Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Keep Breathing’ is a survival drama that has a woman at its center. Liv is a lawyer from New York who has been singularly focused on her job. She’s never taken a vacation, which is what worries her friend when she discovers that Liv has suddenly taken off without telling anyone. Things get more complicated when Liv is stranded in the middle of the forest with no means of contact with anyone who can help her.
The series focuses on Liv’s efforts to stay alive. Her common sense and some knowledge she picked up while her time as a girl scout helps her a lot. In the end, however, her situation takes a grim turn as she sustains injuries that would normally kill a person. If you’ve been wondering what happens to Liv and what it means for her future, we’ve got you covered. SPOILERS AHEAD
Keep Breathing Recap
Liv has to go to Inuvik, but her flight is delayed by a day. She needs to meet someone who won’t stay in the same place for another day, which is why she jumps at the option of sharing a plane ride with two strange men. It turns out to be a bad decision when the plane crashes, both men die, and she realizes that they weren’t who they claimed. They are not the kind of people that someone comes looking for, and because Liv never told anyone where she was going, no one’s going to come to look for her.
Alone in the middle of a forest with no sign of civilization, Liv uses her wit and quick thinking to keep herself alive. She suffers hallucinations, and fears a bear attack, all the while going through all the events that led her to take the trip and end up in the wilderness. After much thought, she picks a direction where she hopes to find a town or at least a single person who can help her. However, things seem to get worse as she gets lost a couple of times and loses her stuff.
Keep Breathing Ending: Does Liv Survive?
Liv is a determined person. She doesn’t give up, no matter what the situation. Over the course of the series, it becomes clear that she will do everything in her power to find civilization and save herself. With some quick thinking and a lot of luck, things seem to turn out alright for her. Keeping herself alive is still a struggle, but at least, she is alive, as opposed to the two men she’d accompanied on the trip. No matter how far gone things might seem, Liv finds something that can help her make her situation better. She proves to be resourceful that way, also showing the audience why she’s so good at her job, back in New York.
In the end, however, she is left with nothing. Her bag is left behind in the cave, so she has no water, no resources she’d carried with her from the site of the crash. She’s empty-handed, with only the postcards from her mother as the luggage. One of her legs is broken, and she is dehydrated and starved. She can’t walk for too long, and there is still not a single person in sight. There’s also the problem of the river in her path. She has no means to cross it, which means she’s stuck in one place now. She hallucinates her father who helps her with some closure regarding her mother, showing her that she won’t necessarily become her.
Eventually, Liv lets go of whatever fear remains in her and she decides to take one last chance to be found by someone. She holds the postcards close and wades into the river with a log to keep her afloat. The river washes her away a long distance, and she loses hold of the log as well as the postcards. Her entire life flashes through her mind, as she remembers all the good and bad times, all the choices she made, as well as the impact on her of the choices made by her parents.
Just when it looks like she will drown in the river and no one will ever know what happened to her, two people find her. They pull her out of the water, but she’s unconscious by them. On top of her previous injuries, she’s also sustained some more in the river. And then there’s also the case of hypothermia and all the water she swallowed while bobbing up and down in the water. After a few tries, the men give up, but Liv doesn’t. She is pretty beaten up but she still has a few breaths left in her. She wakes up right before the camera cuts to black, and the audience knows that, against all odds, Liv has survived.
Do Liv and Danny Get Together?
A lot of bad things happened to Liv, which made her closed off from others. Because her mother abandoned her, Liv feels that everyone else in the world is going to do the same too, which is why she doesn’t allow anyone to get close to her. But then, Danny walks into her life and things look good with him. She smiles and dances and has fun, but then, the fear of abandonment surfaces, and she starts to push him away. Just when things start to get good, she abruptly breaks up with him.
Trapped in the wilderness, as she goes through the events that defined her life, she looks back at the time with Danny as a source of comfort. She starts to regret keeping up her walls and not allowing him to get close, even though they both clearly liked each other very much. She’d worried that she might turn out like her mother. That either Danny would leave her, or she’d leave him, like her mother left her father. In the same vein, she also worries that she’d not be a good mother and might push her child into the same life that her mother pushed her into. In the end, however, she realizes that in wanting not to end up like her mother, she’s doing the exact same thing.
So, after her life flashes past her, while she floats in the river, she gets a glimpse into her future. Previously, she’d hallucinated Danny, and the conversation made her realize that had she let him, he could have been a great support system for her. He would have listened to her problems and he would have been a good father as well. This also assures her that all the doubts she had about herself were also not as convincing. If she tried, she’d be a good mother too. And what would that look like? She’d been stuck in the past all this time, but now she looks into the future and realizes that it could be good, only if she let it. She could be with Danny, they could raise a child together, and be happy.
While it is not revealed what exactly happened after Liv was rescued, it can be extrapolated that she went back to New York with a different outlook on life. She went back to Danny and started living the life she’d thought of, what looked like would be, her final moments in the river. She succeeded in leaving behind her mother’s hold on her life, and free of that influence, she became her own person.
