Biggest Unanswered Questions In The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window
Netflix's "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window" is a satirical take on the cozy mystery genre, starring Kristen Bell as a grieving woman whose wine-soaked life is upended when she thinks she witnesses a murder. Throughout the course of the series, Anna (Bell) reinvents herself as an amateur sleuth, determined to prove that the woman she saw in the window is, in fact, dead — even though no one believes her.
In the spirit of the self-serious mysteries the series is riffing on, "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window" is packed full of red herrings, surprise twists, and a ludicrous amount of tragic backstory, all taken to absurd extremes while played with a completely straight face. And like the best mysteries, by the time the series reaches its shocking yet inevitable conclusion, most of its threads get neatly wrapped up. However, there are a few exception — some of which are definitely left dangling on purpose, while others feel merely overlooked. Here are some of the biggest questions we still have after watching "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window."
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Why does Anna have so many casserole dishes?
Casseroles are a running theme in "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window," with Anna repeatedly baking chicken casseroles for herself and for her neighbors as a way to communicate comfort, welcome, and companionship. Always, she uses the same style of three-liter Cornflower Blue Corningware casserole dish, the kind that everyone probably remembers their mother or grandmother owning at some point. And just about every time Anna bakes a casserole, she winds up breaking the dish. Yet there she is again in the next episode, making another chicken casserole in the same style of dish, only to inevitably break it again. "It's okay," Anna tells Neil (Tom Riley) in the first episode, "I have more." And boy does she ever.
Why does one person need so many casserole dishes? Maybe she got a couple as a wedding present, and could easily have inherited a few more when people inevitably dropped off comfort food following Elizabeth's death, but Anna appears to have a near infinite supply. Even if the limited series winds up getting picked up for more seasons, we doubt the reasoning behind Anna's Corningware collection is something that will ever be addressed head-on — it's funnier to leave it as a question mark. But it's still something we can't help but wonder about.
Why didn't the prison take any precautions around Massacre Mike?
We learn in the first episode of "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window" that Anna's eight-year-old daughter Elizabeth (Appy Pratt) died three years prior, a tragedy Anna has still not managed to move past. In the second episode, we find out why: Douglas (Michael Ealy), her husband and a forensic psychiatrist for the F.B.I. specializing in serial killers, took Elizabeth to work with him one day (it was Take Your Daughter to Work Day, after all!). He accidentally left her alone with a serial killer known as Massacre Mike (Brendan Jennings), who subsequently killed and ate her. No wonder Anna has not figured out a healthy way to process that.
One has to ask, though, why Massacre Mike was meeting with Douglas unsupervised and unrestrained in the first place — much less why he was permitted to bring his pre-adolescent daughter along with him. You'd think that extra precautions would have been taken with a killer known for cannibalizing his victims (we've all seen "Silence of the Lambs," right?), so that even if Douglas exited the room, there would still be guards present or restraints in place. Yet Massacre Mike was both unrestrained and completely unguarded, which raises the question of how this prison hasn't already descended into chaos.
What did Elizabeth's headstone say?
If you weren't watching closely, you may have missed that every time Anna goes to visit Elizabeth's grave, the inscription on the headstone is different. It's a subtle way of establishing Anna as an unreliable narrator — showing that even when she's acting lucid, she's not seeing things as they really are. In the first episode, the headstone reads, "If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever." In the second, it says, "In heaven, you can dance like no one's watching." And the last time we see Anna visit Elizabeth's grave, the headstone reads, "There's no 'I' in heaven."
Were any of these the real inscription? Earlier in episode six, Anna flushes all of her pills and pours all her wine down the sink, but we don't know exactly how much time passes between when she does that and when she visits the grave. So even though we know she's no longer drinking or taking her prescriptions, the psychotropics that Douglas prescribed probably haven't worked their way out of her system just yet — leaving us to wonder just what that headstone actually says, and why Anna doesn't seem ready to see it.
Did Anna know Douglas was her therapist?
Very early in "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window," we are introduced to Anna's therapist. His number is saved in her phone simply as "Therapist." After Anna's therapist tries to convince her to come into the office for an in-person session, she explains that she can't risk leaving her house and getting caught in the rain. Anna has post-traumatic ombrophobia (fear of rain), which she developed after sending Elizabeth to work with Douglas in the rain on the day she died. Because of this, Anna receives therapy solely over the phone.
Later, in the penultimate episode, we learn that Douglas has actually been Anna's therapist all along, which brings up some interesting questions. Aside from the professional ethics of treating his ex-wife and prescribing her strong medications, we also see mid-way through the series that Anna has a different contact saved as "Douglas," who she texts when Rex (Benjamin Levy Aguilar) breaks into her house. One would think that if Anna knew they were the same person, they'd be saved as the same contact, even if Douglas has different numbers for his personal phone and his work phone (which would be smart, seeing that he treats serial killers). And how did Douglas wind up treating Anna following their divorce anyway? The reveal of Douglas as her therapist answers a few questions, but winds up raising a whole lot more.
Does Scott actually exist?
Anna's neighbor Carol (Brenda Koo) serves as a low-stakes foil for Anna for most of "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window," wielding passive aggression like a knife as she pretends to be a supportive neighbor and friend to Anna. While it seems like that this is just always Carol's personality, the claws truly seem to come out after Anna blows off a blind date Carol had arranged with Mark — a big client of her husband, Scott. Throughout the series, Carol brings up Scott at every available opportunity, never hesitating to mention his big clients or his very important letters.
But the funny thing is, we never see Scott. Even though Carol seems to feel compelled to name drop him into every other sentence, and wears a wedding ring big enough to see from space, the man himself is nowhere to be seen. In any other show, it would be safe to assume that Scott is just extremely busy, which is why we never see him. But in the context of this show, where nothing is as it seems and no one is ever telling the whole truth, one has to wonder whether Scott is everything Carol makes him out to be ... if he even exists at all.
Why didn't the police notice the dock was sabotaged?
Neil and his daughter Emma (Samsara Leela Yett) wind up moving in across the street from Anna after Emma's mother, Meredith (Janina Gavankar), drowns. Soon after they move in, Anna learns that the police initially investigated Neil as a person of interest in his wife's death, but ultimately wound up determining that it was an accident, with no foul play involved.
But in the final episode, we learn that the play was indeed foul, when Emma confesses that she spent all summer gradually sawing through the underwater supports for her family's dock, leading to it eventually collapsing under Meredith's weight and dumping her into the lake. If the police did an investigation to determine whether Meredith's death was truly accidental, wouldn't they have started by examining the dock? It wouldn't have taken a forensic rocket scientist to notice that the supports had been cleanly sawed through. That should have prompted a more thorough investigation, not put an end to it. Why didn't the police notice this? Did they really look into Meredith's death at all? And if not, why?
Why did Emma kill her teacher?
Emma fesses up to a lot of wrongdoing in the final episode of "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window," but there's one she never explains beyond just a cursory admission: The murder of her teacher, Ms. Patrick, while on their class field trip to visit a lighthouse. Emma admits that she pushed Ms. Patrick off the top of the lighthouse, but the only reason she gives is that Ms. Patrick called her "crazy." That still leaves a ton of questions unanswered.
For example, why was a third-grade teacher calling one of her students crazy? That seems like a pretty inappropriate thing for a teacher to say. And why was she alone with Emma at the top of the lighthouse in the first place? Didn't she have an entire class to chaperone? Where were they when this happened, and what happened between Ms. Patrick and Emma to push Emma to murder? (In fairness, it doesn't seem to take much to get her there.) Considering that both Ms. Patrick and Emma are dead by the end of the season, we may never get answers to these questions, but we can't help but wonder what the story was there.
How much does Emma know about Lisa?
Anna spends nearly all of "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window" trying to get to the bottom of what happened the night she thought she saw Lisa (Shelley Hennig) get her throat slit across the street. No one believes Anna's story, largely because Lisa continues to send text messages to Neil and to her partner in crime, Rex, throughout the episodes. Neil assumes Lisa is out of town working as a flight attendant (though she's actually a bartender at a strip club named Chastity), while Rex assumes she's split town, cutting him out of the job they're pulling on Neil.
Of course, in the finale, we learn that Emma killed Lisa exactly as Anna witnessed, and presumably has been impersonating her in her text messages ever since. And while it seems that she only sends Rex one text in response to his increasingly frantic messages, claiming a family emergency, we're given the impression that she continues to have an ongoing conversation with Neil throughout the time she's missing. How is a nine-year-old girl able to convincingly impersonate an adult con artist? Does she know about Lisa's true identity and objective with her dad? Does she know who Rex is? Or is she just shockingly good at rolling with the punches? It's too bad Emma is no longer around, because we have a lot of questions for her.
Why was Rex liking all of Lisa's pictures on Instagram?
This one we may just have to chalk up to incompetence, but we've got some questions about Lisa/Chastity and Rex's social media behavior while pulling a con job on Neil. Lisa did have the foresight to set up an Instagram account under her pseudonym (although one would think that if she was trying to ensnare a doting single father and recent widower, she might post something besides selfies), and Rex keeps his account private. Even so, that doesn't stop him from liking and commenting on every single one of her photos. If that's enough to pique Anna's interest, it should've been enough to pique Neil's — if he'd decided to pay attention.
What's more, once Anna gains access to Rex's account (which takes only posting a few photos of herself in lingerie, showing that Rex isn't all that paranoid about who views his photos), she sees that he's posted photos of him and Lisa/Chastity together, looking decidedly non-platonic. With $60,000 on the line, wouldn't Rex and Chastity have been more careful about posting photos together on social media? Especially considering a pivotal part of the con was Chastity passing Rex off as her brother, it seems very dangerous to put contrary evidence out on the internet with only the most cursory of protections in place. It seems odd that Lisa and Rex could have successfully pulled this con numerous times before, given how sloppy their social media habits seem to be.
How did Emma dispose of Lisa's body without Neil noticing?
This is a bit of a grisly question, which may mean we're not supposed to ask it, but we're going to anyway. After Emma kills Lisa, she tells Anna that she was able to clean up the crime scene without her father noticing because he was busy practicing his ventriloquist act in the bathroom. ("His act sucks, by the way, which is why [she] killed him.") Getting Lisa out of the living room, however, was just the first hurdle Emma would have had to face.
Putting aside the fact that Emma is nine years old, which means it should've been pretty difficult for her to hide a dead body and clean up before the police arrived, Emma's body disposal strategy would have been really messy. Somehow, she managed to cut up Lisa's body and hide it in a wagon so that she could later dump the parts in the woods. The mangled cut on the dismembered foot that drops out of the wagon seems to indicate a literal hack job cutting Lisa up. This means that, somewhere, Lisa lost a ton of blood during this process. What tool did Emma use to do the job, and where could she have possibly done it that a lot of noise and blood went undetected? It's a gross question to ponder, but we can't help but ask.
What happened to Rex?
Rex only appears in a couple episodes of "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window," but he makes quite an impression. After initially being introduced via his sexxxy_rexxxy Instagram feed, Rex shows up in Anna's house at the end of the fourth episode, paranoid that Anna is working with Chastity to cut him out of the con and pin all of their past crimes on him. However, after talking to Anna, Rex comes to believe that Anna truly had no idea who Chastity really was. But when he goes to leave, Anna impulsively decides to sleep with him instead — only to watch him get arrested the following morning for Chastity's murder.
The police eventually let Rex go, since he had an airtight alibi the night of Chastity's murder. And ... that's the last we ever hear of him. Detective Lane (Christina Anthony) mentions that the financial crimes unit had been surveilling Rex and Chastity for months building their case, but we never learn if anything comes of that investigation. Did Rex walk free? Did he team up with someone else to continue conning people? Does he blame Anna for what happened to him, or will he show up one day hoping to reconcile? We wouldn't rule anything out, and won't be surprised if Rex shows up unexpectedly in the future if the series gets a second season.
Who was the woman in seat 2A?
The closing minutes of "The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window" set up an intriguing new mystery for a potential second season. While flying to New York to visit her friend Sloane (Mary Holland), Anna accidentally sits in the seat of another passenger (surprise guest star Glenn Close). When Anna asks what brings her to New York, the woman answers merely, "Business."
The next time we see the incomparable Ms. Close, she's dead in the airplane lavatory. If there is a second season of the show (perhaps "The Woman in the Seat Beside the Woman in Seat 2A?"), a big part of it will hopefully be Anna trying to figure out who this woman was, why she was on the plane, what her "business" was in New York — and of course, why she was murdered.
What happened to the woman in seat 2A?
Our last question goes hand in hand with the previous one, which we also assume would be the focus of a potential second season of the show. In addition to Anna figuring out who the woman in seat 2A was, she will of course want to figure out exactly what happened to her. Not only does Anna find her seatmate's dead body in the lavatory, but said body vanishes mere seconds later, after Anna persuades a flight attendant to come look. And then, to make matters even more confusing, the flight attendant then tells her that there never was anyone in seat 2A.
Going by the show we just watched, we're going to go out on a limb and assume that Anna didn't hallucinate the whole thing (especially now that Douglas no longer has her on Schedule IV psychotropic drugs), and that the woman in seat 2A is in fact dead. That raises a number of questions, including who murdered her, why, how they did it, how they got rid of the body so quickly without opening the door to the lavatory, and why the flight attendant denies that woman was ever on the plane. Is the flight attendant in on it? Is the whole flight crew? All we can do is cross our fingers and hope for a season two, so that some day, we might find out.