🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

When Laura Haddock first read the script for The Recruit finale, her reaction was a little unexpected — “like Ross from Friends seeing his sister and Chandler making out from across the apartments,” she tells Tudum. “I was like, ‘No, no, no. This can’t be happening!’”

But it’s all real: In the final moments of the spy thriller’s first season, CIA lawyer Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) and Russian asset Max Meladze (Haddock) find themselves tied up in a leaky basement when the same blond woman Owen had flirted with earlier (and later spotted during the final shootout) walks into the room with a gun. “Karolina,” says Max, surprised — before the woman shoots Max in the chest and turns to Owen: “Who are you, and what the fuck are you doing with my mother?”

It’s possible you found this article while frantically googling, your jaw still on the floor. Listen — we get it. That’s why we spoke to star Haddock and creator Alexi Hawley about that shocking ending. Read on to dive deep into WTF just happened.

Philippe Bossé/Netflix

First things first: Is Max dead dead?!
Listen, Haddock has the same question. “I was like, ‘What does this mean, Alexi?’ But who knows? I have no idea what it means,” she tells Tudum. “It could go either way there, I suppose.”

Hawley won’t reveal whether Max is dead or not, but he understands why you’d be asking. “Look, we did the most dramatic thing you can possibly do. And we did the thing we were building to the whole time, even though the audience didn’t know it, which was ultimately — the story of Max and Owen is one of her being a pathological survivor. Whether she cares for him, whether she doesn’t, whether she cares for her kid or doesn’t — everything comes in second to her just making it to the next day. That ultimately makes her a bit of a tragic figure, and so it was important to get to that point. Then, of course, the twist was powerful. In this day and age, where there’s 9,000 things on television, you have to be bold, you have to go big, and I felt like we really earned that moment.”

OK, so what is that mother-daughter relationship actually like? 
“Well, clearly it’s dysfunctional,” quips Hawley. “No, I think there’s a lot of history there to mine.”

Haddock’s off-screen backstory was that Max had Karolina as a teen. “So she was very young, like 16, and was not a present mother because she was so young and wrapped up in working for the Russian mafia. I think there is a maternal instinct for sure, but there was a lot of unfinished business for Max as a mother. That dynamic and relationship is tricky when you’ve had a child so young, and Max was imprisoned for so long and she’d done some really bad stuff that the daughter is aware of.”

Just to clarify, who was behind the strike team that caused the massive shootout in the final episode? 
“That was all Karolina’s people that came in,” Hawley confirms. “She’d been tracking Owen; she had that sexpionage scene at the bar. She heard her mother was back, and she was going to go take care of that.”

How did you settle on Taylor Swift’s “Trouble” as Owen’s… ahem… relief soundtrack in the scene that opened the season and continued in the finale?
“What’s the thing you’d least expect? In my head, I had Eddie Murphy’s introduction from 48 Hours, singing ‘Roxanne’ in the jail cell,” says Hawley. “So it just felt like a really great way to introduce a character, a lead, that was unexpected. You can never go wrong with Taylor Swift. What came back to me is that she has to personally approve the syncs for the licensing of her songs, and so the idea that she had to watch a clip of that and say yes to it was very fun to me.”

How’d you manage that Nathan Fillion cameo? Did you text him? 
“I called him! He’s the star of The Rookie, which I also do,” Hawley says. “We needed a director of the CIA for those episodes, somebody [who could] walk in and immediately own the room. Nathan is just such a larger-than-life figure and the nicest guy in the world, and so I’m like, ‘Will you do this?’ He said yes before I finished the question, which is really nice of him.”

Could he come back in a potential Season 2? 
“Yeah, the good news is it’s up to me, because I control his schedule on The Rookie, so I’ll just write him late in an episode and then he can come do The Recruit.”

The Recruit is now streaming on Netflix.

Additional reporting by Natalie Morin.

The Recruit Season 1 TeaserNoah Centineo stars as Owen Hendricks, a young CIA lawyer.