The Essex Serpent TV Ending Swaps Ambiguity For Resolution

There’s also another ‘serpent’ explanation in the novel in the form of Naomi’s father’s missing rowing boat ‘Gracie’, which had come adrift and is discovered by Naomi and Joanna with its barnacled prow mistaken for the floating bulk of the beast.

In each version of the story then, rational explanations are given for the serpent sightings, and for the TV adaptation’s underwater point of view shots from the beast’s perspective. So, there was no serpent. It was a fish, it was a boat, it was the fevered imaginations of a community fearing the devil and judgement for their sins… Unless of course, you wish to believe otherwise, a choice for which the book, which lives more happily alongside ambiguity, allows.

Does Stella Die in the Book?

It’s inside missing rowboat Gracie that Stella Ransome prepares her funereal bed, decorated with the blue “treasures” the colour of which she’s become obsessed with in her illness. Aided by Frankie, she drifts out on the Blackwater to meet the serpent, intending to “make peace with it” and sacrifice herself to pay Aldwinter’s debts and send it away. In the TV adaptation, Clémence Poésy beautifully conveys Stella’s addled euphoria as she enacts her ritual and thinks she sees the serpent before being rescued by Will.

In the TV finale, we see Will pick a blue love-in-a-mist flower from the rectory garden and bring it up to Stella in her bed. Silently, he holds her and weeps and from this we understand that she has died. Later, we see Will reading aloud to his young son from Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies. The passage (“If Mr Garth does not find a fox in Eversley wood – as folks sometimes fear he never will – that does not prove there are no such things as foxes”) is significant to the story’s central questions of belief and proof. We understand that Will is now a widower and six months after Stella’s death, see him going to meet Cora as she walks home from her archaeological dig. They embrace, Cora asks Will “Shall we walk?” and they continue on together, united in love.

At the end of the novel however, Stella is still alive and apparently in recovery from her illness. She is strong enough to take walks and a visiting doctor comments that it’s just a question of managing her condition now. Cora still writes the same letter to Will, saying that she is torn and mended, that she wants everything and needs nothing, that she loves him and is content without him. Her letter – and the novel – end: “Even so, come quickly! Cora Seaborne.” With Will’s beloved wife Stella still alive, the Cora/Will romance is left in a more complicated place in the book, even if readers may long for the continuation that the TV series provides, and see it as inevitable.

Other Differences: Naomi, Martha, Edward Burton, Luke Garrett

Some of the story’s secondary plots are also resolved differently on screen, though with no betrayal of the novel’s meaning. No doubt to streamline matters, Luke Garrett (Frank Dillane) wasn’t stabbed in the hand by a would-be mugger, but in a revenge attack by a man who’d tried to kill Edward Burton – a patient Luke saved by successfully operating on his heart. In the TV show, Luke saves the life of a factory worker injured in a workplace blast, and Edward Burton doesn’t feature.