The Continental: From the World of John Wick season 1 finale recap, review & ending explained

Open Go TV / October 6, 2023 / Reviews

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The finale of The Continental: From the World of John Wick follows the showdown between Winston and Cormac, as Winston’s team brings the battle to The Continental. The episode is now streaming on Prime Video and Peacock.

Episode 3 recap: Theater of Pain

Winston and his team are planning and preparing for the attack on The Continental. However, there are no guarantees or safeguards yet. KD comes looking for Vincent to Burton Karate, and Mayhew spies on her.

Lou does not tell KD anything about Vincent, but she keeps feeling like she is being kept in the dark about something important. KD is not the only one looking for Winston; Hansel and Gretel are also trying to find him with Charon.

Winston buys a bank and gifts it to Maisy. He tells her about how his proud mother was reduced to begging when his family faced financial difficulties. He thinks that, unlike other bankers, Maisy will be able to put this bank to better use for the poor. This convinces Maisy to help Winston fight Cormac.

Mayhew admits to KD that he has been following her because he is worried about her. After he went through her belongings, he found out why she has been looking for Winston. This makes KD angry, and she makes him leave.

Hansel, Gretel, and Cormac’s other men find out where Winston is staying. They attack him when he is with Lou in his hotel room. KD also arrives there and stops Winston when he tries to escape. The two parties fight for Winston. Eventually, it is Hansel and Gretel who kidnap him.

KD loses Winston to the twins, but she finds a gold coin, which she had seen being used in the hotel, on the person of one of Cormac’s men. Mayhew warns her about going to The Continental, so KD resigns and uses the coin to get a room in the hotel.

Lou informs the rest of the team of Winston’s kidnapping, and the team attacks The Continental before Cormac is able to harm Winston. Cormac presses the red button to alert the guests, but it does not work.

Cormac realizes that Charon is working with Winston, and he is the one who disabled the button. Charon has the chance to kill Cormac, but he fails to shoot him, and Cormac escapes with the armory’s key.

Meanwhile, Weiko comes to Lou and informs her that the Chinese businessman is coming for her. The Chinese businessman comes with his men and trashes Burton Karate, but not without revealing Lou’s father’s past.

Lou comes to know that her father was an assassin and that he killed the family that lived here before them. Lou never truly knew her father, but Miles did. After finding out the truth, Lou blows Burton Karate to pieces, killing the Chinese businessman in the process. She also takes Weiko under her wing.

Cormac instructs the staff in the Operations Room to press the red button, which leads to all the assassins in the hotel hunting the intruders. While Winston’s crew fights the assassins, Yen patiently waits for Hansel and Gretel, her husband’s murderers.

Winston and Charon manage to get Cormac to the armory, and Cormac realizes that he has walked into a trap when he finds himself surrounded by Maisy’s army. Winston and Maisy created gold coins that are used in the hotel to get her army rooms there. However, the lights go out, and Cormac escapes yet again.

Along with the other assassins, KD is also looking for Winston, and she finally finds him. It turns out that KD’s family was inside that building that Winston set on fire years ago while following Cormac’s orders. KD watched her family die, and now she wants Winston to die in the same way.

She almost kills Winston, who admits that he was the one who started the fire and not Frankie, but Jenkins shoots her. Winston stops Jenkins from killing her. He leaves to find Cormac and end the fight but promises to return and help KD later.

Cormac hides himself in the Operations Room, a secret place from where he can monitor everything. He also announces a two-million-dollar bounty for anyone who catches Winston. Winston and Charon then try to find a way to get to the Operations Room.

Yen finds the twins. She intends to set off a bomb and kill herself along with them, but Miles stops her. While Miles fights Hansel, Yen fights Gretel. Hansel sends a bomb to Lemmy and kills him, and Miles struggles to defeat him.

Lou comes to the hotel and fights alongside her brother. In the end, she uses her father’s gun to shoot Hansel to death. At the same time, Yen detonates the bomb and blows Gretel to pieces. With Frankie’s murderers dead, the only thing left to do is to find and kill Cormac.

The Continental: From the World of John Wick season 1 ending explained in detail:

What is Cormac’s secret weapon?

Cormac had earlier talked about having a card up his sleeve. When he sees his assassins dying and Winston’s team gaining the upper hand, he decides to use his secret weapon.

There is a system in the Operation Room that allows Cormac to demolish the hotel building in a few minutes. He activates the destructuring process, and the hotel shuts down completely, trapping everyone inside.

All the people inside the building will be killed when it gets demolished. After activating the system, Cormac, who is the manager and has an escape pod, flees to get out of there.

Does Cormac die?

Winston and Charon finally reach the Operations Room, but they cannot stop the destructuring without Cormac’s handprint. Winston chases Cormac, who is waiting underground for his escape pod, and catches up to him.

Cormac confesses to Winston that when he sent him and his brother to set fire to KD’s house, he knew that there were people inside the building. He wanted Winston and Frankie to become murderers because that is how Cormac turns his henchmen into perfect soldiers.

KD also arrives there and overhears this. She then shoots and kills Cormac, but after everything that she has seen and heard, she spares Winston’s life. Winston cuts off Cormac’s hand and uses his handprint to stop the destructuring, saving the lives of his team members.

Does Winston take over The Continental?

After Cormac’s death and the end of the fight, Winston drinks with his team in Lemmy and Frankie’s honor. He also asks Charon to leave this place and start his life afresh, but Charon considers The Continental his home, so he chooses to stay back and work with Winston.

The Adjudicator then pays Winston a visit and asks him about how he was able to defeat Cormac. She then reveals that she was the one who paid Frankie to steal the coin press, as she wanted to end Cormac’s reign.

She also reminds Winston that The Continental is not his to take, but Winston disagrees because he now possesses the coin press. Frankie and Winston used to sleep in the trunk of a car when they were children. Frankie had hidden the coin press in the trunk of that car, and Winston found it.

Now that Winston has the one thing that the High Table seeks, he believes he is in control more than anyone else. He does not need The Adjudicator to be the middleman in his dealings with the High Table, so he kills her and takes control of the hotel.

Review

The show’s finale is not only lengthy but also overstuffed with too many subplots. There is too much happening at the same time, and the stories of all the characters do not get enough time.
Cormac completely loses it in this episode. He is an interesting antagonist — a brutal and deranged man whose speech is filled with Biblical allusions.
If there is one thing that is more than enough in this episode, it is the action sequences. There is a lot of violence and gore, which was not seen so much in the previous episodes.
The telephone booth fight between Lou and Mayhew is one of the most creative and original scenes in the show. It is a well-choreographed scene that makes good use of the limited space inside the booth.