‘Bodkin’ Ending Explained: Did They Even Make A Podcast?

The new Netflix mystery series Bodkin co-stars Will Forte and Siobhan Cullen as two journalists named Gilbert and Dove, (he’s a veteran podcaster, she’s a serious journalist who will use any methods necessary to expose major scandals) investigating the 20-year-old disappearances of three people in a small Irish town called Bodkin. Along with their eager assistant, Emmy (Robyn Cara), they travel to the town where they find that they’re unwelcome, and the more they pry into the disappearances, the more the locals try to shut them out, often using dangerous or threatening methods.

While there’s a central mystery of what happened to the three villagers at the heart of the show – the mystery they’re trying to solve for their podcast – there are also several subplots that round out the seven-episode series, including Gilbert and Dove’s own personal traumas, and the mysterious ties that many of the Bodkin residents have to the disappearances, which occurred on the night of an autumn harvest festival called Samhain, which is a real holiday which has been celebrated for thousands of years.

Early on in the series, we learn that Gilbert had a hugely successful podcast about his own wife’s cancer recovery. Since that success, times have been tough for Gilbert; he hasn’t had another hit, and his wife resents him for being fodder for his story. He sees this trip to Bodkin as an opportunity for his next big hit and leaves his wife back home in the States so he can pursue it. Dove is Irish but living in London and working at The Guardian. After one of her sources for a major government exposé kills himself, the paper sends her to Bodkin to work with Gilbert so she can lie low as she’s investigated for inappropriately dealing with her sources, and she resents this major step down. And Emmy is a hungry young wannabe journalist who idolizes Dove, but doesn’t have the grit to use some of the unconventional (i.e. illegal) methods Dove uses to get information.

They arrive in Bodkin to look into the disappearances of a man named Malachy, a woman named Fiona, and a young, unidentified boy, who all went missing twenty years earlier on the night of Samhain, and during the investigation they start to uncover secrets everywhere, including in their own lives. They meet several of the locals including their young driver, Sean O’Shea (Chris Walley), a black market smuggler named Seamus Gallagher (David Wilmot), a local police officer named Sergeant Power (Denis Conway) who refuses to help the trio look into the mystery, Power’s son, Teddy (Ger Kelly), who’s a grown man affected by some kind of trauma, and Sean’s adoptive mother, Mrs. O’Shea (Pom Boyd). Soon, they realize each of these people is a key player in the disappearances.

Bodkin Ending, Explained

We learn early on in the series that Teddy was the young boy who went missing, but that he returned home after a few days and since then, his police-sergeant father has never revealed how or why Teddy disappeared. This makes Sergeant Power a suspect in Dove’s eyes, especially once his car is dragged up from a bog with the bodies of a man and woman inside it. The bodies belonged to Malachy and a woman who was not Fiona, though. The other key suspect in all of this is Seamus Gallagher, whom Dove correctly surmises to be a notorious North Irish smuggler known as The Badger whose many enemies included a rival family called the McArdles. Seamus was living in Bodkin at that time to be close to the two people he loved most: his brother Malachy and his girlfriend, Fiona. But Seamus didn’t kill them, it turns out, he was actually trying to protect them. When he heard that the McArdles were coming after him all those years ago, he encouraged Fiona and Malachy to flee to safety so they wouldn’t be harmed, but unfortunately things went awry during their attempted escape.

On the night of Samhain, young Teddy got into a fight with Malachy over Fiona, who was his teacher and whom he harbored feelings for. Teddy accidentally killed Malachy by hitting him in the head with a brick and once his father, Sergeant Power, saw what happened, he tried to protect Teddy by putting Malachy’s body in his car in order to dispose of the body. In his panic, he accidentally hit another local named Greta with his car, so he also threw her body into his trunk, and then drove his car into a bog to dispose of them both.

Teddy then pursued Fiona, who was attempting to flee the country by boat with her friend Maeve. Maeve knocked Teddy out with an oar fearing he was dangerous, and his disappearance was the result of his father bringing him to the nearby island of Inish Mac Thiere where the nuns living in a convent there nursed him, though he was left with a brain injury. Fiona was also brought to Inish Mac Thiere to be protected by the nuns who lived there, and while she was living there, she gave birth to a baby boy whose father was Seamus, but Fiona died during childbirth. That baby boy, we find out, was actually Sean, the hapless chauffeur hired by Emmy to drive them around the town, and his adoptive mother, Mrs. O’Shea, was a former nun on the island. Neither Seamus nor Sean knew they were related, despite the fact that they were business partners in an illegal eel-farming enterprise they were being investigated for.

Did The Make A Podcast About Bodkin In The End?

As for our podcasters, each of them goes through a major shift as the result of their time in Bodkin. Gilbert, whose wife served him divorce papers, realizes that there’s more to life than podcasting. Though he initially viewed his assignment in Bodkin as a way to revive his career, Gilbert, who had thus far been the show’s narrator and peppering his own observations throughout the show, as a podcast host does, shifts gears. In his final scene, we watch as he throws the handheld recorder he has used to record all of his interviews and narration into the ocean, ridding himself of his old baggage and his old life. Alas, it sure looks like for all their work, he realizes that sometimes a great story doesn’t need to be turned into a podcast, instead, it’s best left alone.

What is the Meaning of the Wolf in Bodkin?

Dove, who had been the podcast’s biggest detractor, denouncing it for not being serious journalism, eventually sheds her hard exterior. Having been burdened with a terrible childhood, abandoned by her mom and raised in a convent, she’s resented everything thrown her way and has been haunted by the vision of a wolf throughout the series. In her final scene, she explains that as a result of the investigation into the death of her source, she had to leave her job at The Guardian.

Showing a softer side than we’ve seen prior, she then visits the convent where she grew up and is given a box of her old belongings. Inside the box is a stuffed wolf. She explains to the nun in the convent that he mother told her that wolf “would always protect me. That if I ever felt lost, all I have to do is howl and she’d find me.” It was only when Dove returned to her native Ireland that she began seeing visions of the wolf, and with that explanation, it’s clear that rather than being a threat to her, the wolf is instead a comfort and protector for Dove, helping her realize she doesn’t need to go through life as hardened and alone as she thinks. And for all the grief she gave Gilbert about being an unserious podcaster, it turns out that while she’s at the convent she plans to start work on her next story, about the nuns in the convent, which will be – you guessed it – a podcast.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.