As much as “The Watchers” plays with ambiguity and mystery for much of its runtime, the thread begins unraveling once our characters begin to figure out the truth behind their plight.

After alluding to a secretive individual known only as “The Professor,” Mina’s flagrant breaking of the rules (which stipulate remaining in the box after sundown, staying away from the burrows that the Watchers use to climb to the surface, and never turning one’s back on the one-way mirror separating them from the outside world) sets them all on a path towards both destruction and revelation. Having angered the Watchers to the point of a violent attempt to break into the Coop, the characters stumble upon a very “Lost”-like hatch built into the floor that leads them to an underground bunker. Here, a series of conveniently-recorded videos by Professor Kilmartin (John Lynch) reveals that he had studied the Watchers and purposefully built this experiment in the woods to learn more about them, ultimately resorting to unethical measures to get the results he needed.

As it turns out, the Watchers are actually what we’d refer to as changelings or faeries in our own cultural mythologies. A long-ago war pitted humanity against these beings and resulted in their exile underground. Having spent centuries trying to break free, the Watchers have studied the humans that wandered into their last remaining stronghold in the Irish woods and slowly perfected the art of mimicking their appearances. Our characters’ white-knuckle escape from their imprisonment (minus Daniel, who is brutally killed along the way) feels like the natural end of the story … but Shyamalan keeps one last twist up her sleeve.