Did Riya manage to get to the bottom of the mysterious case? Full spoilers for Passenger ahead.
*Warning: This article contains full spoilers for Passenger.*
It’s the series that threw up more questions the deeper we got into it, but in Passenger‘s sixth and final episode, we finally got some answers to the mysteries going on in Chadder Vale.
Riya (Wunmi Mosaku) had been intent on figuring out where both local girl Katie Wells (Rowan Robinson) and Swedish tourist Nina Karlson (Synnøve Karlsen) had disappeared to, and Katie turning up 24 hours after being suspected to be missing only further added to Riya’s suspicions.
The mundane small town wasn’t rocked by Katie’s surprise disappearance or reappearance, but when things turned deadly for Mehmet, a lot of other strange things started happening at the same time.
Not only was Jim’s (David Threlfall) fracking site being upended by protestors, but Mehmet’s body being discovered at the site brought its own implications.
A dead stag, growing potholes, a weird video game entitled Passenger and an online forum were all discovered in the lead-up to the finale, but what was happening in Chadder Vale?
Read on for a full breakdown of the final episode of Passenger.
Passenger ending explained: What was happening in Chadder Vale?
To put it simply, there was a lot going on in Chadder Vale – but ultimately, we discovered that local businessman and bread factory owner Derek Jackson (Daniel Ryan) was behind a lot of the weird happenings in the small town.
As we discovered in the previous episodes, a company called Pangaea was responsible for the mysterious contracts that were being signed by young people visiting Chadder, including by Mehmet.
We’d seen that Mehmet was playing a video game entitled Passenger, but what we didn’t realise initially was that it was only the cusp of what was to come.
Actually, the game had a more deadly real-world version that was being carried out in Chadder Vale.
The finale opens with the employees of the bread factory getting letters informing them of their termination of employment, and when he turns up for work, Derek is ambushed by a masked figure. He then winds up at a church where he is greeted by a mysterious woman who appears to be the boss of Pangaea.
While we haven’t met the person behind the Black Rocks true crime podcast that Katie listens to throughout the series, the mysterious host (known as Melissa Dean) and the Pangaea boss sound identical – so we would hazard a guess that the podcast is also some form of extra media that Pangaea uses to reach the youth.
In the church, she tells Derek that they’re closing the factory, not caring that Derek’s brother Kane has been arrested for Mehmet’s murder. She says that nobody needed to know what was going on, and that’s when Derek admits that he and Kane took Mehmet’s body onto Jim’s fracking site to frame him and get the site closed down.
She then reveals what the purpose of Pangaea is, and says: “We had a chance with Derek, to take our anxiety-ridden youth and give them purpose. To turn all those hours sitting at a keyboard and give them strength, entice them with the prize then recruit their minds.”
She cuts a deal with him and tells Derek that if he wants to sort it out, he has to go to the factory himself and take care of it. On his way there, he visits Terry (Debbie Rush) to tell her something’s happened – but she confronts him about his need for money, which was eventually the undoing of their relationship.
Was Eddie innocent?
Elsewhere, the other main focus of the finale is on Jakub (Hubert Hanowicz), who is the mysterious person behind the big bag of cash that was left on Jim’s doorstep.
Jim initially thought that it was Joanne (Natalie Gavin) who wanted to give him money for her guilty conscience, but actually it turns out it was Jakub.
Jakub admits to Riya that he saw Eddie halfway up the street when Jim was attacked five years prior but never told anyone, instead choosing to take over the lease on Eddie’s garage and keep quiet about his innocence.
He later tells Riya and Ali that he was blackmailed and told that it would be his word against the town.
He eventually confesses to Riya that it was Tony (Sean Gilder), the owner of the boxing club and Jim’s own friend, who Riya later punches in the face.
In Derek’s confrontation with the Pangaea boss, Derek says that he arranged to sort out Jim’s attack five years prior and arranged for Tony to do it. But the Pangaea boss still had to sort out Jim’s site, getting a government ban to stop the fracking instead – clearly a major bone of contention for the company.
What was happening in Derek’s bread factory?
Everything starts to slot into place in the finale, and we begin to realise that Derek’s Jumbo Bread Factory is at the epicentre of what is going on in Chadder Vale.
After the confronting chat with the Pangaea boss, everything we’ve seen in the series so far starts to make sense.
Remember the mysterious cage and clear escape from the lorry in episode 1? Or perhaps the gang of solemn-faced heavies that went to stay at the B&B for one night and were then tasked to retrieve the creature in question?
Throughout the series, Derek and his brother Kane are having tense conversations in secret about “batches” and night shifts, coming under pressure when Derek gets an email from waste management. They’re apparently one day behind in their schedule, and that’s when Kane shows Derek the lorry and the gaping hole in the cage at the back, and also the floor of the lorry itself.
The creature in question, which attacks Katie again and eventually John, isn’t seen throughout the series – but has clearly escaped from the brothers at the bread factory.
It is then eventually found when Katie once again comes to in the middle of the forest with one of the mystery men behind her, who thanks her and is clearly now able to locate the monster in question.
We’re left to believe that the creature is part of one of the harder levels of the real-life game, and it is clearly a deadly level as the brothers are regularly discussing “disposal”. The monster in the forest was evidently being held by the brothers at the bread factory, ready to deploy when they were told to, likely by the higher powers at Pangaea.
As we see in episodes 3 and 4, Kane has clearly been disposing of what we’re led to believe are the human remains from failed players in the Passenger real-life game, but hasn’t been using the machine that Derek has bought for £20,000 for that very purpose.
Instead, Kane has been stealing bins around Chadder Vale to store the remains in after dissolving them himself – a previously trivial issue of Riya’s that actually is a lot more sinister.
There aren’t any bones or body parts found in the bins, but there is the “strange liquid” that Riya references, meaning that perhaps Mehmet didn’t die according to Pangaea’s original plan, as his body was still intact and was transported by Kane and Derek to the fracking site.
In the finale, Derek returns to the bread factory with petrol canisters, crying as he pours it out and shouting that “you can’t make me go down there”.
But the problem is that Ali (Ella Bruccoleri) and Nish (Arian Nik) actually are down in the basement of the bread factory, and have found more than they bargained for.
They venture to the bread factory because of coordinates gleaned from their research on the dark web about Pangaea and the Passenger game. But when they arrive, they’re greeted by a bolted door with Pangaea’s logo on it, but manage to crack the code using the notes in Nina’s belongings.
Once inside, they’re greeted by a room filled with overalls and weapons, as well as a screen with the Pangaea boss welcoming a “player”, likely meaning to be for Nina – who has clearly found a way out of the game, survived and chosen not to return.
“This time, the game is real. If you win, a life-changing prize awaits. If you fail, well, better to die greatly, no?”
She then tells them that their journey is about to begin via the door on their right, and they realise they’re in the game. We then see the teenage boy who has been hanging around Chadder Vale (known in the credits as ‘Kid on Wall’) return home to a noisy house with two adults arguing.
Actually, it’s just a recording that has been playing while he’s been out, and he turns it off, goes into the living room and uncovers a hidden trap door that leads to a basement.
There, he has screens of the Pangaea initiative’s game room and sees Ali and Nish preparing to take part. Is he the mastermind behind the game? Is he working for Pangaea?
Back in the room, as the noises intensify, Ali calls Riya to tell her what’s going on but almost as if transfixed by the prospect of the game, the pair are resigned to playing the game themselves.
“We’ve got this,” Ali tells Nish, and as we see them grab weapons on the CCTV camera, we pan to Riya who sees smoke coming from the factory. She’s still on the phone to Ali when she hears a scream.
Passenger premiered on Sunday 24th March at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what’s on tonight.
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