TTK Original — Beyond the Headlines
Warning: Major spoilers for Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.
The ending of Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story makes a strange choice.
After spending most of the season telling a story about murder, suspicion and whether Lizzie Borden killed her father and stepmother, the finale suddenly seems to become a story about something much bigger.
Women’s freedom.
Lizzie and Maggie become involved in the women’s suffrage movement.
Their story is connected to Aileen Wuornos.
And a woman remembered for one of America’s most infamous murder cases is suddenly placed inside a much larger story about women trapped by the societies around them.
For some viewers, the reaction is understandable:
Why is Netflix connecting Lizzie Borden to women’s rights?
The answer is important because this part of the ending is not really trying to solve the Lizzie Borden murders.
It is explaining what Monster thinks Lizzie Borden means.
First, the Ending Is Not Simply History
This distinction matters.
The real Lizzie Borden was tried for the 1892 murders of her father Andrew Borden and stepmother Abby Borden.
She was acquitted in 1893.
The murders remain officially unsolved.
Netflix, however, makes a much more definite choice inside its fictional version of the story.
The series portrays Lizzie and Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan as responsible for the murders and also invents or dramatically expands major parts of their relationship.
The suffrage storyline should be understood in the same way.
The finale shows Lizzie and Maggie becoming involved in the fight for women’s voting rights and eventually celebrating the movement’s victory.
But this is not simply Netflix revealing a forgotten chapter of Lizzie Borden’s biography.
It is part of the series’ interpretation of her.
And that difference changes the entire ending.
The Show Turns Lizzie’s Cage Into a Political Metaphor
Throughout the season, Lizzie is repeatedly shown as a woman living inside different kinds of cages.
There is the literal Borden house.
There is her father’s authority.
There are expectations about sexuality.
There are expectations about marriage.
There are expectations about how a respectable woman should behave.
Even the murder trial becomes connected to those expectations.
The historical Lizzie Borden case has long fascinated scholars partly because gender mattered enormously to how people perceived her.
Could a respectable Victorian woman really commit such a brutal crime?
The series takes that historical question and pushes it much further.
Instead of treating Lizzie only as an individual murder suspect, Monster turns her into an example of a woman trying to escape a social structure built around her.
That is why the suffrage movement appears at the end.
The show has already given Lizzie personal freedom.
Now it connects that freedom to political freedom.
There Is a Dark Irony Here
And this may be the most interesting part of the finale.
Lizzie benefits from the very ideas about women that restrict her.
The society around her expects women to be passive, delicate and incapable of extreme violence.
Those stereotypes confine women.
But in the series, those same stereotypes also help Lizzie escape punishment.
That creates a disturbing contradiction.
Sexism is both Lizzie’s cage and, eventually, part of her escape route.
The finale then takes that contradiction one step further.
The woman who escaped a murder conviction in a deeply unequal society is reimagined as someone participating in the movement to change that society.
That does not necessarily make Lizzie a hero.
It makes her a deliberately uncomfortable symbol.
Then Aileen Wuornos Changes the Meaning Again
This is where the finale becomes even stranger.
Monster connects Lizzie Borden with Aileen Wuornos, the serial killer executed in Florida in 2002.
Historically, the two women lived in completely different eras.
But the show deliberately places them inside the same thematic story.
Why?
Because the series is less interested in saying that these women were the same than in asking a recurring question:
What happens to women shaped by violence, abuse, repression and a society that has already decided what kind of women they are allowed to become?
The contrast between Lizzie and Aileen is crucial.
Lizzie is acquitted.
Aileen is executed.
Lizzie eventually receives comfort and financial security.
Aileen’s life ends on an execution table.
One woman becomes a legend.
The other becomes another kind of monster.
The finale asks us to notice the difference.
“All Is Forgiven” Is the Real Ending
The strangest moment comes after Aileen’s execution.
The series imagines Lizzie and Maggie waiting for her.
They lead her toward another place where, as the finale puts it, everything can finally be forgiven and understood.
This obviously isn’t history.
It is symbolism.
And it reveals what the finale has really been building toward.
Not innocence.
Not guilt.
Understanding.
That does not mean the series is saying murder should be excused because someone suffered.
Instead, Monster appears to be asking viewers to separate two questions that true-crime stories often collapse into one:
What did someone do?
And what made that person become capable of doing it?
Those are not the same question.
That Is Why Some Viewers May Hate This Ending
There is a legitimate reason the ending feels uncomfortable.
The series takes a real woman who was acquitted of murder and gives her fictional crimes, a fictionalized relationship, and a heavily dramatized political meaning.
Then it places her inside a broader narrative of female oppression.
For viewers expecting a historical true-crime story, that can feel like the show has changed genres.
The question suddenly stops being:
Did Lizzie Borden do it?
And becomes:
What does Lizzie Borden represent?
Those are very different stories.
The first is about evidence.
The second is about interpretation.
Netflix ultimately chooses the second.
So Why Does Monster Connect Lizzie Borden to Women’s Rights?
Because the finale is not trying to turn Lizzie Borden into a straightforward feminist hero.
It is trying to turn her into a symbol of female rage, repression and freedom.
The suffrage storyline completes the metaphor the series has been building from the beginning.
Lizzie begins the story as a woman trapped inside a house, a family and the expectations of Victorian womanhood.
The fictional Lizzie escapes all three.
Then the finale expands her personal escape into a larger historical struggle by women seeking political freedom.
Whether that transformation is convincing is another question.
And historically, viewers should be careful not to mistake Netflix’s symbolism for Lizzie Borden’s documented biography.
But once you recognize what the finale is doing, its strange final act becomes easier to understand.
Netflix is no longer asking whether Lizzie Borden was a monster.
It is asking something more uncomfortable:
What if the society that created the cage is also part of the story of how the monster was made?
That is why the series ends with women’s rights.
And that is why the ending feels less like the conclusion of a murder mystery than an argument about who gets called a monster — and why.
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Netflix’s Lizzie Borden Was Acquitted — So Why Does Monster Treat Her Like a Killer?
Why does the Netflix series give a definitive answer to a murder case that history never solved?
TTK Original — Beyond the Headlines explores the questions viewers ask after the credits roll — not just what happened, but why it matters.