Lulu Wang wanted the mystery at the end of Prime Video’s Expats

polygon.com:

In the end, we know about as much as when we started. Expats, whose first episode started with some open-ended reunions — first a more charged one between Margaret (Nicole Kidman) and Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), and later a calmer, sadder meet-up between Hilary (Sarayu Blue) and Margaret — has left off with those same characters coming together, and the same indefinite feeling permeating their meetings.

[Ed. note: This post will now start discussing spoilers for the end of Expats.]

What we still don’t know is what happened to Gus, or what Mercy is going to do next with her own baby, or even, technically, how these women all feel about each other at the end of the day. But that’s exactly how showrunner Lulu Wang wanted the adaptation of Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2016 novel The Expatriates to feel. As she tells Polygon, she sees the ending as its own sort of beginning, and the mystery that drives so much of the pain in Expats was never the point she wanted to leave us with.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Polygon: So, starting off, how did you think about and approach the tone of the ending for each of the characters?

Lulu Wang: I think I wanted it to feel both, like, macro and micro. Both large in scope of the world, and global, but also so deeply personal. It’s a mother looking for her child. But it’s also all of us looking for a way to move on, to grieve, to find closure, to be happy, to find forgiveness, to be gentler on ourselves.

So I think visually, it was always really important to me that I have that really long take of Margaret walking through the city with her backpack on. And in many ways, she becomes part of the city; she’s now no longer able to separate herself from the streets and from the people and from the elements, because her son is out there somewhere. And for Mercy it was about getting to realize that she just wants to be loved. We hate her so much, she does all of these things, and she makes all of these choices. But that