Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen’s Shocking Ending Explained

By Brian Myers
| Updated 27 seconds ago

Something Very Bad is Going to Happen jumped to the top of Netflix’s most-watched shows immediately after its March 26 release on the streaming service, quickly catching buzz from horror and thriller fans. And for good reason. From its opening frames, you can tell something pretty bleak is surrounding a young couple’s wedding. The eerie series of events that occur while they are en route to the groom-to-be Jamie’s (Adam DiMarco) family home and the strange cast of characters that his fiancée Rachel (Camilla Morrone) meets when they arrive make you wonder where the story is going, exactly. 

For the first few episodes, it’s assumed that Jamie’s family has sinister motives with Rachel as their target. But after all of their bizarre behavior is rationally explained away, the storyline focuses on Rachel’s family and their dark past. A strange older man brings her up to speed on how her bloodline is tainted by a curse that kills anyone who marries someone other than their soulmate. Skip out on the wedding after a proposal has been accepted, and that very curse gets passed on to the bloodline of the significant other. 

Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen’s Wedding

The series has lots of great twists and turns, and is more of an eerie mystery than outright horror. Until the last episode, that is. During the finale, a series of complicated events unfold simultaneously that are worthy of dissecting. 

Rachel and Jamie are finally at the altar, and it’s about to be known whether or not she is marrying her soulmate. If so, the couple lives happily ever after. If not, Rachel will face the same fate as so many of her relatives before her and bleed to death in a hellacious hemorrhage. 

Rachel says her vows first. The look in her eyes leaves little question about whether or not she’s making the right call. When she speaks, it’s from the heart. 

Jamie follows this up with his clunky vows. But when he’s finished, he backtracks. “I wrote these a week ago,” he stammers, before launching into a diatribe about how their love doesn’t need to lead to an institution that he knows she doesn’t embrace. He walks away, determined to keep his relationship with the woman he loves, but not wanting to tie the knot.

While all of the wedding guests wait, Jamie and Rachel have a heated discussion. Jamie finally admits that he doesn’t believe that the curse is real, devastating Rachel while simultaneously summoning her ire. When it’s brought to his attention that the curse is indeed very real and his family members are starting to bleed from their eyes and noses, he scrambles to get Rachel back to the altar and complete the ceremony. Rachel, due to Nicky’s dismissiveness of the curse, no longer believes that he is her soulmate. But as she had already said her vows to him earlier, her fate has been sealed. In spite of her protestations, the witness signs his name, and the chaos begins.

Something Very Bad Does Happen

As the show’s title foretells, something very bad is indeed about to happen. The last half of the finale has so much blood that you’d think someone set off a plasma sprinkler on the set. Most fans, including me, believed that the curse (if passed to Jamie’s family) would impact anyone in his bloodline who had not yet married. But in the immediate aftermath of the certificate being signed by the witness, viewers become privy to the horrific reality that the curse on Jamie’s family is retroactive. Meaning that any living person in his bloodline who had married someone who wasn’t their soulmate would hemorrhage and die.

The moment the ceremony is completed, everyone’s fate is sealed. Rachel begins to hemorrhage and runs out to the atrium. She collapses in the snow, her tainted blood offsetting the pure white snow in beautiful form.

Though Nicky is not bleeding, you might assume that the curse wasn’t passed on to his family. But then, more members of his family begin to bleed. Slowly, at first, from their noses. But as time marches on and the panic begins to grow, more and more of Nicky’s relatives are bleeding profusely from every orifice.

They collapse on tables, on the dance floor, and in each other’s arms. The curse doesn’t just whittle at the family tree. It hacks at it quickly with a vengeful ax that only Death itself could masterfully wield. 

The survivors are few. Those who had married into the bloodline were spared, of course, but they all seemed to have fled in a hurry by the end of the episode. In the final minutes, we see that young Jude is still among the living, as well as Nicky. Boris Cunningham, the hopelessly romantic patriarch, is seen in his bed clutching his newly dead wife. Where her brothers and father seemed to be spared from the curse, Portia (Shining Vale‘s Gus Birney) isn’t so lucky. She revealed to everyone earlier that she married a stranger on a whim in Las Vegas. This man clearly wasn’t her soulmate, leaving her fate marked for a premature death.

Jude’s wife, Nell (Under the Dome‘s Karla Crome), having married into the bloodline, is spared. But Jude seems to be unmarked by the curse. This revelation lends to the theory that, in spite of their marital strife and near divorce, the events surrounding Nicky and Rachel’s wedding have brought them closer together, making them the most unlikely of soulmates in the series. 

Why Nicky Survives

But why was Nicky spared? After all, he is the one who refused his marriage vows at the beginning of the episode, leading to the twisted turn of events. Examining his words during his rejection of marriage as an institution, Nicky doesn’t back out of the ceremony because he isn’t in love with his bride-to-be.

Nicky walks away from the altar because he feels he needs to prove his deeply rooted love and respect for the woman that he wants to spend the rest of his life with. In his unplanned speech, he says he doesn’t believe in marriage and knows that Rachel only agreed to marry him because that’s what she knew he wanted. But after discovering that his mother had an affair, seeing his brother come close to yet another divorce, and recounting all of the craziness from the last week, he concludes that marriage isn’t necessary to prove love for a partner.

Nicky lives because he married a person he truly believed was his soulmate. Sadly, it was all for nothing and came too little too late. Rachel was doomed because the ceremony wasn’t completed in time, regardless of whether or not she believed she was marrying her destiny. But in an interesting final twist, we see that life (or Death) isn’t through with Rachel just yet.

Rachel’s Resurrection Explained

Death is never seen in the series. Audiences get a first-person view of who the specter is gazing upon and following, but never so much as get a glimpse of the Grim Reaper. This gaze is set upon the immortal witness, who has settled down at one of the tables. The witness smiles and greets Death with the words “I’m ready.” At this point, Rachel is resurrected. As she wanders through the carnage, she sees the witness face down at a table in the dining room. Next to his body are the words “your turn,” scrawled in blood.

Rachel seems to know what her role is now. She finds her mother’s bracelet on the witness’s wrist (he told her several episodes back that he always takes trinkets from the deceased), and begins to rummage through his belongings. She finds that he had also taken her father’s wedding suit, which she changes into. The witness had been kept alive for more than 200 years and appears to have amassed a substantial amount of money. Rachel cleans him out and begins her departure.

On her way out, she finds Nicky huddled on his bed. He’s clutching a stuffed animal and isn’t responsive when she asks him a question. Here, we see just how cold the new role has made her. Instead of consoling the man she was about to marry about the horrors he had just witnessed, she asked him about the whereabouts of her cigarette lighter. He remains silent, his eyes fixed on something in the distance. Rachel then boldly storms out, climbs into the previous witness’s pickup truck (which is adorned with the words “just married” on the tailgate), and drives down the road.

She finds herself unable to skip past the song playing on the truck’s CD player. Try as she might, the Waterboys track “We Will Not Be Lovers” is the only tune that she can play. Like her new role, she embraces the song. She finds herself singing along to it as she rolls down the window and tosses her wedding ring onto the roadside.

Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen Season 2

Will there be a continuation of the storyline in a new season? There’s no word on that yet.

Fans of the series are already buzzing about the possibilities of future episodes surrounding an adult Jude, about to tie the knot. After all, when Rachel was saying her quick goodbyes, she made it a point to pull the lad aside and give him some needed advice. Rachel told the child that he needs to believe what happened that day, no matter who tries to tell him otherwise. She also warned him that he needs to be very careful about who he marries in the future, should he choose to do so. “I’ll be there to witness it,” she says before exiting the home and entering the first phase of a life of immortality.

You can stream Something Very Bad is Going to Happen on Netflix.