The Spiderwick Chronicles showrunner weighs in on that 'tense' season finale cliffhanger

Warning: this story contains spoilers for The Spiderwick Chronicles season finale, “The Wrath of Mulgarath.”

It’s safe to say that The Spiderwick Chronicles finale was a very difficult day — physically, emotionally, and magically — for Jared Grace. With the entire town of Henson infected with sleeping sickness, the teen, played by Lyon Daniels, joins forces with sister Mallory (Mychala Lee), mom Helen (Joy Bryant), and household Brownie Thimbletack (Jack Dylan Grazer) to summon a troll that seemingly kills the shapeshifting ogre Mulgarath (Christian Slater).

But getting rid of Mulgarath doesn’t magically fix all of the Grace family’s problems. While the sleeping sickness has been lifted, there’s still the matter of what to do with Mulgarath’s pet baby dragon. Jared, who has struggled with his mental health over the series and sees parallels between himself and the dangerous creature, believes that they should kill it, but changes his mind after a meaningful heart-to-heart with his family.

Series creator, writer, and showrunner Aron Eli Coleite tells Entertainment Weekly that it was understood the season would end “at that moment, because it is about [the] acceptance of who you are” and of the importance of others seeing and accepting you, too. 

“It's a family moment of realizing, it's not just you. It's all of us. We all push you to this place. We all take a part in this,” he says. “One of the main goals of the series was to de-stigmatize mental health issues or neurodiversity. That these are not negative things — anxiety, depression, they're not bad words. They are part of our lives.”

He adds that Jared’s ability to wield the Vorpal Sword, which only manifests for the right user, is also a testament to his true character. In the end, it’s his family’s support that gives Jared the push he needs to realize that it's time to let go of the past... That is, until a second Jared suddenly appears claiming that the Other Jared is a fraud.

Unable to differentiate between the two, Mallory makes a split second decision during what Coleite describes as "a really heightened, tense moment" that transports the real Jared into the Faerie realm — where he meets his great uncle Arthur Spiderwick (Albert Jones) — and leaves Mulgarath pretending to be Jared in the human world. According to Coleite, it was Tony DiTerlizzi, who co-created The Spiderwick Chronicles with Holly Black, who actually pitched the idea of having Jared come face-to-face with another version of himself in the finale. "He was like, ‘Oh, this would be great. And it would be great if, faced with this choice, the wrong Jared goes.’”

To make matters worse, the showrunner believes that Mulgarath has the ability to pull off pretending to be Jared for a long time.

“My hope is that is a really difficult and good question that we'll have the fortune of answering should we get to season 2,” he explains. “It's certainly been over a year since we wrapped, and Lyon and Noah [Cottrell] are growing up before our very eyes, so I want to be able to account [for that time] when we come back... I don't want to pick up a week later; I want to pick up some time later, because I would want the family to feel like, 'Oh, my God, it wasn't just that he duped us, but for a long period of time. He did it for months or years.' And how that will emotionally impact them.” 

Mulgarath will also likely have gathered even more of the Field Guide’s missing pages during that time, too. “We can come back and we can have so many more pages," Coleite adds, "and he can have plotted and come up with his next plan and his next way of feeding and getting control.” 

And there’s plenty of potential drama waiting to unfold in the Fae world should the series get a second season. “In the book, Arthur’s stuck there, there's a reason why it hasn't come back,” Coleite says. “He's there, Lucinda's (Charlayne Woodard) also there… and Jared's there. How do you escape from this place that you don't want to [leave]? It's not going to be an awful prison. It's a beautiful place, but how do you compare that when you're in this Edenic world, but the real world is waiting [and] it needs you as well? How do you combat that?"

He continues, "I think we would love to tell our version of a prison escape story, and a different version of it to [the question of] 'how does Jared get back when the elves will not let him leave?'" Your move, Roku Channel!

The Spiderwick Chronicles is now available to stream on The Roku Channel.

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