Is Emaline real or not? Mike Flanagan breaks down Carrie ending and big book change

*Warning: Spoilers ahead for Carrie*

Mike Flanagan’s new adaptation of Carrie has made some pretty major changes to Stephen King’s original novel, but one of the biggest involves a mysterious new character called Emaline West.

Played by Thalía Dudek, Emaline befriends Carrie not long after she starts at Ewen High School. Right from the off, there’s something seriously strange about her, and as the Prime Video series progresses, it becomes unclear whether she’s even real.

As we eventually learn in a jarring twist, Carrie (Summer H. Howell) seems to be the only person who can actually see her. So, is Emaline just a figment of Carrie’s imagination, or is there something much bigger going on?

Well, the answer is a little more complicated than you might think, and it turns out Emaline is at the centre of one of Flanagan’s biggest departures from the book.

Is Emaline real in Carrie?

Yes, she is real. But the version Carrie’s seeing for much of the series is actually astral projection, meaning Emaline is able to send her consciousness somewhere else without physically being there (think Stranger Things). 

This explains why Carrie appears to be talking to herself in the footage Chris (Alison Thornton) and Billy (Arthur Conti) steal from her house. Emaline isn’t imaginary, but nobody else can see her projected form.

And it turns out she’s been keeping a pretty big secret from Carrie. Emaline is actually part of a mysterious group of women with psychic abilities, led by Adelaide (Kate Siegel), who sent her to keep an eye on Carrie after discovering her telekinetic powers.

Things get even more complicated during the disastrous prom night. While it initially appears that Carrie is responsible for the entire massacre, Emaline is actually behind much of the destruction. Carrie allows her to take control of her body, and Emaline uses her powers to unleash chaos on the school.

But this doesn’t mean Carrie is completely innocent. As Flanagan has confirmed, she’s still responsible for killing Chris and Billy. 

Following these events, the Carrie finale reveals Adelaide is also the woman interviewing survivors about the prom massacre, supposedly as part of a documentary. 

But it soon becomes clear that these interviews aren’t so innocent. Adelaide is gathering information about what happened, while also trying to influence how the survivors remember it. 

Sue (Siena Agudong) recalls seeing a shadow “exploding” behind Carrie, which we know to be Emaline’s astral form, and remembers Carrie wasn’t acting alone that night. There were other members of the cabal there, but Adelaide uses her powers to make Sue forget. 

Oh, and Adelaide finishes Carrie’s mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) off when she admits she can’t tap into her powers – or “shine”, as they call it (a term King fans will know all too well).

Although the full extent of the group’s plans remains unclear, they appear to view Emaline as a threat after she helps Carrie escape. When Carrie brought her house down and nearly killed her mum, Emaline pulls her out of the wreckage, finally confirming that she isn’t just a figment of Carrie’s imagination. 

Emaline also explains why her astral projection disappeared mid-dance: her real form got shot. The pair then drive away together, leaving their destination unknown – and the door wide open for a potential season 2. 

Mike Flanagan on the ending and expanding Stephen King’s Carrie universe

Although King’s novel does include an investigation into Carrie’s powers and the possibility of a hereditary “TK (telekinetic) gene”, neither Emaline nor Adelaide’s secret society appear in the original story.

Flanagan has used these new characters to expand on the book’s suggestion that others may have similar abilities, while also exploring the wider supernatural world of King’s stories.

As Siegel explained to Deadline, “What I loved about Adelaide is… she represents this framing device that’s never been fully realised in any of the other adaptations, which is Stephen King pointing to the fact that this is a bigger story, and he goes back and examines that idea multiple times in his career through The Shop and The Institute. 

“You see it quite a bit. He talks about breakers. Clearly this is something he’s interested in, the TK gene and just the concept of the Shine kind of harmonises throughout all of his stories.”

When discussing Carrie, Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly that the “only difference between Carrie White and Charlie from Firestarter” – a character from another King novel who has powerful pyrokinetic and mental abilities – “is location and circumstance”. 

“There were a lot of active questions about how much we could open this universe because King and Carrie is specific to the TK gene being exclusively in women,” he said. 

“So we’re not really getting into Danny Torrance or that side of things. But! What can we do within the framework of the Carrie story that does play into the vibe of those larger Stephen King universes?”

Elaborating on the creation of Emaline, Flanagan said they needed her to step in for Carrie during the prom massacre. “We also struggled with we’re never gonna be able to love this character as much as we do and then watch her intentionally murder so many people,” he continued. 

“Carrie’s culpability became a major question. How do we allow the tragedy to unfold in a way that she’s still responsible, but that she isn’t a monster herself?”

That said, he didn’t want to remove all culpability from Carrie, which is why he made sure it was Carrie herself, rather than Emaline, who killed Chris. “I want it to be unambiguous. It wasn’t Emaline. It wasn’t someone else,” Flanagan added. 

“Carrie looked her in the eye. That was critical, too. You want to see her get revenge on her tormentors, but then at the same time, it was that entire auditorium of kids that begs some moral questions, and we had to play with it a little.”

To the untrained eye, Emaline seemed like another student at the school. But subtle clues were dropped from the very beginning. When Carrie meets her for the first time in episode 2, after Carrie asks what she’s looking at, Emaline says, “No, you’re right. I’m a spy and you’re my mission. I’m just surprised that you caught me, that’s all.”

It comes across as a lighthearted joke, but she is actually telling the truth here. The fact that Carrie sees her proves that she has those powers. 

But there’s an even more subtle hint at the party in episode 3. While all of the students have red cups, Emaline has a blue one. Flanagan explained to EW that as Emaline was using astral projection, she could only project what was on her physical body – so she had to make do with a different cup. 

“We say these women are hidden in plain sight,” he explained. “We have to hide them in plain sight in the show.”

Will there be a season 2?

At the time of writing, Prime Video is yet to renew Carrie for season 2. But Flanagan definitely has a plan if the show gets the greenlight. 

The showrunner told EW that Adelaide and her psychics tie into his larger vision for Carrie, which he envisions as a three-season arc if they’re able to continue. “There are a lot of questions about Adelaide, aren’t there?” Siegel added.

Flanagan also told People that the cliffhanger ending was “baked into” the show “from the start”, and was “one of the things that excited Stephen King about” the series.

“We wanted very much to just try to focus on making it to that last frame of this season, in case it was a one-off season and we’d never return to this world again. We wanted to serve that arc and send the story off right,” he said about the ending. 

“But it was very much on my mind that there was so much potential for it to expand further, and we wanted to leave room for that too… In a dream scenario, I think it’d be really cool [to continue the story]. I’ve never gotten to do that. And we certainly tried to leave the ingredients there for that to be the case.”

In other words, watch this space. No doubt we’ll have an update in the weeks to come. 

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Featured image credit: Prime Video