The Beast In Me offers a meaning that deserves to be explained, with evil and good interacting and provoking each other, setting very specific power plays.
When you reach the ending of The Beast In Me, the Netflix thriller series released in November 2025, you might even be left with a bitter aftertaste. What happens is what we often look for in series featuring a well-defined villain who harms others—an effective release in which the villain is punished or at least neutralized, and the victims find some possible peace. That’s how The Beast In Me ends, but for once, you get the feeling that this wasn’t the conclusion that fits this series best.
It’s true, the Jarvis family seems like the worst that Western society could ever have to deal with: calculating, powerful, willing to do anything to achieve their goals. Indifferent to others, without scruples, without hesitation. If their goal is to obtain the permits needed to complete their construction project, they have no problem tarnishing the career of an honest politician to get them. And if, years earlier, the FBI was on the verge of catching Nile Jarvis thanks to tips from his wife… well, Nile takes two seconds to decide what to do and kills his wife with his own hands. Without thinking twice.
Nile Jarvis will also kidnap Teddy Fenig, without any real reason—simply because Teddy represents someone who, in his eyes, deserves punishment. Karma, right? And when the opportunity arises to take advantage of that kidnapping, he kills him and plants his body in Aggie’s home, to frame her and strip her of all credibility. All these actions are carefully calculated so that he always stays in a position of power over everyone else. This is why evil, in The Beast In Me, always seems one step ahead of good: because it is craftier, more intelligent, and has every possible means to get what it wants.
The relationship between good and evil in The Beast In Me is a close-quarters dance, much like the one Nile and Aggie share in her home on the night they open up to each other. There is always one partner who leads—who drives events and knows exactly where things are headed—and then there is the necessary counterpart, the one who follows the flow and makes the movement possible.
When trying to explain the meaning of The Beast In Me, it’s important to note that there are no good characters who are also smart enough. Aggie is an intelligent woman, but not capable of matching Nile’s cunning; FBI agent Brian Abbott managed to isolate the truth, but it didn’t matter. What he gets in return is the death of his source (Madison, Nile’s first wife), an inevitable sense of failure after the investigation ends without even getting close to Nile, and an unceremonious death when he tries to stop him a second time, years later.
To this, we must add that every good character carries a stain of wickedness that haunts them. Aggie drags with her a deep resentment toward Teddy, a resentment that will make her feel guilty for the fate that befalls the boy and that mainly serves to mask her own responsibility in her son’s death. The other FBI agent, Erika Breton, becomes corrupt and shatters her colleague Brian’s reputation the moment she’s offered the help she desperately needed. Good is weak in The Beast In Me, while nothing, it seems, can throw a wrench into the gears of evil. Anyone who tries either dies or loses credibility. There appears to be no real way to defeat it.
This is why the ending of The Beast In Me “doesn’t feel right.” What brings Nile to prison is a clever move by his second wife, Nina, who secretly records the moment in which Nile confesses to murdering Madison and Teddy. But does this make Nina a strong and virtuous character? Not at all. Nina’s story presents her as an ambitious young woman who doesn’t spend much time thinking about what happened to Madison—who died the same night Nina revealed to Nile that she knew he had a wife in contact with the FBI. She just takes her place as Nile’e second wife, asking no questions. Is it her conscience that pushes her to frame Nile in the end, or the prospect of spending the rest of her days with his money, without his presence looming over her?
Watching Nile die in the finale, at the hands of another villain (Uncle Rick, who avenges his brother’s death), does not make good triumph in The Beast In Me, and this is a fully intentional stylistic choice that defines the series’ meaning. None of us deserves absolution; we all carry a ‘beast’ within us that keeps us from being flawless knights. And before us stands an evil that is coherent and fully in control of its own means—an evil that strips the mask of hypocrisy from the rest of the world, shining a light on the fact that they are not so different after all.
