Netflix’s Inside Man Ending Explained- Why Grieff May Not Have Killed His Wife

Netflix’s latest, Inside Man from Stephen Moffat of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Who fame is a twisty who-done -it is bolstered by a handful of great performances and a mystery that isn’t entirely resolved. Set between two stories that fairly quickly overlap, it is precisely the kind of series that those who love Moffat’s work will appreciate. Stanley Tucci(Jefferson Grieff) is a death row detective whose work as a criminalist prior to killing his wife and hacking her head off has made him a bit of a celebrity inside prison. He is a curiosity to those seeking answers about current crimes and a way to get absolution from the one that landed him in prison.

With just weeks left to live, Grieff meets with a journalist who initially wants a story but later returns with a case of her own. Grieff has strict guidelines for how he chooses his cases. They must be moral imperatives, meaning they must pique his interest and make him feel like he is doing something good in the world. The young journalist Beth has an intriguing but vague case. An acquaintance with who she had been regularly talking sent her a cryptic photo. There were no further texts, but Beth intuitively knew something was wrong. The no-nonsense, clever woman would not have sent something without a reason.

Grieff at first rejects her plea to help and instead bargains with her. He says he will agree to an interview if she gives up on helping her friend. She agrees, and so lies the central conceit of Inside Man. Everyone is capable of terrible things. We all have darkness inside us, and when presented with the right set of consequences, we can snap and be capable of even murder.

While Beth and Grieff, who admits to tricking Beth, search for Janice, her missing friend, we watch things deteriorate for her, Vicar Harry Watling, his wife Mary, and their son Ben. In the course of Harry’s work with his congregation, Harry was given a flash drive with child pornography by Edgar, a troubled young man. When he inadvertently took the flash drive home, he had no idea it would transform his life forever.

Janice, who was tutoring Ben in math, asked for a flash drive. When she discovered the images, she thought it was Ben’s. Her condemnation unleashed a cascade of events that resulted in her being bloodied and restrained in the basement and Harry and Mary googling how to murder someone. They were desperate to protect Ben, who was ironically innocent. Unfortunately, their parent’s love caused them to do unspeakable things to save him. Harry’s actions led to Edgar and Mary’s death as well as the near destruction of Ben.

The ending of Inside Man explained

Grieff and Beth eventually caught up with Janice and rescued her in the nick of time, but the most compelling mystery of the season was left unanswered. Grieff used his missing wife’s family to aid Beth in saving Janice’s life by claiming he was sending them to retrieve his late wife’s head. Although he freely admitted to strangling her, he wouldn’t tell anyone where her head was. This was a point of contention and sorrow for the family. Grieff’s wife’s head was not in Harry’s basement, but the more important question was never even asked. Why did Grieff hide the head in the first place?

Inside Man Season 2 possibilities

Janice and Grieff’s story is just getting started when the credits rolled on the four-episode Season 1 of Inside Man. Newly freed, Janice goes to Grieff in prison and asks for help killing her husband. Most people come to him after committing the crime, but she wants help getting away with it. There are clues all along that Janice left an abusive relationship. Janice quickly came to Beth’s defense on the subway where they first met. She stood up to the aggressive man and outwitted him.

She also told Harry her sister expected a phone call and would worry if she didn’t receive it. Lastly, she probably wasn’t lying to Harry when she told him she occasionally had to go on walkabouts for extended periods of time. She was a woman who was always on the run from her husband. When he got too close, she had to go dark and run. Despite answering quickly, she wasn’t married; she was tied to a man who she hated and who almost certainly hurt her.

Did Grieff actually kill his wife, and where is her head?

Her reasoning for wanting her husband dead and Grieff’s involvement could be the catalyst to uncover why Grieff killed his wife. If he actually killed her, that is. Grieff told Beth to look for what was missing instead of what was there when looking for a missing husband early on. He also told the prison warden if his wife’s head was found, it would explain why he killed her. Why was he so keen to keep that information hidden? Perhaps Grieff wasn’t protecting himself but his wife. In Episode 2 of Inside Man, he says love is common but never commonplace. That is a strangely romantic notion, considering he murdered his wife. He further relates to the young woman pleading with Grieff to help look for her missing father.

She says that hope is a terrible thing, and he agrees. He could be talking about his current circumstance, but he could also be talking about his wife. What if he never killed her at all, and she committed suicide? Her family and faith might think suicide damns her, and Grieff is trying to protect her. Everyone would know her actual cause of death if her head was found. Grieff could be sacrificing himself to preserve the memory of the woman he loved so much.

What if Grieff isn’t a killer at all? Perhaps his desire to tip the moral scale in his favor is for his wife and what he had to do to protect her secrets. I’m just not convinced the brilliant and enigmatic man is a murderer. He says, “We see the exception, not the rule.” He admitted to strangling her. The nature of the crime is so heinous no one thinks to wonder why he might have done it and if he is lying.

A dedicated and gifted doctor and husband hiding a dark passenger, to borrow a phrase, make him the exception, not the rule, and humans are quick to believe the exceptional given the right reasons. It is too easy for us to believe he did it because we all carry the possibility of violence. The thing is, he is the rule. He loved his wife more so than even himself. If she hung herself, he could be using the ligature marks on her neck to hide that fact. By admitting to strangling her, it allows Grieff to hide what really happened.

Grieff tells Beth when she is leaving the house of the woman whose husband went missing, “If you truly love someone, never come home early.” That’s another curious thing to say. It could hint at infidelity or something far sadder. Grieff’s wife may have been profoundly depressed, and Grieff didn’t or couldn’t see it. His guilt may stem from his inability to help her in life.

Grieff’s words are always the key. He is telling everyone what they need to know in Inside Man. “Everyone’s a murderer, Beth. All it takes is a good reason and a bad day.” The title isn’t about having a person hidden on the inside ferreting out the truth but about being trapped. By the end of Inside Man, Harry has been caught and convicted of Janice’s attempted murder and kidnapping, and Grieff is closer to his execution. No one is any closer to finding his wife’s head, though.

What happens, not what doesn’t happen, is essential. Positives, not negatives, are the keys. Humans are conditioned to see the positive. Grieff blames himself for not seeing his wife’s pain until it was too late. His name is a nod to that pain. We believe what we want to believe. Grieff says he killed her, and so he did. He is the blue bicycle lost in a sea of red. Grieff taunts his wife’s father, but there is more subtext there than it appears. Grieff is using the criminal’s connections to save Janice and himself and also to let the viewer know that his wife had a dark side too. We know his wife’s father was the head of a crime organization and was very powerful. We will have to wait and see what his career choices have to do with anything, but nothing is by chance.

Grieff is trapped with the burden of his secret and the knowledge that he desecrated his wife’s body. Maybe he did it? Maybe he didn’t? He may not have murdered her, but his actions led to her death, and he can’t stop punishing himself for it. It’s all speculation at this point, but we can hope Inside Man Season 2 gives us another glimpse at the internal workings of Grieff and all the rest of us capable of horrible things in the right circumstances. The one thing we do know is Grieff is a liar. Inside Man is currently on Netflix.