WARNING: Significant spoilers for Dead Boy Detectives season 1 are ahead.
Now that Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives is out, the final shot of season 1 has plenty of viewers wondering who it is depicted in those last moments. Dead Boy Detectives’ main characters are the teenage ghosts Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri), the erstwhile living teens turned deceased detectives. Aided by their new friends, the amnesiac psychic medium Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson) and the ever-bubbly Niko Sasaki (Yuyu Kitamura), the pair spend their afterlife solving supernatural cases and setting other spirits free.
Dead Boy Detectives, which is part of The Sandman‘s universe, introduces a number of new characters, some from the comics and some invented for the show. One of those characters is Niko, whose fate at the ending of Dead Boy Detectives season 1 is uncertain, despite her seemingly permanent death. It’s why audiences were so intrigued by the very ending of the finale, in which a hooded figure whose face is never shown appears. Whoever they are, they are clearly important and clearly setting up a storyline for season 2. Their identity, however, remains a mystery.
Most people seem to be leaning toward the explanation that the unrevealed figure in the furred hood at the end of the finale is Niko, which is a fair guess. For starters, the person is holding the same carved soapstone polar bear totem that Tragic Mick (Michael Beach) gave Niko for good luck, the one she was holding when she died. Granted, there’s always a chance it could be a very similar-looking charm the existence of which will be explained in season 2, but it’s highly unlikely.
The second hint that it’s Niko is the fact the dandelion sprites, Litty and Kingham (Caitlin Reilly and Max Jenkins) are with her. Though the dandelion sprites didn’t technically belong to anyone so much as they were being kept to make sure they didn’t get out and cause any more chaos, Niko was the one who kept them. They were last in the glass jar of her room, and she was the one they interacted with the vast majority of the time. She was also the one they had formed a parasitic relationship with before being expelled from her body. If they were to show up with any character at the end of the series, it would most likely be Niko. However, that’s not the only explanation for who might be under the hood.
It’s a long shot, but it’s possible that the person in the igloo is not Niko at all, but some Inuit deity. Tragic Mick was related to Inuit culture: it was Sedna who turned him from a walrus into a human, and Sedna is the goddess of the sea and of sea creatures in Inuit mythology. Walruses are also intimately tied to Inuit culture, with the indigenous people of the area surviving through the harsh northern Canadian and Alaskan winters by hunting walrus.
The visual symbolism of the final scene is also heavily Inuit-coded, as well. The howling blizzard, the Inuit lodging of the igloo, and the fur-lined, hooded parka are all elements of traditional Inuit culture (albeit with a Hollywood touch). That considered, it could be that the person holding the bear charm isn’t Niko but an Inuit deity of some sort and the blizzard is some Inuit afterlife or alternative realm of the deity. If that’s the case, the reason could be that, as Niko was holding an Inuit charm at the time of her death, whatever deity had come to collect – or to honor Tragic Mick’s promise that it was a good luck charm – was also Inuit.
Niko’s death was tragic and fate unclear at the end of Dead Boy Detectives season 1, but any discerning viewer knows there’s virtually no way she’s dead. Tragic Mick gave Niko the soapstone Inuit charm and told her “You never know when the good you do may come back around” right before the camera focused in on the charm. The camera also made a point to focus on the charm clasped in Niko’s hand after her death.
Obviously, these aren’t coincidences, and obviously, the charm will factor into Niko coming back from the dead in Dead Boy Detectives season 2, should there be one. She could come back in another body entirely, as a ghost, or exactly as she was, but it’s pretty clear she’s coming back. It may be Niko herself trapped in an Inuit afterlife, not a deity, and her story in Dead Boy Detectives season 2 will be about finding her way back to the land of the living.