Warning: Contains spoilers for The Innocents season 1, including the finale.
Supernatural drama The Innocents has now landed on Netflix and we’ve already praised its unique spin on a coming-of-age tale.
Pleasingly, the first season largely solves the mysteries it sets up across its eight episodes that follow teenagers June (Sorcha Groundsell) and Harry (Percelle Ascott) as they run away from home to be together – only to discover that June is a shapeshifter. The course of true love never did run smooth, after all.
So we thought we’d round up the biggest mysteries of season one and offer some theories on where a potential season two could go, especially after that huge cliffhanger.
Needless to say, major spoilers await after the trailer.
1. What happened to Harry?
Let’s start with the biggie first. In the final moments of season one, Harry and June looked to be on their way to freedom after June’s mother Elena (Laura Birn) turned herself into the police. However, as they were speeding away – with Harry’s mother Christine (Nadine Marshall) in pursuit – they crashed into a tree, leaving June severely wounded.
Harry begs her to shift into him so that she can “find someone that can help you” which she reluctantly does, only for Christine to reach the car and touch June (thinking she was Harry), so that June shifts into Christine after June is too late with her warning: “Don’t touch me, you’ll hurt him.”
To understand what has happened to Harry, you need to go back to the mystery surrounding Harry’s catatonic father Lewis (Philip Wright). When June shifts into her mum in the penultimate episode, it’s revealed that her mum was having an affair with Lewis. They fell in love and he asked her to “take me too”, so Elena shifted into him, but is so freaked out by it that she leaves the room.
While she is Lewis, Elena is abused by a guy outside a pub, so she punched him and immediately shifted into him. Then she shifted into the pub’s landlord, before shifting into a runner and an old woman on a bench, without ever coming back into her own body. When Elena shifted back into her own body, the old woman woke up, but everyone else remained catatonic and have been for the three years since the incident.
This includes Harry’s father who is part of what the police call The Pennines Five, a case which Harry’s mother has been investigating. Since he’s been catatonic, one of the phrases that Lewis has been repeating is “you should meet my son” and after June finally shifts back into her body, she realises that Harry hasn’t woken up and he repeats the phrase “I’ll see you again soon”, the last thing he said to her.
So while he’s not dead, Harry is trapped in his own body as June could only revive Christine, the last person she shifted into. Season two could potentially see Harry’s mother reluctantly work with Elena and June to find a cure for both Harry and Lewis – if there even is one.
The other worry is that with June back in her body, does this mean she’s still critically wounded? It’s not made clear whether shifting into someone else heals your original body, but June better hope this is an ability she discovers is true as she looked in pretty bad shape.
2. How is June different from other shapeshifters?
Even though June only discovers her powers at the end of the first episode when she shifts into Steinar (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), it doesn’t take long to discover that she can do more than just shift into another person’s body.
In episode four, June shifts into the pregnant Nurse Deborah (Clare Calbraith) and discovers that she can do things she never could before, like stitch up a wound. What’s more, June realises she feels pregnant and can see Deborah’s memories and feel everything that Deborah felt as she was trying to have a baby.
This ability to access a person’s memories is not something that every shapeshifter can do and we only meet one other shapeshifter who can do it: Cam (Abigail Hardingham), who we later learn is actually Runa’s (Ingunn Beate Øyen) daughter Freya.
However, it’s revealed that this extra ability comes with its risks as when June shifts into Elena, she starts to forget that she is June and could become trapped as Elena’s memories start to overtake June’s. Almost as if we’ve planned it, this leads us onto the next big mystery of the first season…
3. What did Dr Halvorson want with June?
When we first meet the enigmatic Dr Halvorson (Guy Pearce), he’s already set up Sanctum on a remote Norwegian island, aimed at helping shapeshifters control their powers. It’s where Elena went after her night of shifting into five different people consecutively and it’s also home to Sigrid (Lise Risom Olsen) and Halvorson’s partner Runa.
Runa was the first shapeshifter that Halvorson encountered and it was his experience with her that led him to seek out Steinar (a former patient he helped to stop drinking), in order to use his parents’ home as the base for Sanctum and to have Steinar as a trusted ally.
It’s not explicitly stated, but we can assume that Halvorson set up Sanctum to help Runa. He says it was all about helping the shapeshifters with the “diffusion of their emotional triggers” that start their shift – for example, June’s shifts are triggered by fear and Elena’s by love. But his motives potentially became more nefarious over the years as we see he keeps tapes of all of his sessions with Runa, Sigrid and Elena which he rewatches to manipulate them.
As for why Halvorson sends Steinar out for June in the first place, it could just be that he assumed she would have the same powers as her mother . However, he soon learns about June’s additional abilities and Steinar tells him that “she’s everything you’re looking for” and we have to wait until the finale to understand why.
Runa is suffering from early onset dementia and Halvorson believes he can use June to prolong Runa’s life by having June shift into her and ‘become’ Runa permanently. “Your memories will replace hers, this is the answer. Sacrifice her so you can live,” he explains to Runa, before threatening to kill Harry to trigger June’s shifting. Harry overpowers him and Runa ends it once and for all by shooting Halvorson in the head.
Here’s hoping that Halvorson’s knowledge isn’t what was needed to cure Harry and everyone else that has been left catatonic.
4. Why did Freya leave Sanctum?
Runa and her daughter Freya were at Sanctum together in the early days, with Freya likely to have been Halvorson’s second test subject, for want of a better phrase. As mentioned before, Freya has the abilities to get into the mind of the person she shifts into and her early shifts into Steinar make her want to leave Sanctum.
“He forces me to stay in Steiner with those memories, I don’t want to see those things anymore,” Freya tells her mother when she begs her to leave with her, but Runa doesn’t believe her and that forces Freya to leave without her. However, when Freya later comes into contact with June and realises she’s heading to Sanctum, she decides to return to Sanctum after she shifts into Steinar.
Halvorson used to electrocute Freya to trigger her shapeshifting because her trigger is pain and Freya makes sure everyone else knows by showing a video of her session. Runa finally understands that her daughter wasn’t lying to her all those years ago and it’s not until she sees Steinar’s reflection that she realises that it’s actually Freya. This eventually leads to her killing Halvorson out of vengeance.
However, this doesn’t lead to a happy family reunion. “I came back for June. Your daughter’s gone,” Freya coldly tells Runa before leaving her stranded on Sanctum. We imagine Freya will be a part of season two to potentially help June revive Harry, but it remains to be seen if Runa will come back.
One person who won’t be back is Sigrid after she is fatally shot by Halvorson as he is holding the group hostage.
5. Is Steinar alive?
The last time we see the real Steinar in the first season is in episode six when he discovers that Cam is Freya when he is tracking down June. It appears that – potentially because of the years he’s spent being shifted into – he can see a shapeshifter’s true identity without the need to look at their reflection like everyone else has to.
He follows Freya to her apartment and we see him break in as Freya hides from him, holding a broken wine bottle. Initially it’s thought that this was for self-defence, but after we know she went to Sanctum as Steinar, it’s likely that she instead used it to trigger her shifting ability, allowing her to shift into Steinar.
Before Freya abandons her mother, she shifts back into herself, so the likeliest explanation is that Steinar would then have woken up at her apartment. As far as we know, the person has to be alive to shift into them, but perhaps one of the revelations of season two will be that shapeshifters can assume the identity of people who are dead as well.
For now though and unless they confirm otherwise, expect Steinar to play a part in season two.
The Innocents is now available to watch on Netflix.
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