomgarden), who’d disappeared without a trace in 2007. (That discovery came in large part thanks to Luis Guzmán’s novelist Illan Iberra and to Ben Sinclair’s time-jaunting resort owner Alex.) It truly seemed as if The Resort was setting viewers up for a huge bummer of a depressing ending, in which Nick Offerman’s long-stressed father Murray would bear witness to finding his daughter and Sam’s drowned bodies after 15 years.
However, it was stunningly revealed in the finale “The Disillusionment of Time” that the magical legacy preceding Pasaje was in fact authentic. Sam and Violet hadn’t drowned after all, but were floating perfectly preserved within a small whirlpool deep within a cave system that was completely flooded out in the 2007 hurricane. They’d found exactly what they were looking for, but it came at quite a cost, especially for Sam, whose journey to Pasaje was fueled by his attraction to Violet as opposed to the deep losses suffered by others who made the trip.
To attempt to define it:
- Pasaje is essentially a physical manifestation of nostalgia and its dangers, a place set outside of time that allows those who wander into its waters the chance to go back and mentally relive moments, but with the underlying threat that one can get completely lost in those memories without someone around who’s locked in the present.
Though Illan Iberra expressed foreboding warnings about how the location ruined his life, Violet and Emma both became entranced by the out-there possibility of seeing their dead loved ones, with Violet still mourning her Pasaje-minded mother, as Emma still hadn’t come to terms with the death of a newborn from years past. In the end, Violet claims to have indeed reconnected with her mom while within the whirlpool, while viewers witnessed Emma’s highly emotional response to assumedly seeing her late daughter.
But Emma figured out the lesson that Violet and Sam (and presumably others) did not: losing oneself in the nostalgia of Pasaje necessarily means one misses out on everything happening in the present. For the young couple, it meant putting their loving parents through years and years of emotional turmoil without closure, and then giving them an even bigger mental bodyslam by returning in the same teenage form they disappeared in. So while Pasaje is in part a gift, it’s in the same curio cabinet as the monkey’s paw and other doom-laden creations.
Interestingly enough, creator Andy Siara’s initial iteration of The Resort took its theme of “the disappointment of time” a bit too far, as he revealed to Deadline that Emma originally didn’t find anything but a dead end inside the cave. However, he and others found that conclusion might have been too much of a letdown, and thus evolved the whirlpool concept that inspired the sporadic cloudy ink-blot imagery used throughout the season.
What Did The Resort’s Final Scene Mean?
After everything is presumably squared away in some shape or form for the majority of the characters, The Resort ends on a somewhat mysterious and likely-not-final conversation between Baltasar and Gabriela Cartol’s Luna. They first offer a summation of how things went down, with Luna pointing out how “fucked up” the situation is for Sam and Violet, even if it all seems pretty on the outset. She remains firm with that stance even when Baltasar perhaps jokingly tempts her with the thought of just taking a 30-second dive into Pasaje.
But then it becomes more clear that Baltasar is a changed man after having helped to solve the mystery that stunted his emotional growth for the past 15 years, and that he doesn’t seem to actually want to go to Pasaje himself. That notion is best reflected in his immaculately crafted jacket, upon which is a tailor-made (literally) version of his favorite memory: a night of getting stoned and watching fireworks with Luna and Alex. He certainly wouldn’t put that much effort into creating a physical depiction of that night just to have it go to waste.
So when he gives that newspaper to Luna without detailing what it says, and speaks to the idea of going to an ocean far away — that something has “found” him — some viewers might come away with the idea that he’s once again talking about Pasaje. But Andy Siara seems to confirm that’s not the case in talking with Deadline about what Baltasar may be referring to. In his words:
I guess that’s an avenue for a Season 2 thing. I decided to not show what was on that newspaper that he hands to Luna. In the world of answering all the mysteries, I guess that is one new mystery that is not answered, just because I felt like [it’s best to have] some questions left over, I guess. He shows her something that is a news article that hints at another mystery, where Baltasar is kind of like our… I mean, he’s, he’s a full-on memory detective now, I guess.
Siara also talked about how this season is basically a Batman Begins scenario for Baltasar’s burgeoning crime-solving work, noting that the Batman reference in Episode 3 pointed to that idea. So it would appear that the resort detective has found a new mystery to crack, and that he’s inviting Luna along for that ride.
It’s not clear at this point if Peacock will be renewing The Resort for Season 2, as it almost definitely comes down to popularity outweighing financial costs. But it seems like Siara has at least a couple of ideas for where things could go if the story is allowed to continue, and I can’t wait to see if and how things play out.
The Resort can be streamed in full with a Peacock subscription, and while it technically wasn’t a full-blown true crime show, there are plenty of those on the streaming service as well. Our 2022 TV premiere schedule should also help find more new and returning shows hitting primetime and beyond soon.
