Showrunners Jeff Addiss and Will Matthews tease their multi-season plan for the Duffers-produced drama.

The Boroughs ending explained: Creators address burning questions about Mother, time, season 2, and more

Showrunners Jeff Addiss and Will Matthews tease their multi-season plan for the Duffers-produced drama.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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May 23, 2026 3:05 p.m. ET

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Alfred Molina as Sam on 'The Boroughs'. Credit:

- *The Boroughs *creators answer burning questions about the season 1 finale.

- "We know what Mother is exactly," co-showrunner Jeff Addiss tells EW of the mysterious creature at the heart of the series.

- Addiss and his collaborator, Will Matthews, also explain how *Salem's Lot* was a bigger influence than fans might realize.

**Warning: This article contains spoilers for *The Boroughs*.**

Season 1 of *The Boroughs*, the new Netflix series produced by the Duffer Brothers in their post–*Stranger Things* era, is just the first step in a much larger vision.

What starts out as a story about Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina) reluctantly joining an isolated retirement community in Albuquerque, N.M., after the death of his beloved wife, Lilly (Jane Kaczmarek), turns into an intriguing sci-fi adventure tale about a band of elderly residents facing off with immortal caretakers kept alive by drinking the blood of otherworldly creatures.

Creators and showrunners Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews intentionally left a lot of questions unanswered in the season finale. What are the creatures? Are they alien? Is time travel involved?

If*The Boroughs* is a success and Netflix gives the show the go-ahead for more seasons, those questions will be answered. For now, Addiss and Matthews speak with ** about all those dangling threads.

Who (and what) is Mother?

Nancy Daly as Mother on 'The Boroughs'.

The mystery "monster" at the center of *The Boroughs* is Mother — and not in the sense that your favorite pop diva is "mutha" (though Matthews is "100 percent" onboard with the memeification of his character: "Clip it** **on TikTok. Yes! She *is* Mother"). Nancy Daly, dressed in makeup and prosthetics that were applied over the course of several hours, portrays the character, a creature with incredible powers. The Duchess, played by Mary McDonnell, says at point that even Mother doesn't know what Mother is — but the showrunners do.

"I'll say that we know what Mother is exactly, and the answer to that question is the arc of multiple seasons, hopefully," Addiss says. "That is at the root of it all. So we're not going to say what it is, but we know, and we hope the audience gets to find out."

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Here's what we do know about Mother from *The Boroughs*' first season. She hatched from an egg that a local miner named Marcus Shaw (Seth Numrich) found buried deep in the ground in the spring of 1949. Some of the details remain hazy, but at some point he discovered that drinking Mother's blood kept him young and healthy. A mysterious tree grew from the site where the egg was found, and eating from its fruit offers a similar effect.

Seth Numrich as Marcus/Blaine and Alice Kremelberg as Anneliese on 'The Boroughs'.

Marcus realized that he needed a steady supply of brain fluid to keep Mother alive, and that need only intensified once Mother began birthing large insect-like children — spindly creatures with gray skin, big eyes, sharp teeth, and four mantis-esque legs. So Marcus and his wife, Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg), built the Boroughs, a retirement community that could attract a consistent food supply.

By day, they keep Mother's babies trapped underground in a network of fabricated tunnels. But at night, they let them loose to extract brain fluid from the community's elderly residents. If anyone becomes too mentally deteriorated due to a loss of brain fluids, they are transferred to the manor, which serves as the Boroughs' hospital ward for dementia and other higher-risk patients. Over the years, Marcus passed himself off as Blaine, his own descendent, to mask his immortality. Meanwhile, the more Mother fed on brain fluid, the more her physical appearance began to resemble that of a human.

Mother doesn't experience time in a traditional linear manner, and Blaine implies that she can change the course of events. "You have no idea what Mother is, what she's capable of," he says in the season 1 finale. "Everything you think you've accomplished can be undone." We also know that she can communicate telepathically with certain people, like Sam and the Duchess, whose minds are split across time; Sam's by grief, the Duchess' by dementia.

And then there's all the stuff about the radio waves and TV static.

Why is Sam glitching?

Denis O'Hare as Wally, Alfred Molina as Sam, and Alfre Woodard as Judy on 'The Boroughs'.

To free Mother, Sam and his pals must allow her to die. They bring her back to the tree, where she surrounds herself with her children. She begins to glow bright, like sunlight bursting from underneath her skin, until she explodes. Blaine is disintegrated, while Sam is clearly changed. In the last scene, he goes into the bathroom to tend to his bloody forehead. His reflection glitches like television static just for a moment in the mirror.

"There's a lot in the show about transmission and signals: the signal that Mother puts out, the voices that Sam's hearing, the glitching — we call it 'glitching,'" Addiss says. "So it was not done idly. Everything about it is very specific, and it sets up what we imagined to be the next chapter of the adventure."

We see earlier in the season how certain transmissions and waves from television screens can impact those who've drunk Mother's blood. They become immobilized, while their bodies glitch and deteriorate. "It was partly the idea of the cathode ray tubes and some science-y science with that," Matthews says.

Alfred Molina and Denis O'Hare on 'The Boroughs'.

He recalls his grandmother having an old television set like the ones featured on *The Boroughs*. That image was prominent in his mind while working on the show and, as he explains, factored into Sam having "this thing that no one else has, partly because of his age."

Addiss confirms, "Transmission, glitching, signals, voices, radio waves, TVs — a lot of that language is very, very important to the show."

That finale scene with Sam in the mirror is also "an affectionate nod to the end of the first season of *Stranger Things*," Matthews adds, referring to the scene in the Duffers' first Netflix show when Will (Noah Schnapp) looks into his bathroom mirror and has a brief, nightmarish vision of the Upside Down. The Duffers, he says, clocked the allusion immediately. "I remember them having a rueful chuckle and a smile about it," he says.

Cocoon meets Salem’s Lot

Clarke Peters as Art, Alfre Woodard as Judy, Alfred Molina as Sam, Denis O'Hare as Wally, and Geena Davis as Renee on 'The Boroughs'.

The Duffer Brothers spoke about *Cocoon* being a reference for *The Boroughs *early on, and you can clearly see it in the show. Ron Howard's 1985 film is a sci-fi tale about members of a retirement home who feel younger after swimming in a pool that's housing cocooned alien beings. There's a similar Fountain of Youth story with a comparable otherworldly element in the Netflix series.

But it wasn't as big of an inspiration for the showrunners as you might think. "The movie is not easy to get your hands on," says Addiss, admitting that he hasn't seen *Cocoon* in years. "So I think we talked more about our memories of *Cocoon* than the actual *Cocoon*," he says. "If you say, 'I'm gonna do a show about people in a retirement community,' it does start to play with a lot of the same themes once you get into otherworldly, monstrous [stuff]. So it wasn't something we were conscious of, but it was something we were certainly aware of."

The vampire horror story *Salem's Lot*, however, was a massive inspiration. You can see it in the glowing eyes of anyone who drinks Mother's blood. "There's a lot of vampire in Blaine and Anneliese," Addiss says, "in the way that they talk and look and dress and feel out of time."

Alfred Molina on 'The Boroughs'.

In episode 7, "Time to Go," Sam speaks to a fellow resident of the manor who's reading Stephen King's novel about the residents of a sleepy Maine town turning into vampires. "He's reading my first edition of *Salem's Lot*," Addiss reveals. That's not an exaggeration. "Jeff means literally — he brought his book from home onto set and handed it to the actor," says Matthews.

"I did think of this show as *Salem's Lot*, but if the town was good, not bad," Addiss continues. "The whole thing in *Salem's Lot* is that it seems good on the outside and then as you dig deeper, you find out how rotten the town is. Ours is sort of the opposite. The deeper you dig, the more you find that the people are good."

For Matthews, it was more about *Goonies*, in that *The Boroughs* features "a cast going on an adventure with a little bit of magic."

"One-Eyed Willy is always in the tinkling music in the background, but it's pretty grounded," he says. "And this idea of the unexpected and the overlooked achieving greatness through fun."

Time, death, and life’s big questions

Jane Kaczmarek and Alfred Molina on 'The Boroughs'.

There's a lot to think about when the credits roll in episode 8. Is the season's last lingering shot of a starry night sky a signal to something alien? Is it magic? How does the promise of time travel play into all this?

Anything involving time on the show, Matthews says, goes back to its emotional connection to grief.

"Grief is so unmooring, so discombobulating that you as an individual can be sort of a time traveler who can be stuck in two or more places at once — emotionally, psychically," he says. "So that was a way to talk about a main character who's going through that grief and then let that build into a larger idea. You get into the manor — people who have dementia or a different relationship with time — but we're still not into magic or metaphysics yet. It's just about perspective. And then you start getting into the more metaphysical."

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One big guiding question in *The Boroughs *is: What do you do with the time you have left? In that regard, Addiss says the two scenes that the creators spent the most time digging into "word for word" are in the finale — the scene in which Blaine and Sam fight in front of Mother in the underground chamber, and the scene in which Sam reunites with his wife in his mind.

"Nothing in those scenes is accidental," Addiss teases.

The show's heroes and villains have different takes on time. Blaine sees it as a thief, hence all his efforts to thwart the natural passing of it. Meanwhile, Lilly, in Sam's vision, reasons that time is a gift.

"Neither of them are wrong," Matthews says, "but does that mean they're both right? It depends on your perspective."

*The Boroughs* season 1 is streaming now on Netflix.

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Source: “EW Sci-Fi”