Warning: This post contains major spoilers for The Madness.
Netflix’s new miniseries The Madness isn’t about the events of Jan. 6, 2021. But show creator Stephen Belber explains how the unsettling events of the Capitol insurrection that day had a direct impact on the creation of the conspiracy-tinged thriller.
“The world was a little shaky,” Belber says. “You weren’t exactly sure who to trust. I liked the idea of planting someone with whose perspective we could just sort of sail through the craziness and a lot of different worlds, a lot of different communities, and see where they fracture and where they can possibly eventually coalesce.”
That “someone” in The Madness is Muncie Daniels, played by Colman Domingo, who is also an executive producer. Muncie is a successful CNN news anchor, whose life turns upside down during a getaway to the Poconos to start writing his new book. It’s there he becomes entangled in a murder case when he is framed for the killing of the leader of a white-supremacist hate group known as the Forge. A mass misinformation campaign then makes Muncie one of the most wanted men in America.
The series is a thrilling journey as Muncie tries to claim his innocence and uncover who framed him for murder—and to learn why he’s been framed for murder. The show is jam-packed with shocking twists and turns, culminating in a dizzying finale that concludes Muncie’s journey. But does he get the answers he’s looking for?
Belber and co-showrunner VJ Boyd explain the finale of The Madnessbreaking down the show’s big conspiracy and a crucial showdown.
The climactic showdown
There are a number of enemies invested in Muncie’s downfall. In Episode 7, viewers discover the show’s big bad is Rodney Kraintz (Neal Huff), the silent majority investor of a big tech company called Revitalize, who orchestrated Muncie’s framing. The Madness finale hinges on one pivotal scene: Muncie’s faceoff with Rodney, at his office in a quiet, private warehouse in New York City.
With a gun in hand, Muncie breaks into Rodney’s office. The executive is alone and unarmed, in a room with a giant server farm he uses in service of his mission to spread disinformation like wildfire.
Rodney uses disinformation to fund his quest to influence politics and power, and Muncie stands in his way. Faced with the armed Muncie, Rodney doesn’t seem particularly threatened, nor does he seem worried about Muncie’s presence—a man this good at wide-scale manipulation can’t be thwarted by a single man. “If somebody hurt someone you love, or if you feel wounded by the stretching of some truth, or by the demise of a Neo-Nazi, I would ask you to consider the larger framework. This is a much –” Rodney’s explanation is cut off by Muncie, who, frustrated with Rodney’s dismissive attitude, has had enough.
“Why the fuck did you frame me?” Muncie demands. “You were there,” Rodney answers. It’s an answer that would upset anyone, and Muncie is certainly no exception. Though as Belber explains, it’s not a completely honest answer: “Rodney is being a little disingenuous by simply saying the framing was circumstance. The circumstances were a perfect storm: The fact that Muncie was a well-known figure, the fact that he was black, the fact that he was there, and creating a sort of racial storm out of this was a perfect deflection for what Rodney Kraintz was actually up to.” Still, that was all luck: Muncie wasn’t set up ahead of time.
The wrong place and the wrong time
It just so happened that Muncie appeared to be the perfect person to frame. “It definitely was a wrong-place, wrong-time situation,” Boyd says. The only flaw in Rodney’s plan was that Muncie was far more resourceful than he could have imagined.
The most shocking part of The Madness ending is that the big conspiracy at the heart of Muncie’s problems wasn’t a conspiracy at all. “I think it’s interesting how coincidences, and someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that those little things can end up creating conspiracy, creating something that looks like a conspiracy that was set up ahead of time,” Boyd explains. “If you look at something like PizzaGate, if you’re invested into it, you’re going to look at every tweet Hilary Clinton had that has a pizza emoji. What could it possibly mean? But it just means she wanted pizza,” says Boyd. “The conspiracy was what it always is, which is about power.”
Muncie is left with a crucial decision: Kill Rodney, or walk away. Muncie has taken the high road at every opportunity, and in the face of every horrifying thing that’s come his way. And in the most intense moment of his life, face to face with the man who framed him, he continues to take the high road, and decides not to kill Rodney.
“There’s a part of me that felt like, well, this is the predictable way to end it. Of course, he’s not going to kill him,” Boyd tells me. “But the truth is, we pushed him far enough that from a viewer perspective, who’s going to blame him if he does?” It’s that very notion that makes the scene between Muncie and Rodney so intense. You believe that Muncie will stick to his wits and not kill Rodney, but after all he’s been through, it’s hard to say it wouldn’t be justified.
“We thought about versions where Muncie does pull the trigger,” Boyd reveals. “There was actually an early version where we cut to Muncie at the end, and he’s kidnapped Rodney Kraintz, and has him tied up in his basement…He’s forcing him to pull strings to do good.”
Ultimately, the decision was made to stay true to Muncie’s moral compass; “I felt like it was unfair to Muncie to make him that guy…when they stoop low, he goes high,” Belber confirms. “Though we make a nod to the notion that he’ll never be safe—even if you were to eliminate Rodney Kraintz, the web of those seeking to control narratives lives on.”
One last twist
While Muncie walks away, The Madness has one last twist up its sleeve: Rodney is killed, but by someone unexpected. Bobby Woods, who narrowly escaped the FBI raid on The Forge, is seen killing Rodney and his bodyguards moments after a news announcement that he’s been completely acquitted of any wrongdoing. “As Agent Khalil explains earlier to Muncie, ‘When you stir up the madness, sometimes the madness comes back and bites you.’ And Rodney was pulling these strings and riling people up…he was very much hoisted by his own petard,” Boyd explains. Woods falls victim to hysteria, and in an ironic turn, the very hysteria Rodney readily whips up for personal gain proves to be his undoing.
With Muncie free of the madness that threatened to destroy his life, the final scene finds him spending time with his children in the park. But it’s not all peaceful. The sound of a car suddenly pulling away sends a shock down his spine. “Muncie realizes at the end, yes, he’s distressed by the car, frightened even. But he’s also realizing ‘Even if I pulled the trigger, I still wouldn’t feel more peace. I’d still have jumped when that car pulled out,’” Boyd says. He shares a tender moment with his ex-wife, Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake), and they smile at each other as the show fades to black, leaving a sense of hope for Muncie and his family to be able to move on. But will Muncie ever feel truly safe again?
Muncie may have had his name cleared and put a life-threatening conspiracy behind him, and now he can forge ahead with repairing the family bonds that have been frayed over time. But misinformation still looms large, and the threat of the madness lingers on.
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