The Glass Dome Recap & Ending Explained: Did Ecki Kill Milena and Louise?

There exists a complex, imbalanced relationship between psychopathic criminals, abusers, and their victims, which is founded upon dysfunctional power dynamics, the necessity to assume control more than anything else, and the urge of the abusers to vent out inner trauma by objectifying their target. Not a lot of crime thriller series, especially the ones that release on a weekly schedule on Netflix, merely gloss over these aspects without actually delving deeper into the broken psyche of the perpetrators. In that regard, the Swedish thriller The Glass Dome can be considered an exception, as it goes to quite a length to explore the harrowing extent of the power fantasy that drives such troubled individuals. While the plot itself is quite familiar, which revolves around having a former victim of abduction face her demons all over again after a return home, the narrative treatment is really engaging, and the final resolution is gritty and disturbing enough to bother viewers for a while. 

Spoilers Ahead

What Happened To Lejla During Her Childhood?

A young Lejla Delic spent nine months in hell after getting abducted from Stockholm by a deranged, unknown individual, whom she referred to as Ecki, in the basement of a barn in the small, secluded, wilderness-y Swedish town of Granas. The only guardian figure in Lejla’s life back then, her mother, Milena, did her best to find her and pleaded to the authorities before apparently taking her own life in shame and guilt of not being able to save her daughter. Lejla was held captive inside a glass cage and, even for a ten-year-old child, was perceptive enough to realize that her captor wanted to impose a sense of authority over her. While the authorities failed to rescue Lejla, she herself found her way out by tricking her captor on one occasion and successfully escaped. The police officer in charge of the investigation, Valter Ness, and his wife, Ann-Marie, decided to adopt Lejla as their own daughter, welcoming her into their residence in Granas. Needless to say, Lejla carried the trauma, which haunted her throughout her life. The vocation of her adoptive father and a willingness to get justice for those who suffered the same fate as her prompted Lajla to become a criminal psychologist after growing up, and moving from Granas, she settled in San Diego. However, at present, upon learning that her adoptive mother, Ann-Marie, has passed away, Lejla returns to Granas and gets hit with a feeling of déjà vu after her childhood friend, Louise, is found dead at her residence, and her ten-year-old daughter, Alicia, appears to be abducted. 

Why Did Tomas Consider Said To Be The Culprit?

As it is with the majority of Nordic noirs, a series of red herrings precedes the final revelation, and The Glass Dome follows the same route. Lejla and Valter shared a strong bond; even though the former police commissioner had resigned and given the reins of the Granas police department to his brother, Tomas, when Lejla decided to search for Alicia in hopes of getting some solace for her own lingering trauma, Valter supported her using his years of experience in the force. Kristina, Louise’s mother, was a good friend of Valter, and as Lejla decides to question her to learn about Alicia’s recent acquaintances. Lejla learns from a maid that Maksim, a local builder, apparently had formed a connection with the young girl and even used to record her videos as well—which raises the suspicion about Maksim being considered as a predator and possible kidnapper in question. However, as Lejla and Valter decide to pay Maksim a visit by approaching local contractor Daniela, it is revealed that the poor guy simply approached Alicia as she was a good friend of his own daughter, Mirtel, and the duo shared funny videos with each other. Maksim turns out to be innocent, but one of the videos of Lejla he recorded reveals that Louise was seemingly involved in an affair. 

On the other hand, Louise’s husband, Said, is detained by Tomas after multiple new findings change the direction of the investigation itself. Contrary to the initial suspicion of her having taken her own life, Louise’s autopsy report reveals that she was drugged and murdered. Louise didn’t want to return to Granas from Stockholm; the couple had frequent disputes over it, and Said deliberately hid the fact from the authorities that Louise had filed for a divorce as well. Additionally, Louise’s phone is revealed to be missing as well, and as the closest next of kin, Said appears to be the primary suspect behind the entire situation. However, Said had nothing to do with his wife’s murder, and in reality, Tomas acted vindictively by detaining him, as he himself was in an affair with Louise. When Valter and Lejle bring their findings regarding Louise’s affair, Tomas refutes their extrajudicial investigation but later confesses to them about his affair. 

Said was released, but his misery didn’t end as he was constantly targeted by local hunter/hooligan Jim and his gang of delinquents. As it turns out, as the owner of the local mine, Said was in partnership with a certain Svea Vanadin in overseeing mining operations, and the duo decided to expand their mining operation, which would have left a significant impact on the local biosphere, fishing and tourism businesses, and overall public health. Said and his family, including Kristina and Louise, faced repeated outrage by the local populace. 

 At present, the local water supply is revealed to be contaminated by a leak caused by a mining operation, which results in birds dying all of a sudden. As the town fears a massive health crisis in the upcoming days, Jim continues to torment Said to force him to abandon the mining operation and leave the town. The situation appears to be serious enough to consider the possibility that the enraged townsfolk can put Said’s family at harm to pressurize him into compliance. Additionally, Kristina receives a present video of captive Alicia from her mysterious captor at the same time when the mining leak incident becomes public news, which hints at a possible connection between the two incidents. 

Aino, the expectant wife of Adde, one of Lejla’s childhood friends, who worked as a front desk clerk in Granas police station, gets overwhelmed in the light of recent events and confesses to Lejla that her husband had apparently received a whopping 35 thousand krona in exchange for some shady activity that might be involved with the mining leak and Alicia’s abduction. Leaving Aino’s daughter, Isla, in Valter’s care, Lejla and Aino venture to a cabin hideout and find Adde in a miserable, drugged, overdosed state. Adde confesses to being paid the amount in exchange for causing the leak deliberately. It is revealed that the instruction mail sent to Adde by the anonymous orchestrator was sent from the same encrypted server that was used to send Alicia’s video to Kristina. Given the fact that Jim and his followers, along with the anti-mining populace, don’t have the technical expertise to create an encrypted server in the first place, they get out of the suspect list.

Was Daniel Frick Ecki’s Copycat?

Lejla’s past trauma is reflected in her recurrent nightmares ever since she returned to Granas; her worst fears manifested into reality when Isla, Aino’s daughter, revealed she had met Ecki at Valter and Lejla’s family residence—and the crooked kidnapper had left a sketch of Lejla captured inside a glass cage to serve her a sick reminder of the past. Lejla was aware that before her abduction, Ecki had kidnapped three more girls and had a particular MO. Ecki targeted long brown-haired girls, implored them to draw sketches, and, as Lejla remembers, he had cut her ponytail to keep it as a form of trophy, like psychopathic criminals tend to do. Lejla is convinced that with her return to Granas, Ecki has decided to make a comeback after decades, and to find Alicia, she needs to take a look back at her past and also at the abduction case before her incident. With Valter’s help, Lejla identified four particular disappearance incidents across Scandinavia during the timespan of 1980-1995, as the victims matched Ecki’s target profile. As Lejla struggles to cope with her memories, she befriends Martin, a member of Alicia’s search party, with whom Lejla sympathizes as he confesses to having lost her sister back in childhood. Martin revealed himself to be somewhat of a nerd on Alicia’s field of expertise and fascinated by her published personal account of being a child abduction survivor. 

In the meantime, another young girl, Elma, who matches Ecki’s target profile, gets abducted, but this time, the serial abductor makes a strange departure from his MO by directly calling the police station to inform them that he has abducted Elma. It is by sheer coincidence that Valter comes across the call recording while playing the pending voicemails to the Granas police station. The background noise of the call is identified as water flow from a nearby dam, and from the surveillance footage, Bjorn, a simpleton yet perceptive police officer, identifies the particular car present during the timespan, which guides the authorities to the identity of the possible perpetrator. Daniel Frick, a recently released child abuser, turns out to be the culprit, and things get further complicated when it turns out the same person has taken on the guise of Martin to take Lejla on a date at his cabin in the woods. Daniel drugs Lejla, who somehow manages to flee after figuring out his true identity and manages to escape a repeat of her harrowing past—as Valter saves her in the nick of time. Elma is rescued as well, but Daniel, who is on the run, is not the real Ecki and merely a psycho copycat who harbors an obsession with the notorious kidnapper. Following his release, Daniel came across Lejla, which increased his fascination with Ecki even further, and he decided to abduct Elma to pretend to be the real deal. 

Who Was the Real Ecki?

Tomas never believed Lejla’s words about Ecki’s return and considered her to be mingling her own emotional burdens with Alicia’s abduction due to apparent similarities. However, Lejla was fully convinced at this point that Alicia was taken by the tormentor who scarred Lejla for life, and this time, Lejla started looking into her mother, Milena’s, police statements and past history to try a different angle in the ongoing investigation. Tomas’ investigation hit a roadblock when Daniel was found murdered, and the brutal killing conveyed it was carried out by an expert hunter. Given hotheaded Jim’s reputation for creating messes around the town, Tomas approached and threatened him and secretly took his blood-smeared boots for DNA testing to confirm his suspicion about his involvement. However, the boot stain turns out to be caused by elk blood, and Jim turns out to be innocent in this particular context. Already suffering an emotional crisis due to Alicia’s predicament and Louise’s demise, Tomas hits rock bottom when Valter is reinstated as Granas police chief until the investigation is over and decides to drown his sorrows in liquor. Tomas and Valter didn’t share the most amicable brotherly relationship, and at present Tomas’s sense of failure was aggravated by Valter’s success. A drunk Tomas confesses to Said about having an affair with Louise and gets into a fight. 

Lejla starts considering Tomas to be Ecki when she finds out around the time she was abducted all those years ago, Tomas was present at Daniela’s campsite in Granas, where Milena had taken Lejla on a Vatra fire celebration during Walpurgis Night. Lejla assumed that Ecki shared a possible dysfunctional parental connection, and seeing an old photo of Valter and Tomas’ mother, Lejla was able to find a possible reason for the kidnapper’s obsession with long, dark brown-haired girls. To make the situation worse, Lejla finds out Louise’s phone is at Tomas’ place and decides to call Said to arrange a meeting, instructing him not to involve Tomas or the police force in any capacity. However, Lejla herself gets captured by Ecki while trying to evade Tomas and gets thrown into the glass cage where Alicia is already present. Lejla calls Valter with Louise’s phone to inform him about Tomas being Ecki, but as her adoptive father arrives, the situation brings a shocking, disturbing truth to light. 

Ecki was none other than Valter himself, who assumed complete control over Lejla‘s life following the abduction incident. A conversation with a drunk Tomas and Valter revealed that their father was an abuser, while their mother, possibly a victim of the patriarchal system, remained completely silent, never protesting against her husband’s actions. Childhood abuse turned Tomas into a short-tempered, diffident person, and Valter became a psychopath whose dark tendencies were reflected from a young age, as Tomas reminisced about the time when young Valter asphyxiated fox cubs to death. Walter wanted to assume a sense of control over his mother and thus ended up capturing the girls whose hair acted as a signifier of his mother’s presence. As for why he remained fixated on Lejla, Valter reveals he had seen her at Daniela’s campsite and apparently saw a rebellious, insuppressible spirit in her—which probably reminded him most of his mother, and Valter’s desire to subjugate her increased. When Lejla managed to escape from her, Valter, who was already using his position as a law enforcer to prey on unsuspecting victims, ended up making the arrangements to have her adopted as his own daughter. Thereby fulfilling his wish to have Lejla as his ‘possession’ of sorts, and raising her as his own daughter gave a sick, twisted sense of pleasure to the psychopath. 

Did Ecki kill Milena and Louise?

After Lejla left for San Diego to build her career, Valter, aka Ecki, quit his mad pursuit of finding a plaything to control, and when Lejla returned after years to attend her adoptive mother’s funeral, Ecki’s hidden desires got reignited. Alicia was abducted to lure Lejla further into the rabbit hole of past trauma and misery, and Louise was murdered by Valter after trying to plead with him to spare her daughter. Valter also confesses to killing Milena as well, who proved too human to be used or manipulated as a plaything. In fact, Valter killed all his past victims after collecting their tufts, which he considered to be souvenirs from his prey. Strangely enough, Valter used hairs from victims to use as fishing line to catch trout, and the hunter-prey symbolism is unmistakable, if a bit ludicrous in this context. 

Tomas realizes a serious misunderstanding has occurred after Said arrives at the police station to report Lejla’s call, and as Tomas questions Valter regarding Lejla’s whereabouts, he provides vague answers. Later, finding Bjorn, who was assigned to protect Lejla, to be brutally murdered, and a picture of his own mother in his hands, Tomas suspects foul play on his elder brother’s part. On the other hand, Lejla tries to free Alicia, to no avail, and as she begs Valter to spare the kid, the sadistic psychopath decides to asphyxiate Alicia right in front of Lejla. A desperate Lejla bangs her head on the glass wall, breaking Valter’s assumption of control and taunting him like she used to trigger Ecki back in the day, and Walter leaves an unconscious Alicia to gather his focus on Lejla. The ensuing noise coming from the basement alerts Tomas, who has already found tufts of Ecki’s victims, and he arrives just in time to hold Valter at gunpoint. By now, the backup force has arrived outside, responding to Tomas’ call, and Valter makes a last-ditch attempt to control his brother by asking him to shoot him to death. Tomas doesn’t give in and manages to rescue both Alicia and Lejla while holding Valter as captive. Said is reunited with his daughter at long last, and Tomas manages to redeem himself somewhat by nabbing the infamous Ecki. 

Later, Lejla meets a captive Valter to interrogate him to learn the whereabouts of the rest of his victims, and Valter reveals he drowned them. Before parting ways, Valter taunts Lejla that she will never be truly free from his control, as, given what she has gone through, her definition of reality has been completely overturned. After the bodies of the rest of Ecki’s victims are recovered, Lejla leaves Granas for good, but as tragic as it is, her past will never let her move on. 

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