The Chilling “Woman in the House” Finale Explained

The best mysteries are the kind that leave us wanting more, and the season one finale of Netflix’s “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window” left us hooked with a delightfully unexpected celebrity cameo. After chasing down countless leads and discovering that her handyman, Buell, a convicted murderer, has been living in her attic for years, Anna has good reason to believe that everything is not always as it seems.

In the season finale, she rushes across the street to Neil’s house, convinced that he or Buell must be the killer behind Lisa’s disappearance, only to find that Neil’s daughter, Emma, was the culprit all along, adding more fuel to Anna’s blazing skepticism fire. So when she finally recovers from confronting Emma (read: stabbing her with a broken shard of her casserole dish), rekindles her romance with her ex-husband, Douglas, and has another child with him, it’s difficult to believe that her days of stalking neighbors and breaking into houses to dig up clues are over.

What Happened on the Airplane to New York?

One year after the incident with Emma and Neil, Anna finds herself on a trip to New York to visit her best friend, Sloan, who took a job as an art curator in the city. The flight seems to be going well – Anna even orders vodka because she “doesn’t drink wine anymore” – until an aloof, upscale woman takes the seat next to her, seat 2A. When Anna asks why she’s flying to New York, the woman forebodingly responds that she’s going to New York on “business” and leaves it at that. But after Anna wakes up from a nap, she turns to find the woman gone.

Who Killed the Woman in Seat 2A

As Anna makes her way to the airplane bathroom, still drowsy from the vodka and her nap, she isn’t expecting what she encounters next: the woman from seat 2A splayed over the toilet with her throat slashed. Gasping in disbelief, Anna backs away and stumbles back down the narrow hallway to alert a flight attendant immediately. When they return to the bathroom seconds later, the woman is gone and no blood is anywhere to be seen. Like Detective Lane during Chastity’s murder case, the flight attendant insists Anna’s probably had too much to drink and is just seeing things, claiming there was never a passenger in seat 2A to begin with. But when Anna returns to her row, she finds the woman’s makeup compact wedged between the seat cushions and claims it as her first clue.

In an interview with POPSUGAR on Jan. 25, Kristen Bell, who plays Anna, said that she hopes her character solves the mystery of the woman in seat 2A “within the first five minutes of episode one, and then we just go into another mystery, like murders follow my character around.” “The Woman in the House” has yet to be renewed for a second season, but if Bell wants to channel her Veronica Mars sleuthing skills and come back to solve more murder mysteries, we’ll be right alongside her for every case.