Ride or Die Ending Explained: Why Does Anna Want Judith Dead?

‘Ride or Die’ is an action comedy series in which extraneous circumstances compel two best friends to evaluate the strength of their relationship. Debbie and Judith have been by each other’s side for years. However, in all this time, the latter has been harboring a grave secret. Under the unassuming guise of a forensic accountant, Judith is actually an assassin. Naturally, things begin to go south when Debbie’s husband’s extracurricular activities land him on the chopping block for the Albanian mob. As a result, Judith finds herself defecting from her underground, and highly dangerous, Agency in a bid to protect the most important thing in her life: her best friend. However, the weight of Judith’s secret, paired with the return of a dark cloud from her past, introduces a seemingly insurmountable friction to the duo’s friendship. SPOILERS AHEAD!

Ride or Die Recap

Debbie is an upstanding, buttoned-up middle-aged housewife whose biggest ambitions include helping her politician husband, David, in his lifelong quest to become the next Prime Minister of England. In her eyes, her best friend Judith is an adventurous woman stuck in a boring vocation. Little does she know the latter, better known as her codename Whiptail, actually leads a thrilling life as an assassin. She works for a highly-secretive Agency and is routinely involved in high-profile killings. However, as of late, she has started to bend a few rules, chasing after highs rather than clean, no-nonsense assassinations. As a result, her Handler, Sam, informs her that the Director has deemed her too much of a risk and wants her to retire. Even so, after sticking his neck out for her, the young man has managed to secure her a second chance and an assignment: killing Billy Donovan at the water relief fund charity.

It just so turns out that Debbie and her husband, David, are also attending the same event. Although this doesn’t get in Judith’s way at first, it soon becomes a problem when the assassin walks into a room full of dead bodies, including one that belongs to her friend’s husband. She quickly realizes that Debbie herself is also a target. For the same reason, she ditches the mission in favor of rescuing her friend. Afterward, the duo finds themselves at a graveyard, per a calling card left behind by David’s killer. There, another message awaits them, this time addressed to Judith and promising her death. Simultaneously, Debbie also learns about her best friend’s secret identity. The discovery comes as a solemn betrayal for her, which is why she sneaks away from Judith’s safehouse the next day to find out the real reason behind David’s hit on her own.

Meanwhile, Judith storms the Agency’s headquarters in a gross breach of protocol to confront Director Jack, demanding answers about how her identity has been compromised enough to be threatened. In turn, Jack turns the tables on her, insisting that the situation is a result of her carelessness. Therefore, she must clean the mess to prove she’s still capable of doing the job. Alternatively, Debbie learns that her husband had been working with the Albanian mob and had stolen 24 million pounds from them. The gang has nothing to do with his murder. Instead, they target his wife for the stolen funds. Fortunately for Debbie, Judith manages to save her in the nick of time. Afterward, she employs the help of Mrs. Williams, whose cobbler shop is equipped with Fake IDs and various gadgets for the Agency. Thus, the two women go on the lam. When the assassin realizes her Agency has set a hit on her friend, she realizes the only way to convince them of her loyalty is by killing the original target.

As a result, the duo finds themselves in Monte Carlo on the hunt for Donnie. Still, even once they’ve got him, Judith realizes she doesn’t want to risk losing her friendship with Debbie. For the same reason, she decides to spare her target’s life. Soon enough, the trio finds themselves working together to pull off a heist to pay off David’s debt. Although it’s a minor success, they make a startling discovery afterward: Debbie’s husband is still alive. Back in London, Sam and Queenie Williams conduct their own investigation and learn that David has been kidnapped by a former Agency assassin: Anna. As it turns out, she used to be Judith’s old partner. Five years ago, after a mission in Turkey, the latter returned to declare the other assassin dead. In actuality, Anna was alive and rotting in a Turkish prison cell, plotting her old partner’s eventual demise.

Ride or Die: Why Does Anna Want Judith Dead? Who Dies?

The events of ‘Ride or Die’ are jump-started due to the vengeful plotting of one assassin, who is seemingly back from the dead. Anna, aka Redback, was a fellow agent of the Agency who was often paired up for missions with Whiptail. Eventually, tendrils of a deep friendship formed between the two due to their similar personalities. As a part of the organization, neither were allowed to form any emotional attachments, for fear of exploitation. As such, Anna found a safe and reliable companion in the other. However, simultaneously, the other assassin, Judith, was tentatively breaking the rules and forming an actual deep friendship with Debbie. Anna came to know about the same when Debbie came to surprise Judith in Turkey. Initially, she assumed the civilian woman was just a part of the other agent’s cover.

Therefore, Anna thought nothing of it when she shared her intentions to kill Debbie, given that she had seen her and Judith in the same place together, thus breaching security protocol. Nonetheless, that friendship had quickly become the most important thing in the other assassin’s life. For the same reason, once the two women completed their job, killing a roomful of men, Judith turned her gun on Anna and shot her. The latter fell off the balcony and into the rocky seas. When Agent Whiptail reported back to the Agency, she declared Redback dead, crafting a story about how she became a casualty of the mission. Yet, unbeknownst to her, Anna actually survived the gunshot and the fall.

Anna washed up on a hostile shore, injured and nearing death. The people who saved her life eventually took her captive, assuming that she was an enemy attempting infiltration. As such, they tortured her for years. All this time, the assasin held out hope that the Agency would come looking for her. When they didn’t, she realized that she had been betrayed by the woman she believed to be her best friend and marooned by the people who gave her a purpose in life. Worse yet, she realizes once she manages her escape that Judith had backstabbed her to protect Debbie, a civilian woman with whom the assassin had apparently formed a friendship. Therefore, when she crafts her perfect revenge, she doesn’t simply aim to kill Judith. She chases Judith around, almost killing her at every turn, but intentionally letting her escape.

Anna targets Debbie so that the woman would be forced to learn of her perceived best friend’s reality. Eventually, she even kidnaps the latter, with no intention to kill. Instead, she plays the mission debrief tapes for her, in which Judith herself proclaims that Debbie is nothing more to her than a useful cover. The final stage of the plan arrives months later, when Anna finally corners Judith and enacts her final act of revenge. She threatens to unearth the secret of the Agency unless Jack orders her to kill Judith so that the latter would be abandoned by the organization just as Anna was. In the end, she puts the assassin in a furnace, promising a slow death. However, her plan is foiled when Debbie, with the help of Sam, manages to find and rescue her friend. Ultimately, a chase ensues, which ends with the duo tricking Anna into driving her car off a cliff, hurling herself to her death.

Does Judith Escape From the Agency? Does She Retire?

At the beginning of the story, Judith is being given the boot by the Agency, which seems to have decided it’s time for her to retire. While their decision is influenced by her recent rebellious streak, there’s also a fair amount of misogynistic ageism added into the mix. Either way, Judith is nowhere near ready for retirement. Her rebellious streak is a direct result of the guilt she feels over betraying Anna, which pushes her to seek out trouble in hopes of punishment. Even so, her job is the center of her life, and she has no idea who she is without the Agency. For the same reason, she’s vehemently against the idea of retirement. That is, until her profession directly threatens to ruin another crucial part of her life: her friendship with Debbie. Outside of Jack and the Agency, Debbie is the closest thing the assassin has to a family.

However, this friendship threatens to crumble when Debbie learns of Judith’s massive secret life. She begins to question everything about their connection, wondering if any of it was true. Thus, the mission debriefing tapes, which trivialize their friendship in Judith’s own words, only serve to reinforce these fears. She begins to believe that she was only ever an end to mean to the woman she thought to be her best friend. Consequently, at the end of their adventures in Europe, she turns her back on Judith. This leaves the latter with only one anchor in her life, The Agency. However, her final showdown with Anna flips the script. In this confrontation, Jack abandons Judith for the sake of the Agency. Inversely, Debbie returns for her.

Debbie realizes that much of her friend’s life has been dictated by her past, which has integrated her into the life of an assassin from an early age. Therefore, in their friendship, Judith was plagued by abandonment issues and a deep-seated fear of honesty. Even though her actions aren’t justified, they’re understandable. Once Debbie shows her what real love and loyalty look like, Judith realizes that it’s about time to shed the lessons the Agency has taught her. She has already been abandoned by the organization, which means she has, for all intents and purposes, retired. In the aftermath, Judith and Debbie find themselves on a train, ready to face a new chapter of their lives by embarking on their own journeys of self-actualization. Little do they know, a wide range of people have their sights set on them. Ultimately, from the looks of it, it seems like even though Judith may be done with the Agency, the assassin network isn’t quite done with her yet.

Why Does Queenie Start Working For the Agency? Does Sam Quit?

Another startling development that takes place in the finale revolves around the characters of Sam and Queenie. The duo has been friends for a very long time. While the Handler is a direct employee of the Agency, the cobbler’s daughter remains a contact on account of her family business. Once the plot is afoot, the two end up working together for their own purposes. Throughout the story, Sam proves himself to be a stickler for the rules, showcasing loyalty towards the Agency.

Nonetheless, this begins to change once he learns some horrifying truth about the organization’s assassin recruitment program. On the other hand, Queenie remains perpetually critical of the Agency, especially after their neglect results in her mother’s death. Even so, by the end, she herself has enrolled in their trainee program. Queenie’s reasoning behind this decision remains twofold. After her mother’s death, the young woman makes a startling discovery about her parentage. As it turns out, Jack the Director, is her biological father. This explains why Williams was allowed to walk away from the Agency as a former assassin without any trouble.

Thus, Queenie’s decision to join the Agency is a result of her desire to get closer to her father. Nevertheless, it’s not in the way one would expect. She doesn’t want to bond with her biological father. Instead, she wants to use this connection to infiltrate the organization and bring it down from the inside. As such, she has started working with Interpol agents Jacques and Colette. Sam, whose relationship with Queenie is at a precarious and distant place, doesn’t know the same. Ever since the Handler learned about the Agency’s dark secret, he has been planning on taking the data and making a run for it. Jack has caught wind of the same. Consequently, he assigns Sam to Queenie as her Handler, giving him an incentive to stay in order to keep the latter safe.

How Did Judith Become an Assassin? Why Were She and Anna Chosen by Jack?

Initially, Judith’s involvement in the Agency seems like a hero origin story. She was an orphan who was returned to the orphanage by her adoptive parents as a teenager. This left a deep scar on her, leaving her with abandonment and attachment issues. When she was 15, Jack visited her orphanage, impressed by her high IQ nd potential for success despite her delinquent tenancies. He offered her a scholarship to his organization, which was really a training program to turn her into a future assassin. Ultimately, it was his insistence that the Agency never “return” anyone that convinced Judith to go with him in search of true belonging. In the years that followed, she came to appreciate her decision and truly enjoy her new identity as an assassin.

However, it’s only when Judith returns to the old training facility in search of Anna that she’s faced with a devastating truth. As it turns out, the numerous other kids in the Agency’s training program were all also orphans who were “returned” during their teenage years. Both Judith and Anna, and every other assassin on the organization’s roster, had been handpicked for their potential, then broken down by an intentional charade of adoption and eventual returns. This way, the Agency ensured complete loyalty and reliance from their future agents, manipulating them and turning them into the perfect soldiers.