Deadwater Fell ending explained: What happened to Kate and the children?

Deadwater Fell is the latest drama acquisition from Netflix that's shocking viewers with its dark storyline about a family homicide. 

Although Deadwater Fell was first released in 2020 on Channel 4, the series has had a new second life as it premiered on Netflix for the first time. Viewers have loved this twisted series staring David Tennant as a widowed village doctor who was the sole survivor when his wife and children were murdered after being drugged and left to burn as the house around them was set on fire.

The final episode of Deadwater Fell has shocked and confused viewers as it was revealed who was responsible for the death of Kate and her three children. Here's what you need to know about the Deadwater Fell ending...

Who killed Kate and the children in Deadwater Fell?

The final moments of the final episode of Deadwater Fell showed that Tom was responsible for the death of Kate and their three children. The ending of episode four flashed back to the night of the quadruple homicide and showed Tom and Kate arguing about Kate's affair with Simon. In anger, Tom took to his medical bag and prepared syringes. 

Tom then took Emily upstairs to bed and tucked her in, also checking on the other two children at the same time. When Kate came upstairs to check on them, she became alarmed as she noticed Charlotte, Emily and Iris weren't breathing. While she panicked and turned to Tom, he then injected Kate and said, "They deserved better than you."

With his wife and three daughters dead, Tom then cleaned the kitchen and called his mother from Kate's phone. "I just wanted you to know I tried my best. I did my best mum. Bye," he said. Showing that Carol had a pretty good idea about his crimes from the beginning!

Tom then injected himself in his bedroom and we watched as smoke poured into the room, and Jess began yelling outside, suggesting he had lit the fire and was ready to die. We then watched from Tom's perspective as he woke up in hospital, clearly having failed at his plan to commit suicide and die with his wife and children. The show then flashed to the present as police walked in to arrest Tom.

So why did Tom do it? The GP found that his wife was planning to divorce him and as a coercive controlling psychopath, he couldn't cope with the breakdown of his marriage.

"I found it really interesting that people have looked everywhere. In fact, they say it’s too obvious to be Tom," the director of the series Daisy Coulam told Radio Times "I felt all along we wanted to say something about the men who commit these crimes, because it is men who are more likely to commit familicide than women.

"That’s what we wanted to talk about and it’s very interesting that people are thinking it’s a whodunnit. By the time you get to episode three, I thought it was pretty clear that he had done it. And so, episode four sort of became an unravelling of the truth of the matter," she said.

The director further explained that she wanted the fault to be solely on Tom. "I was really keen not to go, 'it’s his mum’s fault’ or ‘it’s his dad’s fault'. I didn’t want to excuse him because people have terrible relationships with their parents, but that doesn’t make them coercive controllers," said Daisy. "When people commit crimes like this, they get called monsters or they get called evil and that to me is a way of diminishing the fact that they are humans and they committed these acts."

"So, I think Tom is a complex individual. He’s a human being who has made some terrible mistakes," she concluded.