Tamal Kundu
Netflix’s science fiction thriller drama series ‘Open Your Eyes’ or ‘Otwórz oczy’ is a web adaptation of the novel ‘Druga szansa’ or ‘Second Chance’ by Katarzyna Berenika Miszczuk. It tells the story of a teenager named Julia (Maria Wawreniuk), who has amnesia. She ends up being a patient at a memory disorders center called Second Chance.
After she is told to find her talent, she discovers that she is a prodigious pianist. But as her stay at the facility continues, she progressively can’t tell the difference between her visions and reality and realizes that it has something to do with her memory loss and treatment. Here is everything you need to know about the ending of ‘Open Your Eyes.’ SPOILERS AHEAD.
Open Your Eyes Season 1 Recap
Every morning, a yet-to-be-named teenage girl wakes up with a black box playing the recording of everything she has remembered up until that point. She is a patient at Second Chance, a state-of-the-art facility that treats patients with amnesia and other memory-related disorder. She meets some of the other residents of the facility, who all seem to have some talent.
Szymon (Wojciech Dolatowski) is a dancer. Pawel (Michal Sikorski) is into computers and other electronics, and Iza (Klaudia Koscista) is an artist. All of them are given a particular medicine that seems to be helping them keep their cognitive abilities. There is also an older patient named Magda (Sara Celler-Jezierska), whose talent is apparently singing. The teenage patient learns that Magda has paranoid schizophrenia.
She tries to find out what she herself has and discovers that the psychiatrist at the facility, Dr. Zofia (Marta Nieradkiewicz), has diagnosed her with both retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia. From Pawel, she learns that the entire facility is run by a supercomputer. She meets Adam (Ignacy Liss), a handsome and rebellious youth who has repeatedly run away from the facility. After hearing him play the piano really off-key, her seemingly latent talent as a pianist returns. She also recalls that her name is Julia.
Julia starts to have dreams and hallucinations, which seem vividly real to her. She keeps seeing a red-haired younger girl named Ruda whom the others can’t see. She is told that her parents died after their house caught fire. Julia is horrified to discover that Szymon has lost much of his cognitive abilities. One day, the police come to speak to Julia. They reveal that they suspect that someone set fire to Julia’s home. Although they don’t explicitly say it, Julia starts to think the police consider her a suspect.
After Magda’s death, she becomes desperate to search for the truth. With the help of Anielka, one of the younger residents of Second Chance, Julia discovers the room where the supercomputer is kept. It is accessed through a room that, at first glance, looks like a morgue. But then, Julia realizes that all the bodies there seem to be breathing. With Pawal’s help, she learns from the supercomputer that her real name is Karolina.
She and Adam try to run away together and find out that her house wasn’t burned at all. She follows the voice of the red-haired girl, who keeps asking her to open her eyes, and falls into a lake. In the season finale, she wakes up at a hospital. She is told that she was in a car accident and has spent the previous two weeks in a coma. Although her father died in an unrelated incident several years earlier, her mother is still alive. She tries to ignore everything she saw while she was in the coma as figments of her imagination, but she gets proof that something happened to her while she was sleeping.
Open Your Eyes Ending: What Happens to Julia/Karolina? How Does She Lose Her Talent? Who Is Piotr?
Shortly after waking up, Karolina or Julia discovers that she has lost her prodigious ability to play the piano. She finds out that Magda, whose real name is Janina Hass, has also woken up from a coma. She visits the older woman and discovers that she, too, has lost her talent. Although Janina clearly recognizes Karolina, she is still not ready to accept what has happened to her. However, as Karolina leaves, Janina gives her a copy of ‘Druga szansa’ by Zygmunt Tanatowski. Inside the book, Karolina discovers a picture of a house that starkly resembles the Second Chance facility.
She visits the place and learns that it hosts a private nursery that works to bring out a child’s talent at an early age. She later finds Adam in real life, playing the piano just like her. Unlike Janina, he has no recollection of Karolina. It seems that Second Chance has found a way to transform talents from the people who were born with them to the children of the rich and powerful while the former group is in a coma. The children that Karolina sees while she is at Second Chance are the same children that she sees at that private nursery.
The talents of the gifted individuals are harvested against their will and given to the children of affluent people. Piotr appears at Second Chance as a new therapist. However, it is soon revealed that he has more authority than Dr. Zofia. He seems to be oddly protective of Adam. The season 1 finale explains the reason for this. He is actually Adam’s father and personally chose Karolina’s talent for his son. He ensured that Adam, whose real name is Xavier, didn’t remember Karolina or his time at Second Chance.
Who Is Ruda? How Does Karolina Get Free?
The red-haired girl Karolina kept seeing while she was at Second Chance turns out to be Patrycja, her sister. Patrycja spends most of her time at the hospital following Karolina’s accident, asking her sister to open her eyes. At Second Chance, she appears like a nightmare to Karolina, indicating that she is not yet ready to let go of that world. It is only by surrendering herself to her sister’s voice and embracing death in that world that Karolina becomes free of the hold that Second Chance had on her.
Why Does Karolina Go Back to Second Chance? Is Szymon Alive?
In the final scenes of the first season, Dr. Zofia shows up at Karolina’s home and tells her that she has been fired from the Second Chance project, most likely orchestrated by Piotr. She also offers to get Karolina’s talent back to her.
No, Szymon isn’t alive. Karolina has learned Szymon or Igancy died in a coma and deduced that it happened because the loss of his talent was too traumatic for him to continue fighting. The only reason that Karolina and Janina escaped is that they refused to surrender and give up. She realizes that if her other friends remain inside Second Chance, they can potentially suffer the same fate as Szymon, so she goes back to Second Chance to help them.
Read More: Where Is Open Your Eyes Filmed?
