6 questions after The Society’s ending that we want answered in season 2

Netflix’s The Society is about a group of teens who leave for an end-of-the-school-year trip and return to their small Connecticut town to find everyone else missing. The scenario forces the students to organize themselves, figure out who’s in charge, and how they’re going to eat. Alongside all the life and death decisions, they also have to deal with high school drama. Think Lost with teens.

And in the grand tradition of Lost, The Society has a whole lot of mystery.

The ending of the show’s first season leaves many questions, left few answers, and has everyone who’s discovered the series talking. But no series can survive on mystery alone, so there are a few big picture questions that we’d at least like some kind of answer to if Netflix decides to pick the show up for a second season.

[Ed. note: this post contains major spoilers for the first season of The Society.]

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What happens to Allie and Will?

Technically this is the most basic plot detail, and should the show get a second season, it will almost certainly be the first thing that’s resolved. Season 1 stops the plot in New Ham just as two of the main characters are taken kidnapped by a psychopath. If the show does get a second season, we’ll probably get a better idea of who’s still on Allie’s side and whether or not Lexie and Harry really have the conviction to go through with Campbell’s coup.

What was the smell?

This may not be easy to remember after nine episodes worth of romantic and political drama, but one of the central questions for the first 10 or so minutes of the show was about a terrible smell in West Ham. In fact, one of the earliest signs the kids use to discover that New Ham isn’t exactly the same place as West Ham is that the smell itself is missing. More importantly, the smell seems directly related to Pfeiffer, the smell removal expert the parents are talking to at the beginning of the season. So, what was it really?

Who is Pfeiffer and what exactly does he have to do with New Ham?

Here’s a complete list of things we know for sure about Pfeiffer after the first season of Netflix’s The Society:

• He knows about the smell and offers to remove it from West Ham.
• He meets with the parents of the town who are very angry and won’t pay him.
• He drives the bus that takes the children away from West Ham for their field trip and returns them to New Ham.

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Pfeiffer and his motives are the big picture mystery of The Society, but we don’t get much of him at all in season 1. For all we can tell he seems to be some villainous piece of how the kids got transported to New Ham. Thanks to the letter that Sam and Campbell made him destroy, we know that Pfeiffer offered to remove the mysterious smell from West Ham for $1.5 million. Honestly, that doesn’t seem like a lot of money considering how rich everyone in the town is, but that’s not really the point — the parents refused to pay.

We still don’t really know what Pfeiffer has to do with the big picture. Based on the fact that he’s the bus driver that we see in the background of several photos from the night of the big field trip, we also know that he played a first hand role in transporting the kids to New Ham. It certainly seems like he kidnapped the kids because the parents wouldn’t pay. But if that’s the case, why are all the parents just treating their kids like they died? Whatever the explanation is to all these conspiracies, the show is clear that it wants us to think Pfeiffer is at the center so we’ll need to learn more about him if there’s a second season.

Are the kids trapped in a parallel dimension?

Gordie is our guide to any and all questions about where exactly the kids are and how they got there. Sure, everyone else wants to know, but no one’s as invested in figuring it out as New Ham’s resident nerd. So, when Gordie says they’ve been transported to an alternate dimension, I guess we have to believe him. But expect a few more breadcrumbs about how the world of New Haven is different from our own beyond a few strange astrological events.

What’s up with Charlie?

If you don’t remember who Charlie is that’s okay (seriously this show has a lot of characters). Charlie is the mysterious dog who shows up a few different times in the show. His first appearance is in the third episode, when he wanders up to Cassandra outside the prom, then runs off right as Dewy comes up to kill her. A few episodes later, the dog shows up at Elle and Campbell’s house and is promptly — probably — murdered by Campbell. The last time we see Charlie is in the last episode when the show switches from New Ham back to West Ham where Cassandra and Allie’s mom pets him on the sidewalk. It’s the show’s final and most cryptic clue as to what’s actually going on in these two towns, but it also left us with a lot of questions.

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Questions like: did Charlie die in New Ham and get teleported back to West Ham? If that’s what happened, why didn’t it happen to Cassandra or Emily? If that’s not what happened, what did? How did the dog even get to New Ham to begin with? Did the dog find a secret portal to travel between dimensions? Is the dog some kind of malevolent trickster god working to keep the kids trapped in a parallel dimension for its own enjoyment? Is he related to Pfeiffer at all? IS CHARLIE OK AT LEAST?

Out of everything that goes down in The Society’s first season, Charlie is definitely the source of the most questions, and we hope the second season at least answers a few of them.

Who really killed Cassandra?

This question gets a little more conspiratorial, but it’s at least worth asking: did Dewey really kill Cassandra? Sure, he admits to it — once officially and once unofficially — but people are convinced to lie all the time in The Society, so maybe he was only taking the fall for a crime he didn’t commit. If that’s true, who else could have killed her?

The first and most obvious answer is Campbell. The show’s central antagonist and a confirmed psychopath, Campbell certainly wouldn’t have trouble pretending like he didn’t do it. And as the show’s most manipulative character it’s also believable that he could convince Dewey to take the fall. Or maybe the answer is even stranger. One YouTuber theorizes that it could even by Cassandra’s mom that killed her. The theory goes that just like Charlie, Cassandra’s mom somehow crossed over from West Ham into New Ham (but it doesn’t get into why she would want her daughter dead, so that’s on the far end of the believability spectrum).

While all these may be possibilities that could be explored in season 2, the most likely explanation is still that Dewey really did just kill her for all the reasons he explained — even Seth Meriwether who plays Dewey on the show thinks so.