Raising Dion Season 2 Ending Explained
After more than a two-year gap between seasons, "Raising Dion" Season 2 is now available to stream on Netflix, picking up on the adventures of superpowered seven-year-old Dion Warren (Ja'Siah Young) and his mother Nicole (Alisha Wainwright). Two years after defeating the Crooked Man at the end of Season 1 and learning the truth about his father's (Michael B. Jordan) death, Season 2 finds Dion fully embracing the superhero life. This means that Dion is now splitting his time between elementary school and patrolling the streets of his neighborhood (with the help of his friends, of course) as his alter ego, Mind Mover.
After school, Dion works on better understanding and controlling his powers at the research corporation BIONA, where his father worked prior to his death. Season 2 sees Dion get a new trainer, a new friend, and a new supernatural challenge to overcome when his mom gets infected by a mysterious disease that turns people into monsters. That's a lot of ground to cover in eight episodes, so if you've still got some questions after watching the final episode, we've got you covered.
How did Pat survive?
Although he returns at the end of the first episode of Season 2, "Raising Dion" never actually gives a detailed explanation of how Pat Rollins (Jason Ritter), aka The Crooked Man, survived his electrifying encounter with Dion at the end of Season 1. The last we'd seen of Pat, he appeared to have disintegrated after Nicole used a lightning rod to help channel Dion's energy into his heart. However, at the beginning of Season 2, we learn that Pat rematerializes in a field a day after the fight, suddenly stripped of his powers.
Of course, at the end of Season 1, we see where Pat's powers go — into Brayden Mills (Griffin Robert Faulkner), the orphaned son of one of the Crooked Man's victims. Brayden is a central figure in Season 2, driven mostly by the Crooked Man taking up residence inside him. So while we can't know for sure exactly how Pat survived, it seems reasonable to say that the Crooked Man energy is what saved him, but that the process somehow separated the energy from Pat's body. It's not the most scientific of explanations, but most of the powers bestowed by the Aurora Event have a little (or a lot) of mystery around them, so Pat's apparent regenerative abilities aren't too much of a stretch.
What was causing the infection?
Throughout Season 2 of "Raising Dion," we see people get infected with the glowing green spores of the mysterious flowers growing in the sinkhole that opened up on the football field. That sinkhole appears in the same place where Dion fought the Crooked Man two years before. It is eventually revealed that the flowers are a result of the Crooked Man (catching a ride with Brayden) infusing his energy into the ground of the sinkhole, causing the flowers to bloom.
The spores that the flowers give off are not actually part of a botanical reproduction cycle at all, though, and are rather small pieces of Crooked Man energy. Once they burrow underneath a person's skin, they slowly infect their hosts until they become mindless tools of the Crooked Man. This is how the Crooked Man intends to build his "army," as he describes it to Brayden, and also explains why Brayden can control the infected people in the final episode. Much like Brayden himself, they are all mere appendages being wielded by the Crooked Man to defeat Dion and gain power.
Was Pat really trying to help Nicole?
When Pat returns to BIONA in Season 2, he says it's because he saw the Crooked Man kill someone on the news. As the former host of the Crooked Man energy, he explains that he wants to help. Later, when Nicole gets infected by the Crooked Man spores, Pat even leads the team to try to find a cure for her condition. However, when Pat's antidote fails, he is taken off the project so that other BIONA scientists can take over. In retaliation, he injects himself with a cocktail of superpowered DNA, which he then unleashes against BIONA.
Was it all a ruse to increase his own power? Probably not. Through both seasons, it's evident that Pat sees himself as a nice guy who is entitled to some kind of reward whenever he does something good. In Season 1, he feels that helping Nicole with Dion and providing emotional support qualify him for a romantic relationship. Later, in Season 2, Pat believes that his contributions toward finding a cure earn him forgiveness from Nicole, Dion, and BIONA. When he does not receive what he believes is his due, he becomes enraged and seeks revenge.
So while he likely is hoping to find a cure for Nicole, it was probably more driven by his hopes that she would grant him forgiveness and maybe even affection in exchange. Pat rarely seems motivated to do the right thing simply because it is the moral thing to do.
What did Janelle do in the lab?
For most of Season 2, teenager Janelle (Aubriana Davis) spends her training sessions at BIONA trying and failing to get a handle on her supernatural abilities. Despite her best efforts, all she can seem to do is blow things up, especially whenever she becomes upset. However, when Janelle hears that Nicole — the only person who has shown her kindness at BIONA — is dying and that Pat can't manufacture a cure because he's unable to separate superpowered DNA from regular DNA, she decides to take matters into her own hands.
Janelle runs to the lab, where she uses her power to break apart the DNA samples and sort them into separate beakers. It turns out that Janelle's power isn't blowing things up. It's actually "breaking things down into their elemental blocks," according to Suzanne Wu (Ali Ahn). When faced with a problem she wanted to solve, Janelle realizes that she can separate the strands of DNA quicker and more effectively than any lab machinery Pat might invent. Unfortunately, though, Pat's theory that the superpowered gene therapy would provide a cure for Nicole's condition turns out to be wrong, and all Janelle's intervention does is buy her a few more days.
What was David trying to do at Biona?
While Suzanne Wu is focused on helping understand and support superpowered people, her right-hand man David Marsh (Josh Ventura), has set his sights on making a fortune selling superpowers to unpowered people. While originally he appears to support Suzanne's vision for the company, secretly, he's serving his own agenda. This becomes evident when David lies to Suzanne, telling her that Pat's tests confirmed that he is no longer powered, when in fact, they showed the opposite. The truth is that David wants Pat's help in figuring out what's happening at the sinkhole in the hopes that he'll be able to prove himself more valuable to BIONA than Suzanne and take over her role at the company.
However, when David finally makes his pitch to the BIONA board, hoping they'll give him the keys to the company after he proposes using gene therapy to sell powers to nonpowered people, they shoot him down. While David was focused on monetizing BIONA's research on powered people, the rest of the company's leadership team is firmly opposed to any more activity that could result in further destruction. Instead of being given Suzanne's job, David is fired from BIONA by the board. He then turns to Pat, hoping the two can team up to understand Pat's transformation so that David can monetize it and Pat can create his superpowered army. Judging from the end credits scene, Pat seems to agree.
What happened to Janelle?
Nicole confides to Janelle's mother, Simone (Tracey Bonner), that she is dying and would like the parent of another superpowered kid to look out for Dion. Simone is sympathetic to Nicole's situation but fears for her daughter's safety. Nicole tells Simone that there are malevolent superpowered people who have their sights set on Dion, and Simone gets spooked. Simone is worried that if she and Janelle are associated with him, those same people will then target Janelle. So instead of going to Dion's musical review as promised, Simone loads their belongings into the car and attempts to take Janelle away from Atlanta, back to Chicago.
However, after discovering the true nature of her abilities at BIONA and establishing an emotional bond with Nicole, Janelle doesn't want to leave. After unsuccessfully arguing her perspective with her mother, Janelle seems to disintegrate, disappearing from the car, only to rematerialize later back at the school. It would seem that not only can Janelle break down objects into their elemental parts and then put them back together — she can also do it to herself. It's definitely an interesting application for Janelle's ability, setting her up to be one of the most powerful superheroes around.
What was Brayden trying to do at the school?
At the end of Season 2, Brayden — possessed by the Crooked Man — heads to the sinkhole on the school football field during Dion's musical review, hoping to lure Dion into a showdown to save the people inside. The Crooked Man has come seeking revenge, as he blames Dion for his defeat and subsequent disembodiment in the prior season. He also uses the infectious spores to draw a number of people in the local community back to the sinkhole to fight for him, intending for them to occupy Dion and his allies while Brayden attacks his friends.
It seems that the Crooked Man's ultimate goal is to create an army of monsters that he can use to continue to amass power and control. The Crooked Man's energy preys on Brayden's fear of solitude to convince him to go along with this plan. It is fair to assume that the Crooked Man will not stop at attacking the school but will continue to expand his reach throughout the city and, ultimately, the world. If the end credits scene is to be believed, maybe that's exactly what he did.
What happened during the final battle?
When Brayden/the Crooked Man arrive at the school, they use the Crooked Man energy to turn the sinkhole into a beacon, drawing all of the Crooked Man's transformed victims to the school. Dion and Nicole notice what's happening and confront Brayden out on the football field, hoping to keep him away from the school. Dion tries to reason with Brayden, to convince him to break free of the Crooked Man's control, but the Crooked Man's hold on him is too strong.
Dion and Nicole — along with Tevin (Rome Flynn) and Janelle — fight the Crooked Man's monsters for a while but soon realize they'll never physically overpower them. Nicole talks to Brayden, reminding him that his mother loved him and cared about him. Eventually, her kindness gets through to him, giving him the strength to escape the Crooked Man's control. The Crooked Man energy crawls into the sinkhole, where Brayden says it will make more flowers to infect more people.
Thankfully, Nicole realizes that the treatment she was using for her infection will also neutralize the flowers. Dion takes the syringe into the sinkhole and injects it into the root of the flowers, destroying them and releasing all of the Crooked Man's victims from his control.
What happened to Brayden?
After seeing his father killed by the Crooked Man in Season 1, Brayden goes to live with his aunt, who he subsequently kills after being possessed by the Crooked Man energy. Already telepathic, the Crooked Man uses Brayden to transport him back to Atlanta, hoping to find Dion. Under the influence of the Crooked Man energy, Brayden befriends Dion at school in Season 2 and tries to persuade him to join the dark side. However, Dion is stalwart in his determination to be a superhero, and winds up distancing himself from Brayden.
This just allows the Crooked Man to manipulate Brayden more, preying on his loneliness to get him to do his bidding. Ultimately, Nicole realizes that Brayden is just a scared, grieving kid who lost both his parents and doesn't have anyone to watch out for him. She speaks kindly to Brayden, offering him love and support in spite of the bad things he's done, which gives him the strength to break free of the Crooked Man's influence and help Dion save the day. We don't know yet where Brayden will wind up after Season 2, with no living family left that we know of, but we're sure Nicole will do her best to look out for him from now on.
How was Nicole cured?
When Nicole gets infected with the flower spores created by the Crooked Man energy, Pat and the scientists at BIONA race to find a cure. However, the best they can do is a superpowered gene therapy cocktail that will temporarily keep the infection from spreading by "suppressing the parasite's ability to reproduce." However, the serum is also toxic to humans in large doses, which means that Nicole can't take more than three small doses before it would poison and kill her, giving her only 36 hours before they're out of treatment options entirely.
Nicole spaces out her doses as much as possible to have as much time with Dion as possible, leaving her with one dose by the final battle. Instead of injecting it into herself, she realizes that the serum's ability to suppress the Crooked Man infection may also work to destroy the flowers that he's using to infect people. When Dion injects the serum into the root of the flowers, not only does it destroy the flowers and spores in the sinkhole — it also seems to sever the link between the Crooked Man and his previous victims. All of the people who had been transformed by the spores revert to their previous selves, including Nicole.
What happened to Pat?
Season 1 taught us that there is more than meets the eye to Pat Rollins, and Season 2 drives that point home. Not only does the Crooked Energy inside him bring him back to life, but it also manages to start reproducing and controlling others through superpowered flower spores. Aside from the Crooked Energy, Pat again proves that although he likes to think of himself as a good person, he's only out for himself.
At the end of the season, when Pat is taken off of the DNA project for BIONA, he steals a syringe filled with every strand of superpowered genetic material that BIONA has managed to isolate. While that material was intended to create a cure for Nicole, he instead injects himself with it. It's unclear whether he does this out of spite or because he hopes to enhance his abilities — probably both — but both goals are achieved.
While Pat initially seems to die from the serum, his body then manages to revive itself, this time with every superpower in the book. Realizing he's now the most powerful person in the building, Pat shrugs off the "nice guy" persona and fully embraces his sinister side as he rejoins with the Crooked Energy. The last we see him at BIONA, he appears to have teamed up with David Marsh, who offers to be the Moira MacTaggert (an X-Men reference to the human scientist who often assists the mutant Charles Xavier) to Pat's Professor X — although given Pat's tendencies, he's really more of a Magneto.
What is the meaning of the end-credits scene?
The dangling thread at the end of "Raising Dion" Season 2 is Pat, who walks out of BIONA undeterred, reunited with his Crooked Man energy, and in possession of a whole host of new superpowers. Although the infection spread by the flowers at the sinkhole has been stopped, and Brayden has been freed of the Crooked Man's influence, Pat is still out there. And with David's offer to help build Pat an army, we can only assume things are about to get much worse.
The end-credits scene seems to skip ahead in time, showing a now bleach-blonde and leather-hooded Pat at the head of a masked, black-clad army as they walk through the burning remains of a city. Pat looks out over the Atlanta skyline, then tells his soldiers that it's time to "finish this." Before they can do anything, a caped adult superhero emerges from the sky to land in front of them, and we see that he has Dion's father's watch embedded in one of his arm gauntlets.
Pat doesn't appear to know who he is, but the superhero introduces himself as the Mind Mover, as we see he is wearing the logo that Dion designed for himself. As Pat realizes who he's dealing with, he begins to panic before the screen cuts to black. Does this mean that future seasons of "Raising Dion" will take place in the future and star an adult Dion? We can't wait to find out.