Tidelands season 1 finale recap: The Queen’s Knife

In the season 1 finale of Netflix series Tidelands, Cal and Adrielle have a confrontation, but will it be their final one?

Previously on Tidelands, Adrielle Cuthbert (Elsa Pataky) was enacting her devious scheme to unleash an apocalypse on mankind, by calling up her “mothers” — mythical sirens from the sea.
Officer Corey Welch (Mattias Inwood) was killed, and in the season finale, Calliope “Cal” McTeer (Charlotte Best) shows up to find him.

Unfortunately, his killer, Leandra (Jet Tranter), is also there. It doesn’t take long for Cal to get rid of her, though, and Cal makes a quick phone call to Adrielle. She learns that Adrielle has indeed kidnapped her brother, Augie (Aaron Jakubenko), and plans to sacrifice him to summon sirens to take over the earth. Interestingly, gangster Gregori Stolin (Jacek Koman) is also there to see the mythical creatures, apparently not caring how dangerous they would prove, even for him.

Tidelands also focuses a bit on Lamar (Dalip Sondhi), who is trying to escape Adrielle’s increasing craziness. Also, for a brief moment, Cal confronts her mother (Caroline Brazier) about bringing in Stolin to get rid of the half-human/half-siren Tidelanders. It is ironic, considering how Cal is herself half-siren. In fact, her father’s history is pertinent to Adrielle’s plans, as Cal’s father (Dustin Clare) had the piece of broken horn that Adrielle wants (and he found it in a drug shipment somehow). Cal gets an extra incentive for revenge when she has a flashback about him being killed by Adrielle. However, being good-natured, it seems Cal is more interested in simply stopping Adrielle’s plan.

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Showdowns

Instead of leaving together ASAP, Lamar waits for Sgt. Paul Murdoch (Alex Dimitriades) to retrieve something. It turns out to be a bad move. He sees Welch’s and Leandra’s bodies on the floor, and Adrielle shows up to break his hand. As Lamar stands by, seemingly helpless to intervene, she magically mutilates Murdoch’s arm and shoots him. Lamar emptily warns that her people will kill her. It’s been implied that Lamar is loyal to Adrielle, even apart from her position as Queen of the Tidelanders. In fact, the threat he mentions is probably more of a warning that all is lost, and not some personal vendetta.

The biggest moments in the Tidelands season 1 finale, however, are between Cal and Adrielle. Cal has a piece of the siren-summoning horn, and Adrielle wants it. Cal meets Bijou (Chloe De Los Santos), who warns her that Augie has been kidnapped. Meanwhile, Dylan (Marco Pigossi) sees the bodies of Welch and Leandra, prompting him to head back home. Before long, Adrielle captures Cal but is uncertain of what to do with her. (While this may seem like a strange uncertainty, it should be remembered that Cal has that missing portion of the magic horn). When Adrielle leaves, Gilles (Finn Little) gets the key for Cal’s cell, and Cal meets up with Dylan.

There is more treachery afoot as Stolin directs his guns to point their guns at Adrielle. Cal capitalizes on this moment to threaten to smash the horn shard. Then, in a moment of unified strength, Cal, Augie, and Dylan manage to overpower Stolin, and Cal drops her piece of horn. As Adrielle tries to gather up the pieces, Gilles stabs Adrielle, apparently out of revenge for her removing the boy’s eye (not literally “an eye for an eye,” but close enough). As Adrielle apparently lies dying, she offers Cal a joint rulership over the earth if she’ll heal her with her magic. Those plans are sidelined, however, when Stolin threatens Augie to get the shard for himself. Cal gives him the shard alright, stabbing his hand with it. In a distressing Tidelands moment, the young Bijou (Chloe De Los Santos) gets shot by one of Stolin’s errant bullets. Augie is also injured.

As Cal goes to help Bijou, Stolin gets enchanted by the siren’s song, who were summoned by the blood from Cal stabbing him. He is quite obviously killed. Meanwhile, Augie directs Cal to save Bijou instead of himself. After Dylan heals Adrielle, she cruelly murders him. Adrielle doesn’t save Augie, but Bijou lives for at least another day. However, Tidelands ends with a major shift, as the sirens show up for Cal, with the implication that she may be the new Queen of the Tidelanders.

So, if there is a season 2, expect that to be a major plot point, with the possibility of Adrielle threatening to remove her from power. Or, of course, it’s possible that Cal may reject any such status, and may find herself at odds with the sirens themselves. Also, one would expect more exploration of the nature of sirens. Are they really as evil as the story implies, or is there something more to them than a sailor’s curse? There were small hints at a more complicated backstory to them, but there’s definitely a possibility of expanding on all that.

What are your thoughts on Tidelands? Let us know in the comments!