'Watching You' Ending Explained: Is Dan Dead Or Alive?  

In the risqué Australian drama Watching You, Lina is a woman struggling with tying herself down through marriage. Clearly obsessed with the physical nature of a romantic relationship, Lina seems to want to explore more of that side of things, but shies away from commitment. Her fiancé, Cain, is doing everything in his power to get the marriage bells tolling, but she’s seemingly pushing him away every step of the way. When she meets a man named Dan at a party hosted by her dear friends, Clare and Axel, she can’t help herself and decides to have a quick rendezvous with him. But what she doesn’t know is that Dan’s not what she thinks he is. What follows is a thriller, as the title suggests, about blackmail and secret recordings that leaves you guessing about who the real villain might be. Does Lina find out? Does she find her peace? What happens at the end of the show? Let’s find out in the ending of Watching You.

Spoiler Alert

In the final episode, it’s revealed that Dan’s real name is Andrew Wilson, and he was a trust fund baby, i.e., a man with a lot of money, but he had a criminal dad. This says a lot about Andrew as a person. He was likely abandoned as a kid, had no proper parenting, and decided to be a rebel. More importantly, he likely grew up hating women, especially when they didn’t give him the attention he wanted. After Lina finds footage, he also talks about how people are obsessed with watching reality TV, but he’s seen what’s genuinely real to Lina. He says people are only ever real when they don’t know they’re being watched, clearly showing us how messed up he is in the head. He genuinely believes he’s not doing anything wrong, just enjoying some TV, but he’s a creepy voyeur who needs to be nipped in the bud. 

Dan was also known as Pete when he was with a woman named Harriet. He’s clearly changed his identity multiple times before and has no qualms about wearing a new face. He’s clearly a pathological liar as well, and doesn’t struggle to make up things on the spot, as we see him do in the motel near the end of the show, where he tells a woman that his wife overreacts occasionally and stabbed him in the back this time around. Man’s got no fear.

Earlier in the show, the number that was used to blackmail Lina traced back to Axel. Clare later found footage of all the Nestshare “content” on his laptop too. This led Lina to confront Axel, who saw the video on her phone and had no idea about it before that. But Lina doesn’t know this. She blames Axel and calls him out on his weird obsession with her. Cain even finds pictures of Lina on his phone, which is meant to confuse us, but honestly, I never thought Axel was our guy. In fact, I wondered if it was Cain. After their confrontation, the next thing you know, Axel’s found dead in the ocean, and the police claim he fell off the rocks, but this is obviously not true. Unfortunately, Axel isn’t around to defend himself, and Clare even finds Lina’s text asking to see Axel at the Nestshare. What she doesn’t know is that Lina’s getting blackmailed by somebody who has explicit footage of her. Clare and Cain both think Lina’s having an affair with Axel, but Lina tells Cain it’s Dan. As an unknown, this should’ve been the first guess, but alas, guess they had to lose someone to get to the bottom of it all. 

Axel did not slip and fall while out on his morning run. He went to see Dan at Pa’s house and found the guy with mini cameras, realizing what was going on. Dan claimed he would go away and never return, but Axel didn’t listen, for obvious reasons. This led to him being brutally murdered by Dan, who already had a Patrick Bateman setup,  considering his renovating of the house. Fortunately, this was all recorded, and though Dan deleted the footage, as we know, nothing is truly ever deleted, so Lina then delivers this footage, much later, to Detective Brennan when Dan goes missing. This gets Cain out of prison and clears his name, too, but that’s a broken relationship that unfortunately cannot be mended. At least they’ve forgiven each other, and Clare gets some closure on Axel, who she had started to believe was a bad guy. But he genuinely loved her and her daughter, Zara. Guess he really did take those pictures of Lina for the wedding slideshow. 

In Watching You’s ending, Lina and Tess come to the motel that Dan was at, but he’s already run away after realizing the receptionist called the police. The woman is left shaken and feeling like she made a mistake, but Lina reassures her that she did the right thing. So many people have been traumatized by Dan’s actions, and Lina finds herself even more frustrated. All she’s been seeing are crying and scared women in the form of Harriet, the receptionist, and even Tess, after she saw the footage of what happened to Axel. So, she decides to take matters into her own hands. Earlier in the show, we saw Lina pocket some fentanyl, and she had a dose with her, which she never gave the hacker because her partner Scotty told her it would be fatal. Instead, she offered to move him up the surgery list so he could get his knee fixed. But she kept the drug with her, which we all forgot about until the final act of the show. 

Frustrated, Lina leaves Dan a message through one of his cameras at the Nestshare, knowing he’ll watch the clip, and there’s no other way to reach him. She provokes him with her words, calling him permanently broken and saying she will be okay, but he’ll always remain the same—broken. He immediately rushes to find her, then, even though this clearly looks like a trap for Dan. I thought Lina would’ve gone the legal way, and this might’ve been Brennan’s idea. Really, she was preparing to take matters into her own hands. Ultimately, Lina uses the fentanyl to kill Dan, though it was a little stupid of her to think she could handle a man so much bigger than her. I was worried we’d have another “Promising Young Woman” situation on our hands. Fortunately, that’s not what happens, and Lina ends up killing Dan, telling him there was never a baby, adding more fuel to the fire. Lina stabs him right in the heart with the injection, leaving him for dead, but then what? 

Many months later, Brennan shows up to talk to Lina, asking her why she hasn’t been answering her calls. It appears Lina’s moved on and hasn’t received any threats, etc. (for obvious reasons that Brennan doesn’t know). Brennan asks about the basement of Pa’s house, because that’s where Lina was locked up, and she talks about how she used to get nightmares all the time. Lina tells Brennan that she’s renovating the house back to how it used to be, what with all the memories locked up in there. She makes it seem like getting rid of the basement that Dan locked her up in is the way for her to get closure, and that’s what’s letting her sleep like a baby, but we all know it’s because she killed him. But what then did she do with his body? The most obvious answer to me is that she buried Dan in that same basement before sealing it off forever. The house was ruined by him, and nobody would go around digging up old wounds. At the end of the show, Lina’s seen drinking the same drink she asked Dan to make for her the first time they met. Too strong a martini with too many olives. But the camera then zooms into the concrete that she puts the glass on, almost implying that Dan’s somewhere underneath there, forgotten and never to be found again, like a bad memory.