“DTF St. Louis” Cast Breaks Down Finale: ‘You’ll Probably Have to Go Back to the Beginning to Really Understand’ (Exclusive)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the season 1 finale of DTF St. Louis.

NEED TO KNOW

• The DTF St. Louis finale reveals who is behind the death of David Harbour’s lead character Floyd after a long investigation

• Creator Steven Conrad and stars Joy Sunday and Richard Jenkins, who play detectives in the series, open up to PEOPLE about the complex ending

• Conrad also shares the inspiration behind the miniseries, which sees Floyd struggle with intimacy and relationships, leaving him in “emotional desperation”

The season finale of DTF St. Louis proves that nothing is truly what it seems.

After weeks of investigating the death of David Harbour’s Floyd, the final episode of the HBO miniseries saw detectives Jodie Plumb (Joy Sunday) and Donoghue Homer (Richard Jenkins) realize that the case might have been much simpler than they imagined.

“You’ll probably have to go back to the beginning to really understand the ending, honestly,” Sunday tells PEOPLE.

“Somebody said, ‘When you get a script like that, don’t you want to jump to the end and find out what happens?’” Jenkins adds. “I said, ‘If in this script you jump to the end, you still won’t know what happened unless you know the whole script beforehand.’”

Joy Sunday and Richard Jenkins in ‘DTF St. Louis’
Credit: Tina Rowden/HBO

A central theme of the season was Floyd’s struggling sex life with his wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini), due in part to his Peyronie’s disease, a condition where the penis develops a curvature that causes erectile dysfunction. It was later revealed that Carol was having an affair with Floyd’s best friend, Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman), which led Clark to become the prime suspect in the case.

While the toxicology report showed that Floyd died from an apparent poisoning, detectives suspected Clark was responsible, but that theory began to fall apart when they discovered that Floyd not only knew about the affair, but was accepting of it.

“The writing is just sublime,” Jenkins notes. “I hadn’t read anything like that in a long time, so it was an easy yes for me. And it never disappointed in the playing of it, it never disappointed. You almost felt you weren’t worthy of it at times. It was that good.”

Jason Bateman, Linda Cardellini and David Harbour in ‘DTF St. Louis’
Credit: HBO

In the finale, viewers learned that Clark, who had given Floyd — per his request — his prescription for a stimulant drug called Amphezyne in an effort to improve his sex life, was with Floyd in the poolhouse the night of his death. After Floyd admitted that he had mixed some of the drug into his canned drink — which proved to be what killed him — the two stripped down to their underwear and danced together.

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However, when Floyd began to show his romantic interest, Clark confessed that he didn’t share those same feelings.

“I love a show where you can go, ‘Okay, things are going to go poorly for these people who expect things to go well,’” the show’s creator Steven Conrad tells PEOPLE of the concept behind the series.

Meanwhile, Carol’s son, Richard (Arlan Ruf), was watching from the window after finding out that his stepfather was on the dating site called DTF St. Louis, meant for married people seeking outside hookups.

“When I started to conceive this idea, it was 2018, 2019,” Conrad reveals. “These hookup apps were probably at their height of popularity and their promise of, ‘Well, you have a commitment, you’ll meet someone else with a commitment, and no one will ever know. You’ll share a secret night and then you’ll both go home to your partners and everything will go back to normal.’ That idea that there could be excitement without consequences.”

David Harbour and Arlan Ruf in ‘DTF St. Louis’
Credit: Tina Rowden/HBO

When Clark left, Richard confronted Floyd, who he later watched make a “rock and roll” hand gesture before chugging the rest of his drink. Little did Richard know, the symbol Floyd made actually meant “I love you” in American Sign Language.

The revelation that Floyd’s demise was ultimately at his own hands was a reflection of what Conrad says happens when people “feel emotional desperation and then make bad decisions.”

He adds that Harbour portrayed “a person who was susceptible to this bad idea five years ago, but wouldn’t have done it 30 pounds ago, wouldn’t have done it one friendship earlier, wouldn’t have done it but in a phase of life now where he seems to need some volt of electricity to resuscitate him.”

DTF St. Louis is available to stream on HBO Max.

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