What Happened In The Gift
What Happened In The Gift - Breaking down language barriers with its international original section, Netflix has delivered another great show in the form of "The Gift". The Turkish show is a supernatural drama that follows the story of a woman whose life changes after an archaeological discovery. Over the course of eight episodes, it takes many twists and turns, dives into Middle Eastern stories and mythology, and ends the show on a very confusing note.
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What Happened In The Gift
If you haven't seen it yet, head over to Netflix. SPOILERS AHEAD Artist Atiye. She has a great family and a perfect boyfriend. Everything is great. On the surface, that is. He has nightmares and headaches, but these things have always been there. He learned to ignore them and move on;
until you find news about an archaeological dig. A symbol is discovered for the first time at the site of Gobekli Tepe. No one had ever been there, at least not in the last ten thousand years. No one but Atiye had ever seen it before.
He dreamed about it and painted it all his life. So when she realizes she's appeared elsewhere, she runs to find out how it relates to her dreams and her life. While this ending confused us, there's another thing we keep asking ourselves as we watch The Gift.
Plot Summary
Why the hell is Atiye's future father-in-law so interested in her? In fact, at one point he says that he "can't let her lose either" in response to what his son just said! Then there's the "what the hell!" the moment you start talking to your TV screen.
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What's up with this guy? The first season doesn't make it easy, but we have a theory. There is a door on Gobekli Tepe that the mysterious person wants. I think the door opens to an alternate world where this person lives. They have no way to access it, but they know that Atiye and her grandmother can find it and open it.
Also, this person is from that alternate world and wants to move to that world. (More on that later.) They somehow found a way to connect with the people on the other side. They hire Seder to do their job. Knowing about Atiye's power, Seder persuades his son to win her.
The plan is for Ozan to marry her and once she is part of the family, they can use her for their own purposes. It is not clear how much Séder was told. Obviously just a foot in the game. It is also very easily possible that Széder's boss is actually himself in the other reality.
Why Is Seder After Atiye?
But that would be just an extrapolation. After coming to terms with his legacy and accepting his gift, Atiye joins Erhan to find the door that will help him bring Cansu back. Serder already knows where they are going, and that is actually why he wants Atiye.
But he does not know where the door is and believes that Erhan's father wrote about the place in the missing pages of the diary. He sends Hanna to bring them back, while Atiye manages to escape. He follows Seher to the cave and finds himself in the middle where Cansu is waiting for him.
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They hug each other with Atiye saying she wants to bring him back. And it happens. In the final scene, Atiye finds her and Cansu outside the cave, but Cansu identifies himself as Elif and tells her that Atiye mistook her for someone else. Confused, Atiye goes outside and sees the symbol painted on the wall in front of him.
What happened there? Well, the simplest explanation is that Atiye went to a parallel world. No, I'm not just recommending it because I've seen the same thing in dozens of other shows. In one episode, Atiye's grandmother mentions the point where worlds merge, where they collide.
The Ending
Even if only in passing, we can't ignore that when talking about the shocking ending. Everyone was talking about the "door" too. The door has to open somewhere. Summing it all up, here's what the whole show looks like. Deep inside the cave is the door to the alternate universe.
It was sealed thousands of years ago. Hence the beeswax and other precautions. No one knows about it, so they don't know exactly what they're looking for even after they've been excavating the site for so many years. This is where the Seder comes in.
People who work for Seder want to go over, but they don't know how to do it. So they want Seder to find the door and the person who can open it. Atiye inherited the gift, but misunderstood when told that he could bring Cansu back.
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He believed that the door is the link between life and death. He thought his power lay in resurrection, and the show's repeated references to snakes, resurrection, and the Ouroboros fooled us as well. (And to be honest, I still have my doubts about what the door actually does, so who knows!) Also, the story leans much more on the supernatural tone than science fiction, so resurrection could very well be a thing.
Early Life
Another option we can play with is time. Erhan's father writes in the letter that time is not as linear as they thought. Atiye's grandmother knew what would happen twenty-two years later and how Atiye and Erhan would meet to solve the riddle. They even knew about Cansu's death, and he actually changed the date into a password!
So yes, time sure moves in circles. In this case, Atiye's power may be to turn back time; so the resurrection of the dead. Let's take this a step further. How far back in time can you go? The mysterious red-haired lady tells Atiye that whatever she thinks opens up the possibility of a completely different reality.
What are the far-reaching consequences of Atiye thinking about turning back time and reviving Cansu? Could it be that he inadvertently changed too much? Could it be that he reversed the fate of Erhan's parents, which is why Cansu is now Elif? It would be a good theory to leave out a minor but very important detail.
When Atiye says yes to bringing her sister back, we see the entire dig site disappear into thin air. Even if Atiye changed time enough, he could not have changed it back ten thousand years. This would mean rewriting the entire history of mankind! So yes, for our sanity, we exclude that possibility.