When Bodkin’s Gilbert (Will Forte), Dove (Siobhán Cullen), and Emmy (Robyn Cara) showed up in small-town Ireland to record a podcast, they knew they were chasing a great story — but they didn’t know just how many threads they’d have to follow to weave together the full picture of what happened one fateful fall night two decades ago.

So what, exactly, did happen in this quiet seaside town? And how in the world are yoga-teaching nuns, Interpol, smugglers, a sunken car, and a whole lot of eels involved? 

“You need seven episodes to be able to explain,” Cullen tells Tudum. “I think that’s what’s so great about the show. As soon as you think you have a handle on it, there’s another twist, there’s another turn, there’s a red herring, and the rug is pulled from underneath you. I don’t think there’s a succinct way to solve the case without going on that journey with the three [leads].”

Below, Cullen and her castmates, along with showrunners Jez Scharf and Alex Metcalf, try their best to explain the ending of this wild story.

What happens in Season 1 of Bodkin?

Plenty of people in town didn’t want our heroes digging into their secrets, but dig they did. Gilbert poked around and tried to make friends, but hard-nosed journalist Dove had other ideas about how to get to the bottom of this mystery. And Emmy might’ve felt outclassed by the heavy hitters she was assisting, but she pulled her own weight. All three uncovered major leads, helping to find out the fates of the three missing persons — and infiltrate a major international eel-smuggling ring. 

They thought the story would be simple: Three people went missing. What happened to them? 

Helping — and sometimes hurting — their investigation were local twentysomething and temporary chauffeur Sean O’Shea (Chris Walley); Garda Sergeant Power (Denis Conway); Power’s son, Teddy (Ger Kelly); black market smuggler Seamus Gallagher (David Wilmot); and Sean’s adoptive mother, Mrs. O’Shea (Pom Boyd). 

Seamus had a special interest in the case: His girlfriend, Fiona, went missing along with his brother, Malachy. For years, he thought maybe they’d run off together, until Dove followed a few hunches and discovered Sergeant Power’s car at the bottom of a bog with two bodies in the trunk. One was Malachy — but the other was not Fiona. Instead, it was a traveler named Greta. 

Meanwhile, Sean was trying to help Seamus broker a deal for his smuggling operation — eels. Apparently, eels are a hot commodity on the international black market, enough that a few yakuza representatives offered a massive payday for the lot. But those yakuza representatives were actually Interpol agents trying to shut down the illegal enterprise. 

Plus, Seamus Gallagher wasn’t who he said he was. He’s actually Jackie McFadden, a notorious Northern Irish smuggler with a long-standing rivalry with another Northern Irish family, the McArdles.

So, what actually happened the night of Samhain? Also … what is Samhain?

Samhain (pronounced “sah-win”) is an old Celtic festival. “It goes back to old mythology,” Walley tells Tudum. “It was a night when the dead would come back and revisit.” Essentially, Forte says, “Samhain is like the traditional Irish Halloween-night festival. It’s basically like Day of the Dead.”

“A festival where, for one day, the dead could come back — that felt like an incredibly potent metaphor for a story about a true crime investigation,” Scharf says. “All these characters have things that they’re running from, or ghosts that they’re running from, and essentially it all [comes] together at the festival.”

In the present day, Gilbert, Dove, and Emmy realize how everything is connected and find each other at Bodkin’s new and improved Samhain festival just in time for a bomb to blow up a trailer full of eels. (Although the explosion killed many eels, all of the humans were unharmed save for Sean, whose thumb was blasted off.)

But back in the ’90s, here’s what went down: While everyone was celebrating Samhain, Seamus got a call that the McArdles were on their way to Bodkin, and he wanted to make sure Malachy and Fiona got out of town. However, Teddy and Malachy got into a scuffle over Fiona, and Teddy killed him with a brick. Teddy’s policeman father was on his way to get rid of Malachy’s body when he accidentally hit and killed Greta, so he put her body in the trunk, too, and ran his car into the bog. 

And what happened to Fiona?

Fiona escaped to the convent on Inish Mac Thiere, where she hid among the beekeeping nuns. But she kept a secret — she was pregnant, and she died while giving birth to a healthy baby boy, Sean. Mrs. O’Shea didn’t adopt him from Romania; she was a nun who left the convent to raise the baby in his hometown.

So is Seamus Sean’s father?

That’s right! Sean is not from Romania; he’s a Bodkin native through and through. Seamus is Sean’s father, and Fiona is his birth mother. (Mrs. O’Shea, of course, is Sean’s mother.) Walley tells Tudum that he loved a few parallels between his storyline and another famous pop culture paternity case: “It has the references to Star Wars and Luke losing his hand. I lose my thumb.”

Where did the eels come from? 

“I think I speak for both Alex and I here: We knew early on that if a trailer full of eels didn’t explode, we would have failed,” jokes Scharf. “That was a responsibility we took very seriously.”

In actual seriousness, Metcalf tells Tudum that the fish were not part of Scharf’s original pitch, but the writer’s room uncovered the prevalence of illegally exporting the slimy creatures and couldn’t resist including it in the show. “Once we realized that eels were the biggest wildlife-smuggling crime in the world based in Northern Europe and Ireland, we were like, ‘How can we not do this?’ It’s so absurd and wonderful.”

“If you Google it,” Scharf adds, “there’s all sorts of pictures of illegal eel farms being raided and stuff. It is nuts, because — and this is true! — we have no idea how they breed. Absolutely no idea. We have never seen an eel give birth. We cannot breed them in captivity.”

As Seamus says in the show, “I hope we never find out” how the animals reproduce, a viewpoint Wilmot embraces. “It’s funny to think there’s mystery still left in the world,” he tells Tudum. (In fact, scientists have just begun to find out.)

What happens to the podcasters now?

Gilbert, Dove, and Emmy were facing their own messy pasts when they headed to Bodkin, but their time in the town taught them about dealing with their problems in their own ways. 

“I think Gilbert probably starts to question his methods a little more thanks to these two,” says Forte. “It seems like he’s a little more realistic with himself, a little more honest with himself.” 

Cara says her character learned how to be a better journalist. “I think Dove pushes her in ways, makes her more daring,” she says. 

And Cullen says Emmy rubbed off on Dove, too. “It was so painful for her to spend so much time with two people who are so endlessly positive and happy,” she tells Tudum. “And then by the end I think she cracked. I suppose the light got in a bit, and I think it shifted her for the better.”

Bodkin is now streaming on Netflix.