The Girlfriend Episode 6 Recap And Ending Explained

While the previous episodes of The Girlfriend dealt with two perspectives—with two manipulators competing against each other—the last episode pushes the show towards a more objective ending, or so it seems from the narrative. Cherry has gained her power back over Daniel, and she is using it to ascertain every step of her in Daniel’s life. However, as the show nears its end, the half-truths are not just the property of the two women in the show; there is a third intervention that plays out in the end, which may possibly mess with Daniel’s head for the rest of his life. There are some burdens so heavy that they cannot be brushed off even with years of negotiations with yourself; in the last episode of The Girlfriend, Daniel becomes forever tied to a sinking stone of grief, uncertainty, and guilt. Let’s check out what happens in the end, or rather, who wins—is it Cherry or Laura?

Spoilers Ahead

What Happens in This Episode?

Daniel takes Cherry out for shopping and gets her a proper engagement ring. Cherry does not want this engagement to be covert—she suggests a full-blown Instagram announcement and an engagement party. Daniel is unsure at first but soon decides that Cherry deserves a party after all. Laura is still trying to get hold of Daniel, and he tells her to keep away from him and that he and Cherry are now engaged.Laura, expectedly, goes berserk and starts looking into every piece of detail that could incriminate Cherry. Howard is leaving her side frustrated with her web of lies, her obsession with Daniel, and overall the decisions she has been taking at the gallery. He tells Laura to give Cherry a chance; he says she is charitable and donates to a hospital, as a marker that Cherry is a good person. This leads to Laura checking the medical bill that she once found in Cherry’s mail, and she traces it back to the hospital where Cherry’s father is. She visits the hospital and digs up information about William’s accident and then visits Cherry’s mother, Tracey, at her butcher shop. Laura tries to accuse Cherry of pushing his father off a building, and Tracey neither confirms nor denies it. She maintains a composure, saying Cherry had gone through a lot and her steps might have been reactionary. But Laura believes what she believes, and she wants to get this information through to Daniel. Meanwhile, Cherry vandalizes the artwork in Laura’s gallery, spray-painting “LIAR” over all of them. Laura escalates it by taking it to the police, resulting in Cherry being arrested at her own engagement party. Cherry gives a strong alibi at the station of being with her mother and also mentions that Laura has a history of bullying. This actually stands since there are explicit records of this now.

Daniel is furious at Laura for pulling what she did at his engagement party, but Laura convinces him for one last talk. As Cherry is getting out of prison, Laura offers Daniel a drink at her house. However, in a totally psychotic way, she decides to lace the drink with sedatives. As Daniel struggles to move after consuming the drink, Cherry breaks into the house looking for Daniel. Daniel is barely conscious when all of this is happening; Cherry and Laura are having yet another confrontation. Cherry sweeps Laura’s phone off to the floor, and Laura advances with a knife towards her. As Daniel struggles down the stairs, Cherry cuts herself with the knife, voluntarily pretending Laura has stabbed her. Laura pushes her off into the swimming pool, and Daniel jumps in to save Cherry. As Daniel holds his mother underwater, Cherry waits just enough before getting out and then asks Daniel to stop drowning her.

What Happens to Laura?

Laura’s lies have isolated her and pushed her to a corner where her survival instincts are solely relying on bringing down Cherry. She goes to the extent of looking into Cherry’s background to call off the marriage. At this point, sympathies towards Laura are quite waning away. Laura’s obsession with Daniel, as Daniel speaks out, is a compound care that she directs at Daniel after losing Rose. Laura’s last resort is to exert physical imprisonment—she goes to the extent of lacing the drink of her son to physically hold him back. 

Cherry’s intervention seemingly looks like she is there to save Daniel from his mother’s obsessive tendencies, but the reality is much twisted here. Laura could have, but she did not stab Cherry with that knife; Cherry orchestrates the entire thing to add dramatic value to the situation. When Laura pushes her into the pool, she mercilessly dunks her head into the pool for just enough time for Daniel to appear, and then she reverses the role. She swiftly becomes the victim in the story where Laura is pushing her down beneath the water. Daniel steps in, barely in his consciousness, and what Cherry does here is play with time. Cherry had enough time to get out of the water as Daniel was drowning Laura, but she took her time. Just enough that Laura stops breathing, and then she turns into a savior—she asks Daniel to stop. It is too late by the time she does, and Laura is dead. Daniel holds Laura’s limp body on the water just as she did in the Spanish retreat—a visual, tragic callback of what this madness has spiraled into. 

In a way, Laura’s death liberates Daniel. It makes him feel like his own person—an adult in control of his life decisions rather than a projection of his mother’s desires. This is actually a common psychoanalytic trope—the child living up to their mother’s unfulfilled desires, and in psychoanalysis the death of it is usually symbolic. However, with unleashed, pathological insanity from Laura and Cherry compounded, the event of death becomes quite literal.

Are Cherry’s Hands Clean?

I am guessing Daniel did not face charges for a homicide since it would be dismissed on the grounds of self-defense. There is factual evidence of him being under the influence of heavy sedative drugs, and Cherry was literally bleeding from her hand. Quite a nice symbolic imposition of showing her bloodied hands in this act of murder. Cherry is partly responsible for this, but Laura’s own actions also led her there.The Girlfriend flashes forward some years; Daniel and Cherry are happily married; Howard is present, and Cherry is chatting happily with him in the backyard. Daniel finds Laura’s phone, and after charging it, finds the recording that Laura meant to share with him. In the recording, Cherry’s mother, Tracey, tells Laura how her daughter always gets what she wants, and she will find a way to get rid of Laura in the process. This shocks Daniel as she looks at pregnant Cherry prancing happily. Daniel’s expression hovers between a mix of doubt and guilt, in anticipation of an impending doom.

What Happens in the End?

Now I want to talk about the bit I mentioned in the very beginning about one more addition to the half-truths. At this point, the narrative of half-truth splits another time and introduces Tracey’s perspective to create a rupture. Tracey has always felt that Cherry is an overachiever; she gets away to her own life instead of being with Tracey in the butcher’s business, and Tracey also has some kind of unhealthy attachment towards her abusive husband, who she claims to love. She had always reduced Cherry’s connection with males to the motive of money, whereas I have not spotted any concrete hint that Cherry was actually chasing money. The show has a case of problematic mothers, and I have reasons to believe that Tracey’s account is not the objective truth. It is yet another subjective observation about Cherry’s character that is often associated with women who want and get what they want. But phenomenally, it leaves its imprint at the show’s ending—Daniel’s gaze changes for Cherry. What Tracey says may or may not be true, but for Daniel his life just gained an immense weightage of grief. As the last act, this half-truth again turns Daniel from the savior to the victim, as well as the villain of his own mother’s death. This revelation shifts Daniel from passive pawn to active killer and also to the role of a man who will be forever haunted by doubt. Daniel may have freed himself from Laura’s suffocating control, but in doing so he inherits a heavier burden of suspecting his partner, that she outwitted him and built the relationship on the tenets of manipulation and lies. If she could have orchestrated his mother’s death, she is also capable of orchestrating the same fate for him. While objectivity dissolves in memories and versions of stories told, the show reminds us that there is no “authentic” truth; people will see and want to believe what they see and want to believe and only hope for the best!

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