Dhruv Trivedi
‘Brand New Cherry Flavor’ blends satire, horror, and kittens to serve up a truly surreal opening season. The miniseries is based on the novel of the same name by Todd Grimson and follows Lisa Nova, a budding film director, as she goes down a rabbit hole of black magic in a bid to get a chance to direct her first full-length film. The show is unapologetically twisted, and between some truly disturbing scenes that include Lisa regurgitating kittens, it also manages to take some comedic swipes at the pretentious elite of Hollywood. There’s a lot to unpack in this dark-magic-infused show’s season closer, so let’s jump right into the ending of ‘Brand New Cherry Flavor.’ SPOILERS AHEAD.
Brand New Cherry Flavor Recap
The season opens with Lisa Nova contacting her friend Code from the outskirts of LA. She has an appointment with the award-winning film producer Lou Burke, who has called her for a meeting after seeing her short film — ‘Lucy’s Eye.’ Lou is impressed by Lisa’s work and eventually agrees to produce a feature-length version of her “paranoid thriller” short film with her as the director. He mentors her and even takes her to a few high-profile events to pitch her project to other potential producers.
However, at one such event, Lisa runs into a mysterious woman named Boro, who informs her that Lou is using her. Soon enough, Lou’s true intentions begin to appear, and after Lisa brushes off his advances multiple times, he cheats her out of her film and assigns another director to it. Thus begins the overarching rivalry between Lou and Lisa. In a fit of rage, Lisa tracks down Boro and takes her up on her offer to help Lisa hurt Lou.
Boro, who is slowly revealed to be extremely proficient in the occult, then makes the angry and jilted director consume a variety of potions through which she puts Lou under a spell. She takes payment from Lisa in the form of kittens, which our heroine regularly regurgitates, only to have the tiny creatures collected by the witch (Boro). As Lou’s life spirals out of control and begins falling apart, Lisa finds her own life shattered by strange occurrences, including the pompous new rookie director of her movie bursting in flames.
She soon realizes that she must break ties with Boro, who seems to have her own agenda and doesn’t release Lisa from her spell. As the heroine continues to eject kittens, Lou also realizes that his misfortune is connected to Lisa and hires two men to kill her. However, when Lisa kills one of them, it sets off a chain of murders resulting in her own loyal friend Code being killed. In between this commotion, to find out more about Lisa, Lou tracks down the lead actress of her short film and finds that she (Mary) ripped her own eye out for the climax, which Lisa filmed and used in her movie.
Brand New Cherry Flavor Ending: Is Lisa Dead or Alive? What Happens to Her Film?
Lisa’s rivalry with Lou reaches a breaking point when the latter finds out that she’s responsible for his son dying and turning into a zombie. The two threaten to kill the other, and in an attempt to enact an occult ceremony described by Boro, Lisa licks a poisonous toad. However, she is then forced to undergo the entire ritual and comes close to the creature that has been haunting her ever since she first came under the effects of Boro’s spell. Lisa realizes that the entity is her long-estranged mother, who tells her Boro is using her to regain her strength. It also tells her where Lou is hiding.
Lisa confronts Boro but is barely able to escape with her life. She then heads to Lou’s house, intending to kill him, but instead takes pity on him and helps pull out a worm from his eye. The surreal finale begins to wrap up with Alvin, another wealthy Hollywood producer, offering Lisa a chance to direct the feature-length remake of her film while Lou lies helpless in the hospital. We also see the actress from Lisa’s film, Mary, being taken under Boro’s wing and agreeing to become her assistant. The season closes with Lisa catching a one-way flight to Brazil and telling the woman at the ticket counter that she’s heading home.
So it looks like Lisa survives her multiple brushes with death, including having her skull fractured by James (the hitman hired by Lou), licking a poisonous toad, and finally being shot by James’ uncle. In all three situations, she is saved by Boro. However, when the witch pulls a bullet out of Lisa’s lung in the third instance, the budding director realizes that Boro is only saving her so she can continue to use her body to draw strength from it.
Her film, for which Lisa initially set off on her path for revenge, eventually gets greenlit by the wealthy producer Alvin who reassures her that she will be allowed to direct it. However, we last see Lisa abandoning the reels of her short film ‘Lucy’s Eye’ on the bed of her LA apartment after ghosting Alvin and leaving the country to go home to Brazil. Therefore, even though there is still a chance that Alvin or some other producer might eventually find her remarkable film and make a feature-length version of it, Lisa seems to have made it clear that she wants nothing more to do with it.
Lisa abandoning her film, which she often referred to as the only worthwhile thing she had, can be attributed to multiple reasons. By the time she finally gets the green light from Alvin, Lisa realizes that many people have died along the way in her efforts to regain control of her film. This includes her friend Code, his girlfriend, and Lou’s son Jonathan.
Her actress Mary also blames Lisa for using her tragic self-mutilation to give the film its all-important ending. Therefore, it seems like Lisa finally realizes that she’s destroyed too many lives chasing her film and decides to abandon it. The way Alvin keeps hinting at how he will be her new “master” once he officially becomes the producer of her film also seems to ring an alarm in Lisa’s head. Though she doesn’t say it, he possibly reminds her of what happened the last time a Hollywood producer (Lou) promised to help fund her project.
Who is Boro?
Boro is the witch that initially pretends to help Lisa exact revenge from the producer Lou for stealing Lisa’s film. However, it soon becomes clear that Boro has her own agenda as she refuses to release Lisa from the spell. We find out that the woman we know as Boro was initially a lady named Jennifer, who had a husband and two kids. However, Jennifer’s body was taken over by an entity that’s jumped from body to body for hundreds of years (900 to be exact).
According to what Boro tells Lisa, she was a man who got special powers after mating with the White Jaguar around 900 years ago but then betrayed the spirit animal. The powers allowed Boro to jump from physical body to physical body, suppressing the original personalities inhabiting them. This is why we see Boro ruthlessly remove the memories of Jennifer’s family members when Lisa tries to confront her by introducing Boro to Jennifer’s husband. It is also revealed that the White Jaguar is still chasing Boro to avenge the ancient betrayal.
What is with the Kittens?
Boro makes Lisa pay for her occult services in kittens. These kittens are excruciatingly ejected from Lisa’s mouth, seemingly at Boro’s command. The witch is perpetually surrounded by cats. It is later revealed that Boro consumes the felines’ blood and uses their corpses to make herself fluffy slippers. Eventually, the entity revealed to be Lisa’s mother explains that Boro uses the kittens that Lisa ejects to absorb her energy, which explains why the witch is drinking their blood. The last time Boro tries to get Lisa to regurgitate a kitten, our heroine swallows it back, therefore denying Boro her elixir of strength.
What Happens to Boro and Mary?
The one-eyed actress from Lisa’s short film who clawed her own eye out under the effects of Peyote (a hallucinogen) becomes a willing follower of Boro. After attempting to exact revenge on Lisa for her exploitative use of the gruesome eye-extraction scene for her movie’s ending, Mary volunteers her own body for Boro to take over. Therefore, at the end, we see Boro take over Mary’s body, pushing the young actress’ personality to an obscure corner of her mind. Jennifer then regains control of the body that Boro has controlled for a decade and wakes up as if she was in a long coma, with no idea where she is or how she got there.
Is Lou Dead?
Despite Lisa promising to kill Lou for all he has done to her (stolen her film, tried to have her killed, and being suspected of killing her friend Code), in the end, she doesn’t go ahead with it. When Lou tells her how he felt belittled when she brushed him off, she realizes how petty the man is and decides not to kill him. She also helps pull an extraordinarily long worm from his eye (which she had tricked him into ingesting in an earlier episode). The extraction leaves Lou completely blind, which is how we see him last.
Is Roy Dead?
The promising young actor Roy, who keeps getting pulled into Lisa’s deadly schemes despite trying to tear away, meets a truly gruesome end. Soon after winning a Golden Globe Award, which he has long dreamed about, he gets himself brutally decapitated by Boro’s zombie minions. Therefore, the actor tragically dies and is last seen being eaten by the zombies.
Read More: Best Horror TV Shows
