Everything is not what it seems in Netflix’s limited series Vladimir, or at least that’s what The Protagonist teases us with by the end of the finale. Based on the book of the same name by Julia May Jonas, the series stars Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz as an unnamed college professor who becomes completely enamored with her titular younger colleague, played by Leo Woodall.
Feeling stuck in her marriage, which has an “agreement,” with fellow professor John (John Slattery) and reeling from her husband’s sexual misconduct allegations, The Protagonist slips into an obsession and seemingly an alternate reality. She daydreams about pursuing a physically intimate relationship with Vladimir, and as the first episode suggests, she might go too far.
Since Netflix has designated the new show as a limited series, Vladimir features eight episodes that come to a natural conclusion and wrap up the season-long story. Between an uncertain ending containing a fire, fantasies fulfilled, and future decisions, what’s fact and fiction with our possibly unreliable narrator? Let’s dig into the ending and explain what went down!
Warning: Major spoilers ahead from the Netflix original series.
What happens with John’s hearing?
Throughout the season, The Protagonist works to put an end to John’s hearing, mostly to save her own job and put an end to the public scrutiny. She makes several attempts to get the hearing pushed to the summer, which would allow John to retire and put the whole thing to rest. However, a big mistake allows the hearing to follow through as planned.
When Lila joins the case, The Protagonist realizes that she has some loose ends with the former student that could ultimately hurt the case. It appears as though that after learning Lila had a relationship with her husband, The Protagonist retaliated by voting against Lila receiving a lucrative scholarship. She denies that the affair had anything to do with her decision.
In the end, The Protagonist is able to get through to Lila, and her intentions seem pure. There could have been an ulterior motive, since Lila doesn’t bring The Protagonist down in the hearing. As John reveals, the complaints were dismissed. He can no longer teach at the university, meaning that he was let go, but he was able to keep his pension. He views the outcome as a win, but it came at the cost of his relationship with their daughter Sid (Ellen Robertson).
Do The Protagonist and Vlad actually sleep together?
Vladimir features a unique format in which The Protagonist breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience. She also has multiple daydreams in each episode about having sex with Vlad, but did any of those actually happen? We can likely count out that any of the intimate moments that she imagined actually happened, but there is one moment that definitely did.
While at the cabin in the season’s final episode, The Protagonist and Vladimir finally have sex after all of the tension between them since they met. The scene doesn’t play out like any of the previous daydream scenes and appeared 100 percent real. Giving into temptation happens after The Protagonists drugs him, ties him up, and basically gaslights him about what she did. She also leads him to believe that his wife Cynthia (Jessica Henwick) was having an affair with her husband John.
That turned out to be false, but she didn’t know that when she told Vlad… unless she bent what she believed to be happening to fit her narrative. In the end, The Protagonist doesn’t end up with Vladimir. This isn’t a love story with a happy ending. The show ends with The Protagonist saving her new book from the fire that breaks out in the cabin, leaving Vlad and John trapped inside.
Who survives the fire, and is she telling the truth?
In the final moments of the series, The Protagonist tells us while standing before the burning cabin not to worry, that she called 9-1-1 and both Vlad and John lived. We have no actual evidence of any of that happening. Likewise, she tells us that she published her book about a college professor’s obsession with her younger colleague, which performs better than Vlad’s from his perspective.
Honestly, we can believe that portion of her truth much more. She was inspired by her infatuation with Vladimir to begin writing her second book, and it seemed obvious that Vlad was also writing about her while in the cabin. But we have to take her at her word that she saved Vlad and John and that what she says about the books is true. She ends the series by cheekily nudging our belief in her.
Vladimir’s ending leaves us to wonder how much we should have been trusting The Protagonist all along. After all, she was our entry point into the story and hers was the only point of view that we saw. While other characters expressed their feelings and truth, she shared hers straight to us, which could have been lies anyway. As she had been teaching her literature students, there are various ways to interpret an author’s work, and the audience should be questioning our unreliable narrator.
