**Spoilers for The Haunting of Bly Manor lie within, especially for the finale.**
When watching a show with The Haunting in the title, you probably don’t expect to fall in love with the couples presented before you, but then The Haunting of Bly Manor rolled up and ruined whatever happiness I thought I knew with its exploration of the relationships of Hannah Grose (T’Nia Miller) and Owen Sharma (Rahul Kohli), and of course, Jamie (Amelia Eve) and Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti).
The four are all put together at Bly Manor to take care of Flora and Miles Wingrave, two orphaned children who still live at the estate. Dani, their au pair, is an American who arrives after Rebecca (Tahirah Sharif) has been found dead. There, she meets Owen, who is the chef; Hannah, the housekeeper; and then Jamie, the gardener. They grow closer as they all take care of the house and these children and become a family of sorts while trying to figure out the mysteries of Bly Manor.
The Haunting of Bly Manor mastered the art of giving us couples we love and want to root for—and promptly taking them away from us. Watching the show, there is a real “will they, won’t they” feel throughout the first few episodes between both of these couples. Owen and Hannah are constantly near each other and talking to one another, and Jamie, at first, doesn’t particularly care that Dani is at the manor but slowly begins to open up to her.
But as the show progresses, so do these couples, and without realizing it, I found myself so captivated by them that I truly broke down in sobs by the finale. In an episode titled “The Altar of the Dead” (which is episode 5), we learn that Hannah Grose has been killed by the ghost of Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) as he inhabits the living body of Miles Wingrave (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth). Pushed to her death in a well, the entire time we know Hannah, she’s been a ghost living in the manor and staying there for a purpose she doesn’t yet know and her love of Owen, despite never telling him so.
Bly Manor is sadly a lesson in two parts: Tell those you love while you have the chance and embrace every moment with people you care about while you can. So yeah, those two things kind of go hand in hand, but when you look at “The Beast in the Jungle” (the finale episode of the show), it’s clear with each of these couples that they are tragic for their own reasons.
With Hannah and Owen, they never tell each other how they feel, and Owen has to go on and live his life continually loving Hannah and knowing that she loved him despite the fact that they never gave their love a chance. For Dani and Jamie, they have years together, but they’re lost to the past and Dani’s fear of what the ghosts will do to Jamie if she doesn’t go back to Bly Manor means what time they do get is constantly marred by what is to come.
The reveal that the Storyteller (Carla Gugino) is Jamie, telling Dani’s story to an adult Flora on her wedding day (as both Flora and Miles do not remember their time at Bly Manor) ,is heartbreaking in its own way because Jamie is clearly still connected to Dani and the love they shared with each other, just as Owen, who has a photo of Hannah hanging up in his restaurant, is the same way.
Both of these couples loved each other so completely that it stayed with them even after their partners were gone, and that’s the kind of love that is both inspiring and also devastates us as we’re watching their pain. Seeing Jamie scream as she saw Dani’s body in the lake felt like happiness was being sucked out of the room. Watching Owen light the candle for Hannah and knowing that, even in death, Hannah was reliving memories of Owen to calm herself, felt like happiness was gone forever.
It’s dramatic, but looking at both of these couples, we can learn a lot about embracing life, and I can’t stop thinking about how much Hannah/Owen and Jamie/Dani loved each other.
(image: Netflix)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
