Major spoilers below for the six-episode thriller Behind Her Eyes, so be warned if you haven't yet watched!
Based on Sarah Pinborough's 2017 novel of the same name, Netflix's jaw-dropping limited series Behind Her Eyes is a fever dream of fractured personalities and mysterious motivations, coming off as a pitch-black whodunnit where it's not even clear at first what the "it" in "whodunnit" means. The story first sounds like a tawdry made-for-cable movie, with Simona Brown's Louise Barnsley unwittingly infringing upon the disintegrating marriage between psychiatrist David Ferguson (Tom Bateman) and his long-suffering wife Adele (Eve Hewson). But it soon becomes something far more sinister and playfully depraved, with a little bit of supernatural soul-swapping tying all the twisty mysteries together. Which is where the batshit crazy (but still plausible) theories come into play.
Below, I'll attempt to briefly sum up Behind Her Eyes singularly bonkers ending, and will then dive into the two hilariously nutty and thought-provoking theories that easily give all the WandaVision speculation a run for its mental money. Without further ado, let's get to counting our fingers so we can walk through our first door to the creepiest pop culture moment related to pigeons since Home Alone 2.
How Behind Her Eyes Ended
There's no succinct way to say all this, but here we go... In the final episode, it was revealed that back when Adele's friend Rob (Robert Aramayo) visited her family's estate after their rehab stint, Rob's envy and desperation completely took over. While they were in the midst of an astral projection session outside, Rob put his severely heinous plan into play. His blue spirit (for lack of a better word) entered Adele's body, and he then used heroin to murder his former corporeal form before dumping it and Adele's purple spirit into the well. To sum that up, while it was implied that David killed Rob in a fit of jealousy, it was actually Rob-As-Adele who killed Adele-As-Rob, and David's entire stake in the murder was tied to blackmail, since his incriminating watch also fell to the bottom of the well.
With David wanting out of the marriage, Rob-As-Adele put his plan to work a second time with Louise, who was still only a novice in the astral projection department. Preying upon Louise's kind nature, Rob-As-Adele sparked a fire and faked a suicide attempt, causing Louise to send her green spirit into the house to check it out. But that's when Rob took over Louise's body, forcing her spirit to jump into Adele's heroin-filled, slowly dying body. Rob-As-Louise then dragged her outside to wait for the authorities, and the series ended with Rob-As-Louise assimilating to a new life by getting married to David, leaving poor young Adam to presumably be raised by a total monster. It's one of the darkest TV endings I can think of, and the show is all the more amazing for it.
Behind Her Eyes Pigeon Theory Part 1
You read that right, people. (Assuming you all ARE people.) Perhaps the biggest underlying theory inspired by Behind Her Eyes is 100% pigeon-related. Just after Rob-As-Louise arrived at Louise's apartment for the first time, there was a cooing pigeon on a kitchen counter, and the two beings starred at each other before the pigeon flew off. It wasn't the first bird-centric moment in this show (more on the lower), but its placement and timing made it seem far more meaningful than random. Because, if you'll notice, the pigeon sported a patch of bright green feathers, and we all know what the color green represents in this show, right?
That's right, Louise is all green everything in Behind Her Eyes. Even beyond her spirit taking on that hue, Louise had on some form of green clothing for seemingly 90% of her outfits. So the theory here is that before Louise-As-Adele had completely overdosed to the point of no return, Louise's spirit escaped unnoticed and, perhaps out of desperation, entered the body of that particular pigeon. It would make sense why the bird was inside the house, being quite familiar with it and all, and why it gave Rob-As-Louise a good stare-down before flying off. If the theory is legit, it wouldn't be surprising if the pigeon started following the new family around to make sure Adam stays safe.
Those are the kinds of sentences one can say with a straight face after watching Behind Her Eyes, because for as baffling as they are on the surface, the details line up well enough to make it entirely plausible. Birds, with pigeons in particular, are seen and heard throughout the six episodes, with the most noteworthy moment before the finale coming in Episode 3, when Louise is outside smoking. It can be speculated that this moment foreshadowed the late-game moment with Rob-As-Louise without much hyperbole, but then we can also go deeper down the rabbit hole to view that Episode 3 moment in a completely different light.
Behind Her Eyes Pigeon Theory Part 2
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say, so if it sounds like too wild a notion that Behind Her Eyes doubled down on the twists by introducing a human-to-animal transition, then consider that Louise might not have been the first character in this show to pull off such an act. What if, in the flashback timeline, O.G. Adele performed a similar feat by escaping Rob's body before death settled in, and her purple spirit also entered one of the birds in the vicinity?
This, as it goes with everything in this story, is entirely up to interpretation, but the pigeon that shows up in Episode 3 has a slightly tinge of purple when viewed from behind, reminiscent of O.G. Adele's spirit, though it's nowhere near as bright as the green on the pigeon in the finale. But if it was indeed her, it's feasible the bird wasn't there for Louise, but rather that it sticks around the office to see David. While I'm not sure if her spirit would be able to keep a pigeon alive for an untold number of years, it stands to reason that any spirit that does enter a non-human would be trapped in there, with no fingers and no other way to go through the sleep ritual that sets up the astral projections.
I legitimately can't tell if Part 2 is any more or less nutso than Part 1, but it's not entirely without some form of merit. The first time Adele is seen in the flashbacks at rehab, birds are heard chirping beneath the song she's listening to with headphones. And they're also heard at other moments when she and Rob are out in the woods. That's a natural enough occurrence, admittedly, but I definitely don't think the sounds were added arbitrarily.
Since Behind Her Eyes is a limited series, it's entirely possible that viewers will have to go on without learning any concrete answers about Louise and the pigeons. But as popular as the thriller has been on Netflix since its release in February, I wouldn't consider Season 2's potential to be any less possible than the theories listed above. Let us know in the poll below what you think!
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