‘Down Cemetery Road’ Team Explains Season 1 Finale Ending — Where It Left Zoe & Sarah (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Down Cemetery Road Season 1 finale, “What Will Survive.”]

Down Cemetery Road gives us one of our favorite pairs of 2025, with the unlikely duo of private investigator Zoe (Emma Thompson) and art restorer Sarah (Ruth Wilson). The series is based on Mick Herron‘s books about the former, but is there a place for the latter in her life going forward after the December 10 finale? It depends who you ask, and TV Insider did just that.

There are, after all, the complicated feelings that have to arise in Zoe to still have Sarah around; it’s because of the other woman that her husband, Joe (Adam Godley), was killed.

“Zoe’s not the kind of gal who gets caught up in that kind of thing,” Emma Thompson tells us in the video interview above with Ruth Wilson, who interjects, “Deep down, she wants me back.”

“I think that deep down, actually, there is something in Zoe that would, absolutely, if she saw Sarah three weeks later in a spa — unlikely — she’d go up and say, ‘Hello. You alright?’ That’s all you get. Wouldn’t be a big hug,” Thompson continues. “‘I’m glad to see you still in one piece.'”

Meanwhile, Sarah feels she has “nothing else to go back to,” Wilson points out. That’s part of the appeal of wanting to stay in Zoe’s orbit.

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Adds author Mick Herron, “She’s seen what kind of person Zoe is, and Zoe is a far more impressive character than many of the people that have been in Sarah’s life up until that point. Her husband turned out to be a bit of a waste of time, and Zoe is someone that proved herself reliable regardless of how prickly she might be. And I think Sarah is just realizing more and more about her things about her own life, about how she’s made a few wrong decisions and Zoe is not someone who would regret what she’s done. Zoe kind of owns her life in a way that Sarah is admiring of because that’s where she needs to be in her life now.”

Sarah also found out while she and Zoe were working separately, then together, to stay alive and save a young girl caught up in a government conspiracy, which they did, that her husband was cheating on her. It’s in the finale that she tosses her wedding ring.

That’s partly because “she hasn’t had much time to think about it,” admits Wilson. “She’s been on the move. And I think she wasn’t ready to let go of him – or let go of that life or think there was something other that she could go back to. I think throughout the show, you see her realizing that she hasn’t really got a home to go back to. But I think throwing off the ring is like, ‘OK, I’m ready to see what else is out there for me. OK, I can’t go back there, but now I am free to go somewhere else.’ I think it’s representative of that really that she feels, ‘OK, I’ve got a new beginning.'”

For Sarah, the relationship was more about what he represented than who he was. “She wasn’t particularly honest about who she is or honest with herself. And there was her trauma that happened [when she was] a student that she’s deeply ashamed of. And there’s some part of her that she has locked away. And I think that she married him because he was there at the time then and seemed to support her, but actually didn’t really respect her as she didn’t really respect herself. So she sort of chose someone that validated those bad feelings about herself,” Wilson explains. “That relationship is based on her own dishonesty actually, and so was never really right and was very suffocating for her and this journey in the first season as her way of escaping that world and re-finding herself.”

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Will There Be a 'Down Cemetery Road' Season 2? Ruth Wilson Details Plans

But when it comes to what’s next exactly for Sarah — who’s not in all of Herron’s novels in the series — Wilson has no idea. While she knows she’s not going back to her husband, “whether she returns to her work, I think even that she’s going to have a reckoning that wasn’t fulfilling her or that she could do more than that,” the star says. “I think what she’s realized over the course of the show is that she’s capable of more and she wasn’t trusting herself before and didn’t have the confidence to take risks, and somehow this has allowed her to open up. So I think it might take her a while, but she’ll be happy to have, in some ways, freedom to go and start again on her terms.”

She’d love for that to be alongside Zoe in some way. “She really admires her, the fact that she doesn’t want to be a good girl, that she is irreverent and says what she wants and needs and lives by her own rules. So I think Sarah really respects Zoe and in some ways wants to keep her around to keep instilling that in her probably. It’s like, ‘I want someone like you around so I know that I can live differently,'” Wilson adds. “So I think she assumed that they would have a friendship at the end, or they might continue to meet and chat about what happened or have a cup of coffee or something. Zoe’s like, ‘No way.’ I think Sarah might try and attempt to go and see her a few times. I imagine she would go knock on her door and just ask her out for a cocktail.”

Watch the video interview above for more from Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson.

Down Cemetery Road, Season 1, Streaming Now, Apple TV