‘Archive 81’s confounding cliffhanger ending, explained

Though Archive 81‘s twisty-turny first (and only) season has long since ended, people are still … confused. Whenever time travel is involved, there are always bound to be some loose ends and frayed edges in the fabric of the plot. And boy oh boy, was time travel involved.

What happened at the end of Archive 81?

Dan certainly put in the work. He spent multiple episodes trying to restore the videotapes that detailed all of the comings and goings of Melody Pendras during her stay at The Visser apartment building. What he found on those tapes was shocking indeed, and in a big sparks-fly season finale confrontation, he decided to shake down Virgil Davenport for some info, and Virgil had a lot to say.

Virgil tells Dan that Dan’s own father was previously in possession of the tapes and that the tapes randomly showing up in a storage facility before the show’s first season was merely a red herring. As it turns out, Dan wasn’t the only one after the tapes. There was a seriously shady cabal of demon summoners after the tapes as well, as destroying those tapes would help them bring their dark god/alien overlord Kaelego from its dimension into our own.

Virgil then drops the bombshell that it was this group that was responsible for the fire in Dan’s childhood home that claimed the lives of his family. Dan wasn’t supposed to survive, that was an unforeseen complication. Virgil decides to do what the freaky cult couldn’t and riddle Dan full of lead, but is knocked unconscious by Mark. Hell yeah, Mark! Mark and Dan then descend into the basement of the compound, which has been decorated to look like the same satanic ritual site that was found at both the mansion and The Visser, Kaelego effigy and all.

Before they’re able to mess with the ritual, the groundskeeper Bobbi emerges from the shadows with Davenport’s gun and “DUN DUN DUN,” reveals that she is both a Baldung witch and Melody’s mother! She agrees to help Dan begin the ritual to get Melody out of The Otherworld, and Dan crosses into the mysterious dimension only to come face to face (so to speak) with Kaelego itself. Refusing to give in to the eldritch entity’s temptations, Dan finds Melody and is about to pull her back into the material world, but she’s taken by Samuel instead. Melody returns to the present day with her mother, while Dan wakes up in a hospital bed in the 1990s. Don’t you just hate when that happens?

Wait … but what happened?

It would seem that time travel works a little differently in Archive 81. Journeying through the Otherworld is a journey not only outside the dimensions of space but the dimension of time as well. Dan isn’t traveling across time, he’s traveling beyond it and back. When Dan traveled back from the otherworld to get to our universe, he returned at the right location, but the wrong date. His journey spat him out into the past, and, like a certain time-traveling duo and their DeLorean from 1895, Dan was likely going to spend season 2 figuring out how to get back to the future. Unfortunately, Netflix canceled the series before we could find out more.

We’ve got quite a cliffhanger on our hands.