There was never really a mystery. Throughout its run, the FXX comedy Wilfred invited intense speculation about the “real” nature of Wilfred, the dog who appears as an Australian guy in a dog suit (Jason Gann), but only to burnt-out former lawyer Ryan (Elijah Wood). The show spawned theories that rivaled Lost (and invited the comparison)—maybe Wilfred was an alien, maybe Ryan was dead the whole time, and maybe Ryan was a figment of Wilfred’s imagination. But the answer was always right in front of us: Ryan is psychotic, and after attempting suicide in the pilot, he started seeing Wilfred as a person, the manifestation of repressed parts of himself. It was all in his head—basically, a series-long, less violent version of Fight Club.
The show played coy in the past, hinting several times that Wilfred was a supernatural being, maybe a demon or, throughout this past season, a god. But the writers more or less gave up the secret in the season two premiere, when Ryan tells Wilfred that it’s “messed up” that he spent several months pretending Wilfred was a person, and the dog responds like a lovesick actor trying too hard to sell a romcom: “Without you I have no purpose. I’m nothing. It’s like I don’t even exist.”
It’s become fashionable in recent years for series finales to shoot for big, defining statements, with results ranging from divisive (Lost) to, well, divisive (How I Met Your Mother—though my initial opinion of “Last Forever” has softened a bit). “Resistance” and “Happiness,” the final two episodes of Wilfred, won’t satisfy those who were hoping for a truly crazy ending, but for the most part they succeeded in recontextualizing and clarifying what the show was about from the start: a guy coming to terms with himself and his messed-up family history by grappling with a pretty serious history of mental illness. It took almost 50 episodes, but Ryan is finally comfortable just hanging out inside his own head at the beach—the answer was that the answer didn’t matter. It’s crazy that the ending feels warm and fuzzy and safe.
OK, the emphasis on the bromance between Ryan and Wilfred (or, rather, Ryan and himself) is all kinds of disturbing if you think through the full implications of everything Ryan’s done over the course of the series—late-night surprise cunnilingus, committing several crimes and then framing a kid for said crimes, kidnapping a bunch of cats. These facts are mostly papered over, with the exception of the nauseating Fight Club-style reveal of Ryan giving a panting, clueless dog the finger, smoking and laughing hysterically alone in the closet, and holding his own head in a toilet. This is what we’ve been watching the entire time?
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It’s the right kind of disturbing, forcing a confrontation the silly dog humor and what it stemmed from. The wrong kind of cornball ending would have found Ryan, “cured” and happy with Wilfred’s owner, Jenna (Fiona Gublemann), who he correctly acknowledges has mostly been another fantasy. If there’s been a central question for Wilfred to answer, it’s not “What is Wilfred?,” but “How can Ryan be happy?” And “Resistance” proves once and for all that “attaining” Jenna wouldn’t, couldn’t make him happy—just try to imagine decades-older versions of those characters showing up on Married. Ryan ending up with her, as Wilfred wanted, would have been narratively conventional but much sadder, closer to the vomit-inducing ending of Silver Linings Playbook, which posits that True Love somehow alleviates serious mental health conditions. Relationships can provide emotional support, but they also create a whole new sort of work. Suggesting otherwise puts an enormous burden on both victims and their partners.
The many links to the pilot, from Ryan’s suicide note (he’s even wearing the same clothes) to the tennis ball, strengthen the notion that Ryan's ultimate rejection of Jenna is the most important action he takes over the course of the series. In a great showcase for the normally restrained Wood, he tells her “you want to run back to Wisconsin and play it safe, instead of taking a risk and maybe finding real happiness.” Ryan is sorry for Jenna for being normal. His life with Wilfred is insane, but as he says in his moment of despair, it isn’t boring. Instead, Wilfred’s “happy ending” is, essentially, Ryan coming to terms with the fact that he’s batshit crazy, that his best friend is a hallucination of an Australian dude in a dog suit, and that’s just fine. That’s why the best moment of the finale isn’t the exposition dump about Ryan’s mom’s history with the dog-worshipping Flock of the Grey Shepherd (unfortunately delivered by recent series addition Mimi Rogers, trying and failing to replace Mary Steenburgen as Ryan’s mom) or Ryan’s confrontation with his zonked-out real father and former cult leader (Tobin Bell). It’s Wilfred helping Ryan remember who he loaned his Roman Polanski box set to (Jamie Fowler!).
Wilfred casually reveals itself as a series filmed almost entirely from the subjective point of view of a person suffering from a serious mental illness in a tragic context—“Happiness” has the misfortune of airing the same week as the suicide of Robin Williams, who guest starred as a dream version of himself who is also a doctor in a mental hospital of Ryan’s creation. Williams has received countless eulogies all better written and more heartfelt than I could hope to achieve. But his shadow, and loss to depression, looms large over the end of this series. Is Wilfred really so great of an investigation of mental health when it’s easy to construe its final lesson as “be comfortable with your own illness and don’t see professional help?”
I’m genuinely unsure about the final message of Wilfred. It’s maybe not quite as happy of an ending as the show wants you to think—as much as everything was really about Ryan, the dog does die (the shot of Ryan holding the tennis ball, confronted with Wilfred’s real body, is heartbreaking), and the show’s status as a longform examination of getting stoned and hanging out with the voices in your head is, to say the least, complicated. Ryan’s mother, his sister Kristin, and Ryan himself all seem to be happy—but for how long? Is Ryan going to try to piece through all of the horrible stuff he did? Will he ever be able to be in a healthy relationship? (A question the show seemingly answered “no” with Allison Mack’s Amanda in season two.) Is Wilfred’s goofy stoner-philosophy veneer really a good attitude to lean on in the face of the insanity of the rest of the world? It might depend on whether or not you see the finale as Ryan finally working through his issues, with a little help from himself, or as a deus ex machina absolving him of all responsibility. But, as with the rest of the show, that’s probably a matter of perspective. Or, as the show asks, "What would make you happy?"
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Eric Thurm is a contributing TV critic. He tweets here.
