Woman of the Dead plot recap: is a Season 2 possible?

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Woman of the Dead is a TV series directed by Nicolai Rohde, which landed on Netflix in January 2023. Based on the book of the same name by the Austrian writer Bernhard Aichner, the series tells the story of a woman working as an undertaker in a small town in the Austrian mountains: her husband gets killed, and she begins a risky, private investigation that will lead her to extreme actions. Those who watched the TV show wonder if the ending is open, if a Season 2 is possible, and what can happen later: let’s have the plot recap and everything explained in this article.

You can watch the official trailer for Woman of the Dead here on Youtube.

Woman of the Dead, Season 1 plot recap: who are the five men? Who killed Mark?

In Woman of the Dead, Blum’s husband, Mark, gets killed at the beginning of the first episode. The car that ran over Mark and the driver inside it become Blum’s obsession: she finds Mark’s second phone, believing he’s cheating on her, and she ends up meeting Dunja, a girl Mark was secretly helping. She is a victim of a group of men who abuses young women and then kills them. She escaped but didn’t want to involve the police, so Mark helped her privately. She convinces Blum that Mark died because of her: he was killed by those men.

One by one, Blum manages to discover the identity of those men. The first is Edwin Schoenborn, photographer-artist and son of Johanna Schoenborn, a powerful woman who wants to transform the valley into a tourist place and make money with her ropeways. Blum makes up a meeting with Edwin; she attacks him and kills him. She doesn’t show much remorse and will secretly get rid of his corpse, dismembering and putting its parts in one of the coffins that leave the morgue regularly. Not before noticing a unique mark on his body.

She recognizes that mark on the skin of another man, the priest Herbert Jaunig. She will confront him and set him on fire. This time is nothing that can be interpreted as an accident, and the viewers become aware that Blum has started a personal path made of revenge and death: she won’t stop until she didn’t identify and kill all the men of the group, considering them the ones who killed her husband. She also discovers the third man’s identity after setting up the meeting with the priest through the group chat on Edwin’s phone: it’s Bertl Puch, who manages a fancy restaurant in town. She will kill him too, this time getting wounded. Reza, the man who works with her in the morgue, will save her and help to get rid of Puch’s body.

Blum doesn’t manage to find the identity of the fourth man quickly, and neither has the plot of Woman of the Dead explained it to the viewer until Episode 5, where we get to find out who he is because he decides to expose himself: it’s dr. Benjamin Ludwig, who understands that she has Edwin’s phone by writing in the group chat. He tries to kill her, unsuccessfully, and then she kills him and brings his body out of the hospital, always with Reza’s help. She also discovers that he could have saved her husband, but he let him die because he knew Mark was investigating them. That leads us to the ending: let’s continue our recap of Woman of the Dead.

The ending explained

The ending of Woman of the Dead shows a plot twist, revealing the last mystery about the man who ran over Mark: it was Massimo, Mark’s colleague in the police, the fifth man of the group. He was aware of Mark’s investigation, and he’s always been the executioner of the men’s group. He just did what he’s always done for them: killing who they needed to be dead since they were young. He attacks Blum and brings her to the place where all the girls were dragged, but Reza comes in to help and kills Mark. It’s over: Blum killed all five men responsible for her husband’s death.

There is a federal investigation in progress on her: Blum is suspected because she was the one who saw Schoenborn and Jaunig last. Her blood is also in Puch’s kitchen, and it’s just a matter of time before the police find out. But that’s the way the ending of Woman of the Dead has explained to us how Blum manages to save herself: she meets Johanna Schoenborn and reveals that she owns the video found in her son Edwin’s studio, where everybody can see what he did, together with the other men. She agrees with Ms. Schoenborn: Blum won’t make the video public, and in exchange, Ms. Schoenborn will use her power to stop the police investigation on her. That’s what happens in the ending: the police chief pushes to drop the investigation and come back to normality. Blum had her revenge; the five men are all dead. In the last scene, the new investor found by Ms. Schoenborn asks her if she has enemies because he could “take care of them,” and she wonders what to answer.

Woman of the Dead Season 2: can the plot continue?

The question everybody has now is: can Woman of the Dead has a Season 2, and what can happen after the plot recap we’ve just read regarding the first season? The answer is positive. Yes, a Season 2 is definitely possible for one simple reason: the book Woman of the Dead written by Bernhard Aichner (Totenfrau, in German) is, in fact, the first book of a trilogy, which includes two more books, Totenhaus and Totenrausch (which could be translated in English as House of the Dead and Ecstasy of the Dead). In all books of the trilogy, the protagonist is Blum.

The sequel of Woman of the Dead, Totenhaus, starts with the police finding the dismembered parts of one of the men killed by Blum during an exhumation in a cemetery in Innsbruck. They immediately suspect Blum, the undertaker, the only one who could have hidden those parts in the coffin. But she disappeared a long time before: as the book cover hints, the second book of the trilogy is about “a hotel that has been empty for twenty years; a murderess on the run; a loving mother who has to leave her children behind.”

Therefore, the plot of Woman of the Dead has a sequel ready to be used as a possible Season 2 of the TV show. Netflix usually announces the sequel seasons some weeks after the release: we will find out soon if we have the chance to watch Season 2.

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