Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Don’t Come Home’ begins as a story about a haunted house, focusing on the dynamics of a mother-daughter relationship while the mother, Varee, is trying to cope with the end of what had been a violent marriage. While she has her own demons to tackle, things get worse when her daughter, Min, goes missing. For the first couple of episodes, the show mixes thriller with the supernatural aspects of the story, but halfway through the season, it takes a completely different turn and ends up in the realm of science fiction. Time travel is revealed to be a defining aspect of the story, but it also opens the door to confusion, especially regarding the timeline of events. SPOILERS AHEAD
The Time Machine in Don’t Come Home Has a Very Peculiar Feature
When one thinks about the idea of a time machine, one thinks about being able to travel back and forth in time. The future is just as open to being a destination as the past. However, ‘Don’t Come Home’ looks at it from a very different angle. To begin with, the time machine wasn’t invented but was accidentally discovered by Panida in 1991. She works at a hydroelectric plant, where issues with a machine lead to the creation of a mysterious black mass. Panida doesn’t quite understand its purpose and is surprised when a broken sandal falls out of it. It isn’t until a few months later that she realizes that the sandal is her own. It fell in from the future and traveled to the past.
The thing about the machine, which Panida takes home to her basement, is that it only seems to bring future things into the past. When the machine is activated, it creates a black mass that covers a specific area, most likely depending on how much energy it receives from the source. The bigger the energy source, the bigger the black mass. Because the energy source at the plant was bigger, the mass created at the top of the lake and under the bridge was significant. However, when Panida takes the machine to her house and powers it up with a generator, the size of the mass reduces considerably. Moreover, when the machine is activated, it affects the gravity around her, making the furniture float in the air.
The black mass acts as a one-way bridge. Anything within its radius is sucked in and thrown back in time, though it remains undetermined how the span of time is decided. This also means that once you are in the past, the only way for you to end up in the future is by living through it. The machine doesn’t allow you to take the bridge and fall into the future. But that might not be a permanent limitation of the machine.
From what we see in the final episode of the series, it seems as if the machine turns time into a fluid that mixes past, present, and future. When the machine is activated, everything inside its circle seems to exist at the same time. This is why there are overlaps like the time when Varee in 2024 hears Min’s voice from 1992. For as long as the machine is running, everything is on the same plane. The moment it shuts down, everything becomes linear, and anything that has fallen into the past stays there. That is unless someone finds a way to change the flow and turn the machine into a two-way street.
Don’t Come Home’s Complicated Timeline Leads to Shocking Revelations
While the events of ‘Don’t Come Home’ begin in 2024, the timeline gets twisted when the story of Panida, over thirty years ago, comes into the picture. Once everything is put in perspective, we discover the real connection between Min, Varee, and the ghost haunting their house.
1991: A Prelude to Tragedy
Panida lives in the house with her husband and daughter, Varee. She is an engineer and oversees a project at the hydroelectric plant. She is so consumed by work that she rarely, if ever, gives time to her family, which causes a rift between her and her husband. At work, she is informed about an anomaly in the machine, which creates a black mass through which a broken sandal comes out. As Panida dives deeper into her work, her relationship with her family worsens.
After a lot of guilt-tripping, Panida is finally convinced to take a day off and go to the beach with her family. She is not happy about it and doesn’t make any effort to hide it. When her husband calls her out on this, she makes him stop the car midway and storms out. Moments later, a truck hits the car, and her husband and daughter die. Their deaths hit Panida hard, and she realizes everything she had she has now lost.
A few months later, a dejected Panida ends up on the bridge, having decided to jump off it and end her miserable existence. But then, a mysterious black mass appears over the surface of the river, and Panida’s sandal, which broke only moments ago, falls into it. This is when she realizes that the sandal she’d found months back was her own, and it had traveled from the future into the past. Believing that it might help her get her daughter back, Panida takes the machine to her house and has it installed in the basement.
1992: Panida, Min, and Varee’s Paths Cross
For a long time, Panida works on the machine, and eventually, she gets it to work. She steps into it, hoping that it will take her to the day her daughter dies. However, the machine doesn’t work that. When repeated attempts don’t bear results, Panida gets angry. And then, something strange happens. The machine starts, and this time, instead of sending something forward, it brings something back: a little girl who identifies herself as Min.
Panida knows that this is not her daughter, and she treats Min as such in the beginning. But then, with time, she starts to see her own daughter in Min and decides to adopt her. When suspicions are raised about Min’s parentage, Panida shuts them down. Around the same time, she gets Min a mask, which she recognizes as the one she had in her house, along with the paper dolls she used to play with. Min wears the mask frequently and runs around the house wearing it. She also plays hide and seek wearing it, and at one time, hides inside the closet.
Sometime after Panida has accepted Min as her own daughter, she feels the loss of her daughter and restarts the machine, hoping for a different outcome. This time, a woman lands inside the cage. She recognizes Panida and calls her mother, which seems impossible to Panida as her daughter is dead. The woman tells Panida that she is Varee, her daughter and that she is looking for her own daughter, Min. The moment Varee mentions Min, Panida decides to keep her in the cage, fearing that she might take Min away from her.
Over time, Panida convinces herself that the only way to keep Min to herself is by killing the woman who claims to be her mother. She tells Natee to do away with her, but he fails. At one point, Varee looks at Min from behind a tree, but before she can reach her daughter, she is attacked by Natee and thrown back in the cage. Natee also becomes curious about the strange woman when she tells him that Min is her daughter. A few days later, Varee manages to come out of the cage, and she attacks Natee, stabbing him in the eye. She tries to get to Min, but Panida finds her. She throws her off the balcony to the ground floor, following which the chandelier falls on Varee, instantly killing her.
The next day, the cops are called. Varee is painted as a madwoman who attacked Panida and her daughter. The cops are unable to identify the woman as her face is charred due to the chandelier. Moreover, there is no identification on her. She has a gun, which is taken into evidence, and there is a piece of paper with a few numbers written on it that don’t seem to make any sense. Eventually, the case is closed and Panida moves out of the house permanently. She also renames Min Varee and they leave for Bangkok, while Varee’s ghost, with the charred face, looks on, calling out to her daughter.
1993-2019: The Story of Varee’s Life
As Varee (previously Min) grows up, she completely forgets about the things that happened in the house. She turns out to be a promising young woman, and Panida is glad to see her flourish. But then, Panida also starts to notice something strange about Varee. As she gets older, she starts to resemble the woman who’d showed up at the house and had claimed to be Panida’s daughter and Min’s mother. This leads Panida to the realization that the woman whom she’d killed was not lying. She really was who she said, which means that Panida killed her daughter for the second time.
As Panida gets older, she is also consumed by guilt for what she did to Varee and how her daughter will eventually die. Still, she is not able to relate the truth to Varee. The only thing she can tell Varee is not to “come home.” Varee doesn’t understand a word her mother says and considers it a result of her old age. Meanwhile, she meets a Colonel named Yutthachai and marries him. In 2019, they have a daughter, whom they name Min. Slowly, however, Yutthachai’s abusive behavior surfaces. He starts physically abusing Varee, and she tolerates it for years. With her mother at the nursing home, Varee is left with her daughter as the only person she loves and cares for. It is for Min that Varee decides to leave her husband.
2024: Varee Goes Back to the Beginning
It takes some time, but Varee eventually finds the courage to leave her husband. She asks for a divorce and then hastily takes Min with her, driving through the night to go back home to the house where she used to live with her mother more than thirty years ago. By now, Varee has completely forgotten her origins. However, the more time she spends in the house, the more her memories start to resurface. In her relocation, she is helped by Uncle Natee, who has a permanent injury in one eye, which Varee inflicted on him in 1992. Later, he tells the cops that he was stabbed in the eye by a madwoman who tried to kill Panida and her daughter. However, he doesn’t tell them that she looked eerily like Panida and had been held in a cage for weeks before she died.
She starts seeing a young girl in a mask but doesn’t realize that it is herself. At the same time, Min starts to see the terrifying ghost, not knowing that it is, in fact, her mother (and, in a twisted way, herself), who will die in a few weeks. A couple of days after moving into the house, Min goes missing after she falls into 1992 when Panida activates the machine for the first time. Because she disappears without a trace, an investigation is opened into it but is of no avail. Meanwhile, Min continues to see the girl in the mask. Eventually, she hears Min’s voice and follows it to the closet in her room. At the same time, the furniture floats in the air, signaling that Panida has activated the machine again, and Varee, too, lands in 1992, which is where she dies.
