The spin-off of ‘On My Block’, Netflix’s ‘Freeridge’ follows the story of a group of friends who get entangled in a complicated series of events after they come in possession of a mysterious box. Cut from the same fabric as its predecessor, ‘Freeridge’ brings a lot of ups and downs in the lives of its four main characters. The personal struggle with family ties becomes an important factor in deciding what happens with the characters. We also find the teenagers struggling to keep their romantic life uncomplicated, only making things worse for themselves in the process. By the end of the season, so much has happened that one can’t help but wonder where it will lead the characters. Here we break down that ending and see where things can go from here. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Freeridge Season 1 Recap
Gloria and Ines are sisters who have had a fraught relationship ever since their mom died. Gloria feels that her younger sister keeps pushing into her life, especially when it comes to her friend circle, and believes that it’s time they go their separate ways in school. Meanwhile, their friend, Cam is struggling to break up with his boyfriend Andre, whom he considers too clingy. Cam also has feelings for his best friend, Demi, but things are complicated between them due to some stuff that happened when they were children.
All of these complications between them get more troubling when they get their hands on a mysterious box during a yard sale. Cam buys the box from Geny and Ruben Martinez, the parents of Ruby Martinez from ‘On My Block’. Soon after he leaves with it, a woman shows up asking to buy it for a suspiciously big sum. She also tells Gloria that the box is cursed, which creates a very worrisome environment for the four friends, especially when bad things start to happen in quick succession.
Freeridge Season 1 Ending: Is Mariluna Dead?
In the final episode, the teenagers, along with the Martinez family, Rusty, Tio Tonino and Demi’s sister, Davina celebrate a rather chaotic Thanksgiving at Mariluna’s place. In the end, Mariluna makes a proposition to the teenagers. She agrees to give them one million which they can spend however they wish. Or, they can take three months to spend one million in a way that they can’t keep anything they buy. If they succeed at it, they will get ten million in return.
While the teenagers ponder over this, Mariluna goes out to bid farewell to the Martinez couple. This is when Davina’s boyfriend, Joker and his friend from the gang see the old woman. Previously, Joker had heard about Marisol and Jamal finding the Rollerworld money, which everyone believes Marisol hid for the kids to find again before she died. When Joker sees Mariluna, he believes that she is Marisol, who faked her death and used the Rollerworld money to build a new life for herself.
The thugs threaten Mariluna, asking her for the money. She tries to explain to them that she is not Marisol and doesn’t have the Rollerworld money. They don’t believe her and the situation escalates when Mariluna takes out a gun in her defense. Later, we hear a gunshot. When the teenagers come out to see what’s happened, Joker and his friend are nowhere to be seen, and it looks like they have shot Mariluna. Does that mean she is dead?
While we do hear the shot, we don’t actually see Mariluna’s dead body. We just see her limp legs while the rest of her body is out of view inside the car. We don’t know where she was shot and whether it was a fatal shot. Hence, it cannot be confirmed whether she’s really dead. On one hand, it looks like she might be dead after all, especially considering the prediction that Cinnamon had made earlier. When she said that one sister would be the downfall of another, Gloria believed that it was about her and Ines. In the end, it is Marisol who becomes the reason for Mariluna’s downfall, making the prophecy come true. Death was also predicted, and if the first half of the prediction was about Mariluna, then the second half would be about her too.
All of this points towards a strong possibility of Mariluna’s death. Still, the show keeps toying with the nature of the curse, with the teenagers always wondering whether or not it’s real. The same thing happens with the prediction when we discover that this is the first time that any of Cinnamon’s predictions have come true. There is also the fact that we don’t really see the dead body, which means that Mariluna could just be very badly hurt and there might still be hope for her if she reaches the hospital in time.
Is the Box Really Cursed?
In trying to find out about the origins of the box, Gloria and her friends discover that it belonged to Marisol Martinez, Ruby’s grandmother. The kids believe that the woman who came to them asking for the box was Marisol, but they are shocked to discover that the old woman died some time ago. This leads the teenagers to believe that they are being haunted by the ghost, which further pushes them into the idea of the curse, making them experiment with the ways in which they try to rid themselves of it. Eventually, however, they discover while the box belonged to Marisol, the woman asking for it is her twin, Mariluna.
The revelation of Mariluna’s existence, of which even the Martinez family was not aware, eases a lot of things for the teenagers. Mariluna also reveals that the curse isn’t real. It was a joke made up by her and Marisol. Around the same time, Ines and Demi also discover the same thing from a medium, who tells them that the curse only becomes real if they really believe in it. If they continued to believe that it was real and would make bad things happen, then it would all turn out to be true. However, if they choose to believe that it doesn’t exist, then the curse can’t affect them.
This is a very simple explanation but makes a lot of sense as teenagers start to put things in perspective. The reason that Gloria believed that the curse was real was that it was after bringing the box into her house that bad things started to happen. This is when she found out that her father was seeing someone and also that he had cancer. But then, it turns out that both of these things had happened way before she and her friends even knew about the box. Their father knew about his cancer at least a month before his family found out about it. Similarly, he had been dating for a while before he introduced his daughters to his girlfriend.
In a similar manner, every other bad thing that teenagers believe happened to them because of the curse can be explained rationally. This confirms that the curse isn’t real. However, that still doesn’t stop the bad things from continuing to happen. By the end of the season, Gloria and Ines’ father’s situation worsens; they discover that Rusty might have been faking his feelings; things get worse between the sisters; and Mariluna gets shot right when Gloria has hope that they can finally have the money to afford the expensive treatment for their father and save his life.
Apart from the curse, the show also plays around with other supernatural elements, like predictions and ghosts, be it Gloria’s mother (who might have been a product of her heavy alcohol intake) or the ghost of the medium’s uncle who now lives inside a crooked bowl and repeatedly visits Demi. While there is a way to explain all this too, the increasing presence of these elements in the story and the way the predictions come true, one can’t help but wonder if the curse might be real after all.
Read More: Where is Netflix’s Freeridge Filmed?