Playing Gracie Darling Ending Explained: Still living with the guilt of her best friend Gracie’s disappearance after a seance gone wrong, Joni comes back to her hometown when Gracie’s niece goes missing under mysterious circumstances, attempting to get to the bottom of the mystery once and for all.
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Playing Gracie Darling Netflix Cast
Morgana O’Reilly, Rudi Dharmalingam, Harriet Walter, Chloe Brink, Dan Spielman, Celia Pacquola, Annie Maynard, Dominic Ona-Ariki, Peter Carroll
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Playing Gracie Darling Series Creator
Miranda Nation
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Playing Gracie Darling 2025 Director
Jonathan Brough
The supernatural mystery has 6 episodes, each with a runtime of around 45 minutes.

Playing Gracie Darling Ending Explained
The series starts with 14-year-old Gracie Darling going missing after a seance goes wrong. 20 years after the fact, when her niece Frankie goes missing similarly, Gracie’s best friend Joni, who is now a psychologist, comes back to town to get to the bottom of the mystery. In town, she discovers Gracie’s burnt body decomposing in the woods for all these years and tries to figure out what really happened to her friend, and now Frankie.
Joni was also a part of the seance that claimed her friend, but all these years later, she is unable to recall all of the details. Her friends Jay and Anita, also a part of the seance, band together to get to the bottom of the mess and find the truth once and for all. Thus, in the final episode, she is forced to confront her own guilt and trauma as she recalls the night that changed her life – the night she saw Gracie alive for the last time.

Who killed Gracie?
By the end of the show, we learn that it’s James, Gracie’s grandfather, who killed her. After the seance, she had learned about James killing his own brother Levi in cold blood and was left confused and distraught. In a moment of wrong decision-making, she goes to her grandfather for comfort, who, upon learning that she knows his secret, kills her to save himself. It’s a horrifying secret that is unearthed, one that most people won’t be shocked by, as James is shown to be quite cruel and unempathetic.
The series also attempts to misdirect us by showing that Ruth, Joni or Jay might also be suspects, but that doesn’t turn out to be the case in the end.

Is Frankie dead?
No, Frankie isn’t dead. In a not-so-shocking twist, we find out that Frankie, too, found out about James’s shocking past and killing Levi, and, on top of that, she also learnt about Peter being her father. It’s a lot of information for a young mind, especially with Peter being her uncle and all that. Scared and confused, she runs off to safety, and Billy comes to her rescue and hides her, fearing that Ruth and Peter might come after her to save Peter and themselves since they, too, were witnesses to the murder but did nothing to stop James or get him punished.

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Thankfully, since Joni and Mina find out about the truth, Ruth and Peter, too, realise their shortcomings in not protecting their child and do right by Frankie, and she ultimately comes back home safe and sound. However, justice is served in the end, and Moira ends up smothering James to death, avenging her daughter’s murder.
Is the haunting real?

There is no haunting; Joni’s mind, guilt-ridden and confused about the past, was creating scenarios in her head to get to the truth buried in her head. However, in the last scene, we see her having a clairvoyant moment in her new home, seeing Ivy’s ghost in the backyard. So maybe she was, in fact, seeing Gracie’s ghost, and it wasn’t just a figment of her memory. The ending is left open to interpretation, but it’s clear what direction it wants to take.
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