The ending of Half Man is here, and it’s just as devastating as we feared, if not more so. Warning: The following post contains spoilers for Half Man‘s finale, Episode 6.

The episode begins right where the show first started, with Ruben (Richard Gadd) and Niall (Jamie Bell) in the barn. Ruben asks Niall how it feels to love him, and Niall admits the truth, “It’s like dangerous. It is the best and the worst thing all at once. It’s like the only thing. It’s the only thing I’ve ever felt. It’s like I’m f**king high off you or something. Chemically dependent, I don’t know.” Then Ruben asks him the question he really wants the answer to: “How long did you wait before you swooped in, before you took what’s mine?” This time, Niall refuses to answer.

The episode then flashes back to the not-so-distant past as Niall, who’s just snorted a line in the bathroom, faces a gaggle of journalists who only want to talk about one thing: Ruben. Niall is, ostensibly, an accomplished author now, but his brother, the inspiration for the story, is the real appeal for the media, it seems. When Niall’s agent demands questions not about Ruben, the room goes quiet.

Niall “strives his whole life to achieve something — and even in his success, Ruben is still the focal point,” Gadd tells TV Insider of the scene. “No matter which way Niall turns, Ruben’s shadow looms large.”

This amuses Ruben to no end when he reads about it in the newspaper during Niall’s prison visit. “Come on, Bambers, I’m the main character in this relationship. When are you going to realize that? At best, you’re my sidekick. At worst, you’re the guy who brings me my lunch,” he says. About four years have passed by now, and Mona (Amy Manson) still denies having a dalliance with Benji, the man Ruben nearly killed. She and Ruben are in touch again after Mona broke things off with her subsequent boyfriend, and now she wants to make a go of it again with him — and little bouncing boy Baird is all the motivation he needs to get good behavior credits inside.

Niall is, naturally, panicked and visits Mona to find out what she plans to do. She reveals that she’s lonely and wants just to tell Ruben the truth to wipe the slate clean — it’s Niall who Ruben will kill, not her, she reasons.

Niall then drowns his anxiety in a chemsex party that leaves him puking all over Maura’s dying body afterward. His horrified mother (Neve McIntosh) instructs Niall to inform Ruben about Maura’s passing so he can get a stay from prison for the funeral. She also knows of his extracurricular activities and encourages him to see a doctor to test for diseases.

 

HBO

Niall does the second ask first, and he’s surprised to find Alby (Charlie de Melo) working at the hospital. He diagnoses him with syphilis and offers support to Niall. Niall then visits Ruben, who reacts to Maura’s death by lashing out, blaming Benji for the years that have been taken from him. Niall, knowing that anger should be directed at him, rushes right back to another party and crashes his car right after. He gets some help from a lawyer friend who is also a frequenter of the club, but Niall still lands in jail. This makes him very late for Maura’s funeral, and still, he does another line in the bathroom to cope with seeing Ruben in person at the memorial.

Ruben then offers a surprisingly tender speech about his regrets with Maura, noting that the only time she was truly happy was when he passed his school exam, and then that smile faded when she realized Niall did it. “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry you had to wait until now for me to accept some sort of responsibility, and I’m sorry for the things I’ve put you through.”

When asked if he’s playing up Ruben’s sympathetic side to win Mona back over, Richard Gadd says, “People take loads of different things from that funeral scene. They think that it’s very genuine, for starters, and they think it’s the only time in the series that he’s honest and owns up to his actions. Then other people think that he’s doing it because he knows Niall is watching. And he brings up the exam, and he brings up all this stuff because he wants Niall to feel as guilty as possible in that moment… or he wants to do it because he’s playing to Mona because he wants Mona back, he wants to live his life with Mona and his child. All are very valid interpretations of the scene. I know what I wanted to do when I performed it, when I wrote it. I know what I wanted to achieve. But I think, almost in giving that away, it would take away from all the myriad of opinions you can draw out of it. I wouldn’t want to do that.”

After the speech, Niall pulls Mona aside to encourage her to disappear again, but she says the only thing that’s stopping her from telling Ruben the truth about them is that she can’t figure out if it’s only to “let him know what a traitorous little worm [Niall is].” Ruben walks in and demands to know what they’re talking about. The tension mounts to the point of no return before Ruben’s case officer interrupts.

What would’ve happened in that moment if Niall hadn’t been saved by the guard? That’s a question Gadd doesn’t mind giving a definitive answer to. “I think it would have gotten physical for sure,” he says. “I think probably towards Niall first, and I think it would have been a very bad situation.”

After seeing Ruben’s anger in person once again, Mona decides she needs to stay away for good, which gives Niall another free pass. He visits Alby again, and Alby once again encourages him to tell Ruben the truth about his sexuality, the same statement that has caused his facial injuries. This time, when Niall visits Ruben in jail, he (finally) does just that. It’s hard to know if it’s out of respect for Alby’s wishes or merely a convenient excuse for why he and Mona stole away at the funeral..

 

HBO

To his great surprise, Ruben is completely apathetic to Niall’s sexuality — he’s only surprised that Niall has finally fessed up to it. Moreover, he refuses to accept responsibility for Niall’s self-torture over the matter. “This is all your s**t, son. This has got nothing to do with me,” he says. “The real homophobe in your life? Come here, I’ll tell you: you. You were the only one who cared, Niall. You always have been.”

When Niall challenges that part of the reason for his trepidation about the truth is Ruben’s tendency to use slurs and the fact that he was bullied in school, Ruben insists he shouldn’t have listened. “March to the beat of your own drum. Drown out the other noise,” he says. Ultimately, Ruben concludes that he’ll accept about “10 to 15 percent” of the responsibility for Niall’s lifelong anguish, but nothing more.

Ruben then shares his own dark secret, revealing that the abuses he suffered with his father were more than just violence; he was also sexually assaulted and, at times, he was even involuntarily aroused by it. “Do you think less of me?” a tearful Ruben asks. Niall declines, saying if anything, he respects him more, knowing where he “get[s] his armor.” Ruben admits it makes him feel like a half man, but Niall says if that’s true, he’s a quarter man or less.

Both are left laughing and crying in equal measure, and it feels like the storm cloud has lifted from above their heads… until Ruben invites Niall to seize the moment and get any other secrets off his chest. Knowing Niall’s penchant for self-sabotage, it now feels like we’re about to head off a cliff.

“I always thought, when I was building the show, it’s two people who can’t communicate their love for each other and can’t communicate their love for themselves. It’s two people struggling to almost love in a way, in every respect, and I thought that, really, the place you have to get these characters to is the place where they just have an honest conversation, and they admit the demons that they’re struggling with in their lives. They have got to the point where they are literally in a prison speaking through glass, and that was kind of what the whole series built up to, this point, so I knew I needed to take time with it,” says Gadd of the deeply intense and emotional exchange. “I knew it needed to be almost like an exorcism of the soul, them leaving no stone unturned, which I think is what kind of, for the first time ever, would almost be like a hope for them in a way, which is why in the end, it’s probably fated that he let slip about the one thing he shouldn’t.”

First, Niall admits to seeing Alby, the boy Ruben went to jail for assaulting when they were teenagers. He also admits they were fighting over Alby’s desire to tell Ruben about Niall being gay. “I went to prison for a decade for that s**t! I wouldn’t have given a s**t, you f**ker, you f***ing c**t,” Ruben screams with moderate amusement. Then, Ruben admits that he hooked up with Niall’s French flatmate as soon as he got out of prison the first time. After a good chuckle about that, though, that’s when Niall comes clean about sleeping with Mona and fathering Baird. Rather than storming the glass, as he normally would, all Ruben does is give Niall a menacingly loaded glare, and then the scene cuts back to the present day one last time.

The series ends with Ruben suffocating Niall with his bare hands. Niall uses the knife his mother gave him to stick Ruben in the side, but ultimately cannot fight him off. Ruben doesn’t relent until Niall is fully dead, then he looks at his wound, sits up, and grunts.

 

Related

‘Half Man’s Richard Gadd Unpacks Why Ruben’s ‘Empire Crumbles’

Of this ending, Gadd explains, “I felt like in a show where you were always asked to fill in the gaps of things, wouldn’t it be interesting, and wouldn’t it be quite exciting to almost fill in the gaps of the ending, almost in a way? To me, I know how Ruben dies, and to me, most people, when they’re asked to answer, say the same thing in a lot of ways, but they sometimes say different things, and they sometimes say different things as to what Ruben’s final grunt means. To me, I would never want to take that away from people, but I thought that one of the more interesting things you can do in a show where you were almost asking the audience to kind of intellectually fill things in is to have them fill in the kind of crescendo piece as well, and that was my thinking behind it.”

When asked if perhaps Ruben’s final grunt, after seeing that Niall has gotten a stab in before his demise, could perhaps be one more bit of Ruben being “proud” of his brother, Gadd says, “The question of the ending comes up a lot. I sometimes am like, ‘Oh, maybe I should just say it,’ but it’s when I hear amazing interpretations like that, I always know I’m absolutely right in holding it back because people say so many different things. I feel — I hope I feel, unless I’m deluded — excitement from people when they say certain things, and that’s what I like about it, and I’d never want to take that away. People spot different things. They take out certain things, and I really enjoyed that, and listening to that, and that’s why I’m so protective of not talking about it too much, or at least not saying what my intent was behind it.”

One thing he will finally confirm, though, is that Ruben is indeed dead, and the body we saw being carted out in Episode 4 was a cold one.

Of the construction of the series as a whole, he says, “I suppose it all started really with the initial idea in the first place. I thought you create a really arresting, quite ambiguous opening scene, and then you flash back, and I always thought, “Well, the whole show is about contextualizing these two guys who have grown up in this less than accepting times in the U.K. that soak up all this prejudice, they soak up all this learning behavior, and it kind of corrupts them all the way through their lives, all the way through to the end.” And I thought, “Well, if you’re going to really explore male violence and masculinity in this way, then it feels like almost like a mosaic. You should leap forward in time, and you should go to the key moments in these brothers’ lives, and you should paint it that way. … And then with the wedding stuff, I felt this urge to keep coming back to it at the start of the end, just because I thought it was interesting storytelling, but I kept feeling the urge to sort of play with the form of it. So we got the Alby reveal at the end of [Episode] 2, and I think by 4, I felt the need to just shake this bookend up again — Reuben and Niall have had an intense moment. I thought, ‘We can’t just do that again… so maybe I bring the ending forward a little bit,’ and then I think once I brought the ending forward, or Ruben’s death forward, I felt then again that the ending shouldn’t be him. We know he’s dead; we best try and find a more interesting way of doing that as well.”

Interesting is an understatement. The structure of the series makes this ending both inevitable and one we desperately hope won’t happen… until it does. As a whole, Half Man is a clinic on building anticipation and fear to the bitter end and creating moments of ambiguity that are still exceedingly satisfying.

What did you think of the Half Man finale? Hit the comments below with your reactions to how it all came to a head. Also, read back on the cast and creators’ comments on Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Half Man, Season 1, HBO