Diksha Sundriyal
In Prime Video’s ‘Shelter,’ we follow the young Mickey Bolitar, who discovers that everything he thought he knew about his world was a lie. The story begins with the death of his father in a car accident. Four months later, Mickey is in his father’s hometown, trying to get his life back on track but still reeling from the accident. When his new classmate suddenly goes missing, he starts looking into the mystery and realizes it is tied to him and his father. The first three episodes of the series set the stage for the conflict that only gets more intense with the coming episodes. Here’s what the ending means for Mickey and his friends. SPOILERS AHEAD
Shelter Episode 1, 2, and 3 Recap
Mickey and his family come to the States to start a new life, but things take a turn for the worse when they get in a car accident and his father, Brad, dies. Mickey’s mother is put in psychiatric care to get help for her depression, and Mickey is placed in the care of his aunt, Shira. He goes to the town of Kasselton, where his father grew up, and tries to start anew. At school, he meets a girl named Ashley, who is also new to town.
Mickey and Ashley hit it off on their first day and decide to meet later at a diner. However, Ashley never shows up to their date, which worries Mickey, especially when she is nowhere to be found the next day. The mystery deepens when a mysterious old woman, known as the Bat Lady, tells Mickey his father is still alive. He decides to get answers from the woman, but things get more complicated. Luckily, he has help. When Arther, aka Spoon, and Ema discover Mickey is looking into a mystery, they decide to join his quest because, otherwise, the town is quite boring, and nothing exciting ever happens there.
Together, they look into Ashley’s disappearance and realize she is not what she appears to be. When they visit his home to ask his mother for her whereabouts, the woman says she never had a daughter. Moreover, her husband, who should’ve been dead, according to Ashley, is beaten up by a mysterious man with an octopus tattoo on his face. Mickey and his friends also start looking into the unsolved disappearance of Dylan Shakes, who Mickey discovers was Brad’s best friend in school.
Shelter Episode 3 Ending: Is the Bat Lady Lizzy Sobek?
In school, Mickey learns about Lizzy Sobek in a history lesson. According to their history teacher, Sobek was a young Jewish girl who lived during the Second World War. She escaped the Auschwitz concentration camp and helped rescue hundreds of other children like her. According to the story, she was killed by a Nazi officer known as the Butcher of Lodz. However, there is no official confirmation of her death; some believe she is still alive.
When Mickey confronts the Bat Lady and asks her about Ashley and Brad, she asks him if he has heard of Lizzy Sobek. Mickey doesn’t understand how a girl who lived in the 1940s is connected to the events happening in the present day. This is when the Bat Lady reveals that she is Lizzy Sobek. She tells him about the famous story where she saved fifty children from a train bound for a concentration camp. In the story, the children followed blue butterflies that took them to Lizzy, who saved them all. The reality, though, is much different.
The Bat Lady reveals that there are never any blue butterflies. Butterflies were engraved on the trees, which became markers for the children to follow. However, of the 49 children who came out of the train, only six made it to Lizzy and were saved. The Butcher of Lodz and his people found and killed the rest. The Bat Lady further adds that the Butcher was also responsible for the death of her family. When Mickey asks how this is relevant to his story, she shows him the Butcher’s photo, and he realizes that this is the same man he saw on the night of the accident. This is the paramedic who attended to Brad before he died.
This revelation opens more questions, the most important of which is how the Butcher is still alive and looks exactly how he used to almost eighty years ago. Another thing that has been bugging Mickey is the blue butterflies. From the story of Lizzy Sobek to the cover of the song his father played the last time to the tattoo on Ashley and Ema’s back, the symbol has been repeated too often not to be of significance to the story. Ema’s tattooist tells her that the butterfly represents Abeona, the goddess of protection. This explains why the children saw the butterflies while escaping their Nazi captors. However, more details are needed to explain how it is connected to Mickey. Whom does he need to be protected from?
What makes things more interesting is that another classmate of theirs is involved in all of this and might be connected to Ashley’s disappearance. It’s a girl named Rachel who introduced Mickey to Ashley. Rachel’s involvement in this mystery is revealed when Ema and Spoon catch her on the CCTV, taking stuff from Ashely’s locker. Unbeknownst to them, Rachel has also crossed paths with the man with the octopus tattoo, though there’s still a lot of explaining left to do.
Apart from these mysteries, Mickey also has a lot to deal with on the personal front. His relationship with his aunt is not exactly ideal. He is still coming to terms with the fact that she is his legal guardian now, at least until his mother comes back home. He desperately hopes for her to get better and is glad to see her when she finally comes back home. However, his hopes are dashed when he finds his mother breaking down because it’s all too much for her to handle. Her mental health is rather delicate at the moment, and the doctor believes it would be better for her not to have contact with the outside world.
It looks like everything is going wrong for Mickey, but it is relieving to see that Ashley is alive and well. It’s not clear whether she is safe, and if so, she is hiding or if she is kidnapped by someone. The last scene reveals that her disappearance doesn’t mean death, and it also turns out that she came to Kasselton with secrets of her own. Apparently, high school wasn’t the first time Ashley saw Mickey. She’d seen him in the woods when he was camping with his father. She spied on them from a distance and was attacked by someone. Who was it, what did they want from her, and how does it connect her with the Bat Lady remains to be seen.
Read More: Is Lizzy Sobek Based on a Real Holocaust Survivor?
