Warning: This article contains spoilers for the fourth and final season ofDear White People.
What happened to Reggie?
Did he go to jail?
Jemar Michael, Marque Richardson, Ashley Blaine Featherson, Logan Browning, Antoinette Robertson, DeRon Horton, and Courtney Sauls on ‘Dear White People’.LARA SOLANKI/NETFLIX
Thankfully, Reggie didn’t suffer a tragic fate.
However, that didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that they were all together again.
Marque Richardson on ‘Dear White People’.NETFLIX
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you approach figuring out Reggie’s ending?
At the end of the day, we are still treated as less than in this society.
So how do we tell the truth about that without sort of perpetrating it?
Logan Browning (center) on ‘Dear White People’.LARA SOLANKI/NETFLIX
That was the conundrum that I brought to Jaclyn.
JACLYN MOORE:And I solved it.
Like, let’s keep it real.
We can find joy, we can find community, we can progress.
I wanted that to be a truthful statement as well as a satisfying one.
And that’s where we landed.
It’s not just about the story about these people.
It’s not just about the human condition, or about the things that normally motivate a character journey.
That doesn’t feel good.
Because on the other side, art is supposed to heal us too.
I was surprised by Reggie’s decision to buy a gun in the first place.
Where did that idea and having him shoot an armed attacker come from?
MOORE:We were talking a lot about shadow selves.
And so we kept breaking it down, well, what is the thing that scares Reggie the most?
It is having this level of power.
And this season it felt like it dovetailed with Reggie’s core issue.
[Laughs] But I was always very anti-gun, as a good liberal should be.
It’s not necessarily a political calculation at some point.
these are more life-and-death thoughts, and it’s complicated and nuanced.
What conclusions did you and Jaclyn end up reaching that you wanted to convey in the finale?
SIMIEN:I was sort of feeling really disillusioned around that time when we were writing it.
I mean, just to put it plainly.
Well, turns out, not true.
Turns out all theBehind the Musics were right.
It doesn’t solve all your problems.
[Laughs]
So I was in a “So what do I do now?”
kind of a space.
Just, they don’t go together.
So how do you make those choices?
How do you find joy?
That was my journey, literally, during that time.
And so it became the characters' as well.
And I mean, not that we would know.
[Laughs]
SIMIEN:I mean, I’m down to find out!
MOORE:Maybe that’s where the deliverance comes from!
But you’re not going to find real contentment in those things.
What does real success look like?
What were the origins of the original song they sang at the end?
And I saw it in a way that I never saw it before.
And maybe that’s all we can do."
Maybe the effort is enough, is what I think we’re trying to posit.
And it really is a maybe, because we don’t know.
