'The Burbs' Ending Explained & Finale Recap: Will There Be A Season 2?

The Burbs’ ending was about Samira coming close to figuring out who was really behind Alison’s disappearance. Samira was married to Rob, and after having their baby, Miles, they moved to Rob’s hometown, Ashfield Place. They familiarized themselves with their fellow residents, Lynn, Dana, Tod, Naveen, Agnes, Bill, and more. While doing so, Samira, Lynn, Dana, and Tod became oddly obsessed with Gary, the inhabitant of a house in the neighborhood that had been lying abandoned for a couple of years, especially because Gary was very distant with everyone around him. The plot thickened when they found out that Gary’s reclusive “wife” was Alison, Rob and Naveen’s childhood friend who had gone missing several years ago, which obviously led everybody to the conclusion that Gary was the one who had kidnapped Alison and was holding her hostage. By the time Alison clarified that Gary was actually helping her figure out who had kidnapped her while also trying to piece together the mystery surrounding Hank’s (Gary’s brother) disappearance, Walters, the garbage man, dropped the mask to supposedly kill Gary, Alison, and even Samira. Why? Let’s find out.

Spoiler Alert

After setting up red herrings left, right, and center, the finale of The Burbs finally revealed that it was Walters who had kidnapped Alison all those years ago. When he was taking her away from Ashfield Place and Hinkley Hills in his car, Alison managed to make her escape and fend for herself all on her own. While doing so, she ran into Gary, because he was searching for his brother, Hank, who’d disappeared from Hinkley Hills too. The duo came to Ashfield Place to get some answers. But they clearly underestimated Walters, because he got the better of Gary after luring him to a parking lot by dangling the promise of giving him some info about Hank, and he managed to trap Samira and Alison in the bunker that the latter used to hang out with Rob and Naveen in. Since the cell signal in that bunker wasn’t good, Samira was unable to dial 911 or call Rob for help, but, conveniently enough, she was able to tap into the nanny cam for Miles and give her location to whoever was on the other end. 

In order to delay the inevitable, Samira and Alison did try to force Walters to confess why he had kidnapped Alison in the first place. However, Walters just went for the kill. The girls put up a great fight until Rob and Naveen arrived after listening to them through the nanny cam footage, but even when all four of them combined forces, they were no match for Walters. It was actually a lucky strike to Walters’ face, delivered by Alison, which caused his head to hit an exposed metal rod and he bled to death. Now, I’m fairly certain that the showrunners made the garbage man the kidnapper so that viewers would think that the show was pushing the narrative that suburban neighborhoods and gated communities are populated by generous, rich people; it’s the poor people working for them that are the real problem. They just don’t know how to accept benevolence, and they tend to vent their frustrations on those who help these working-class people put food on the table. In doing so, the show wanted people to assume that it was a discriminatory piece of media that wanted to portray blue-collar workers in a negative light. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case at all, and Walters was a gun whose trigger was being pulled by somebody else entirely.

Samira, Rob, and Naveen couldn’t reveal the existence of Alison to Officer Daniels, because Alison apparently needed to be in the shadows even though she had killed her kidnapper, which was why Naveen took the credit for killing Walters. Since Daniels was incredibly inefficient, he accepted the classist narrative that Walters just snapped, went haywire, and was put down like a rabid dog by Naveen. I mean, even if that was truly the case, Daniels needed to establish that Naveen’s cause for killing Walters was true, and not just a lie that Naveen was peddling to frame Walters. However, Daniels’ job was to protect the elites of Ashfield Place, not treat them like convicts. Hence, Naveen was lauded for being a hero, and Alison got to leave that neighborhood without facing a barrage of questions about what she and Gary had been up to for the past couple of years. Alison even gave the keys to her family house to Samira and Rob so that they could take care of it as they saw fit. Lynn was keeping her husband’s dead body in her freezer—he had probably died of a cardiac arrest and wasn’t killed by Lynn—and she had to bury it in the basement of Alison’s former house. Dana’s ankle monitor, which she had gotten for illegally trespassing into private property to liberate dogs, came off. 

Naveen signed the divorce petition, leaving Megan (his ex-wife) in the rearview mirror, and went on a date with Kate. Everything seemed perfectly fine. That said, Walters’ last words kept ringing in Samira’s ears, and she posited the theory that Walters was actually a hired gun; the real perpetrator was Agnes. As per Samira, Agnes was hellbent on presenting Ashfield Place as one of the best towns in the United States of America. Lauren, Agnes’ daughter and Daniel’s wife, was interested in renovating Alison’s house in order to make its aesthetics match the rest of the neighborhood. All the people who had died or had gone missing over the last 2 decades, including Alison, were like thorns in Agnes and Lauren’s path. 

In the ending of The Burbs, Samira and Rob even discovered that Kate was a part of the Ashfield Place’s resident welfare association, which meant that Naveen was in danger because he was on a date with her. Sadly, by the time they could warn Naveen, he had already been kidnapped by Kate. There’s no doubt that Samira’s hypothesis is correct, but what’s Naveen’s offense? Well, he did play loud music right outside his house, which was flagged by Agnes, and the interior of his house was in a state of disarray because he was “getting over” Megan. And that might be reason enough for Agnes and Kate to team up and remove Naveen from Ashfield Place. Even if that sounds plausible, because we have all watched Hot Fuzz, where the residents were killing “problematic individuals” to maintain Sandford’s rural aesthetic, that’s still just a theory.

At the time of writing this article, The Burbs hasn’t been greenlit for a second season by Peacock, even though the payoff to all the setups completely depends on a Season 2. I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but if it wasn’t my job to cover TV shows, I wouldn’t have heard about this series. Which means that the show’s marketing isn’t really that good. So, if the minds behind the network and the streaming platform are waiting for the viewership numbers to hit the stratosphere so that they can give the showrunners the thumbs up, well, I hope they are praying pretty hard. But given the nature of the cliffhanger, I am inclined to believe that they have already written Season 2, because there’s no way you leave so many plot threads unresolved without the surety of returning for a second season, right? Anyway, if a second season actually happens, I hope to get more clarity on Agnes’ whole deal. I mean, yes, it’s kind of obvious that Agnes is petty enough to employ Walters to kill the people who are keeping Ashfield Place from being a model town. Maybe Agnes wants to win all those “best town of the year” awards to increase the monetary value of Hinkley Hills and make a ton of money by selling all the property on that land at sky-high prices. And since Naveen was being a nuisance, she supposedly ordered Kate to take him out the same way she almost had Alison murdered, thereby making this whole affair a case of extreme greed rather than classism. 

Speaking of Alison, I think she is dead, or she has been captured again, because there’s no way Agnes is going to give her a free pass. Also, Samira getting that key seemed a little too convenient to me. I have a feeling that Lauren is actually out of the loop when it comes to her mother and her mother’s secretary’s nefarious means of keeping the neighborhood clean, and Lauren will be instrumental in the downfall of her mother. In addition to that, it’ll be great to get some clarity on what happened to Gary. Sure, Walters said that he killed him, but we didn’t see a dead body, so I’m not going to rule Gary out just yet. Maybe Walters has tortured Gary a lot to obtain info about Alison’s existence, which is why he assumed that he’s dead. If he’s alive, he’ll certainly be able to testify against Agnes. Will that be enough for Samira and her gang to prove that Agnes and her crew have been committing murder, orchestrating kidnappings, and lord knows what else? I don’t know. What I do know is that Samira and her neighbors have to stick together and function very carefully so that they aren’t picked apart for simply going up against someone as heinous as Agnes. It’s going to be a gamble, as it’s possible that, after putting in all that effort into exposing a slew of crimes, the people of Ashfield Place will welcome the peace that’s been achieved through Agnes’ tyranny, and be revolted by the idea of equality that might be achieved through Samira’s revolution. Anyway, those are just my thoughts on the show. If you have any opinions on the same, feel free to let me know in the comments section below.