Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for The Beast in Me. When you first meet Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) in The Beast in Me, it’s hard to deny that there is something up with this guy. Whether or not he killed his wife, Madison (Leila George), there’s something definitely shady about him. When Aggie Wiggs (Claire Danes) first speaks to him, he denies involvement in his wife’s disappearance, and when Aggie speaks to his new wife, Nina (Brittany Snow), and even Maddie’s parents, they all defend Nile and his innocence. But as Aggie and FBI agent Brian Abbott (David Lyons) close in on the truth, even Nile’s denial starts to wear thin. By the end of the series, not only is it clear who killed Maddie, but also who is the source of all the violence of the series.
Nile Jarvis Reveals Himself To Be a Very Violent Person in ‘The Beast in Me’
When Aggie first meets Nile in The Beast in Me, he immediately has a menacing aura. Whether it’s trying to bully and bribe Aggie into approving a path to be built in their neighborhood for running or going to lunch with her and subsequently smashing the phone of an onlooker who takes a picture of him, it’s clear that there’s a lot of rage within Nile. However, someone with anger management issues isn’t necessarily a murderer. And as he opens up to Aggie, Nile reveals his own flaws that make him look more human and seemingly convinces Aggie and the audience enough to doubt if he is truly a killer.
However, at the end of Episode 4 “Thanatos,” we see Nile in an empty warehouse where he meets with politician Olivia Benitez (Aleyse Shannon). There, he tries to bribe her in order to approve the zoning rights for the construction of Jarvis Yards; however, Benitez rejects him. What he doesn’t know is that Abbott has followed him to this meeting, thinking he’s gotten his chance to get the jump on Nile. But after failing to secure Benitez, Nile turns on Abbott when the agent reveals himself. He violently attacks Abbott and kills him after bashing his head in. Afterward, he throws Abbott’s body into the trunk of his car and gets the car crushed so that no one can find the body.
But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Nile’s violent side. When Aggie believes that Teddy Fenig (Bubba Weiler) was killed by Nile, we don’t get to see the truth until a couple of episodes later, when Abbott comes across Nile’s secret computer files that reveal a livestream of a kidnapped and beaten Teddy hidden somewhere as Nile’s prisoner. When Aggie gets the evidence she needs to confirm Nile’s the one who killed Maddie, he kills Teddy and frames Aggie to ensure that she goes down for killing Teddy and can’t share her evidence with the FBI. Because Teddy was drunk driving in the car that hit Aggie and her son, she has harbored a lot of animosity toward Teddy, to the point where the teenager has a restraining order on him. So, when Teddy turns up dead in Aggie’s home, it’s not hard for people to believe that Aggie has a hand in his murder.
‘The Beast in Me’s Penultimate Episode Finally Reveals Who Killed Maddie Jarvis
However, even with his best efforts, the penultimate episode “Ghosts” reveals, without a question, that Nile is the one who killed Maddie. Maddie, we learn, had been working with Abbott and leaking information to help the FBI get Nile arrested for financial crimes. When Nile finds out there is a rat in their inner circle, he doesn’t initially think it’s Maddie. Instead, he thinks it’s Nina, who was still Maddie’s assistant at the time.
When he finds out that Maddie betrayed them, he brutally kills Maddie in the same way that he kills Abbott. His father (Jonathan Banks) and half-uncle (Tim Guinee) take care of Maddie’s body, while Nile frames her death as a suicide. Because Maddie is bipolar and has attempted suicide before, Nile uses an old note to convince the masses that she has not only disappeared, but is dead.
Although Maddie’s parents are eager to believe Nile — due to the fact that their family finances are all tied up with Jarvis Yards — Chris (Will Brill), Maddie’s brother, doesn’t believe his sister was suicidal. He brings Aggie some of Maddie’s old things, including a birding journal that she wrote in often, as a way to help Aggie along with her research. Looking through the journal, Aggie realizes that Maddie’s suicide note was ripped from a page in the journal that was written years before her death, when Nile first saved her from her actual suicide attempt. Nile then used that old note to prove to the cops that Maddie was suicidal. With that evidence, it’s proven that Nile not only knew how Maddie died, but also covered it up. The series ends with justice served for Nile and Aggie telling the entire story of the investigation in her newest novel.
The Beast in Me is now streaming on Netflix in the U.S.
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