1899 Ending Explained: Who was responsible for the Simulation?

“1899” is a show that appears to be a period mystery-horror series that gradually unveils itself to be a blend of various other genres thanks to its mind-bending story and trippy visuals.

It contains enough twists and turns to keep viewers’ heads spinning for days. The multilingual show follows passengers of the ship Kerberos at the turn of the 19th century who find themselves amid supernatural happenings after stumbling across the Kerberos’ sister ship Prometheus, which was believed to be lost at sea four months prior. 

1. Who is the Creator of the Stimulation? 

One of the major twists of ‘1899’ is the revelation that everything happening to Kerberos’s passengers is not real. It is a simulation. This means that all the conflicts, deaths, losses, and perhaps even memories the passengers have experienced have happened only in their minds.

Because the whole nature of events is so convoluted, naturally, everyone wonders who made this Simulation. And more importantly, why did they make it?

At first, it looks like Maura’s father, Henry Singleton, is behind everything. We first meet him in the second episode, where he monitors the rest of the passengers. Maura also mentions him, saying that his company bought the ships, and he has been using it and the passengers in some twisted experiment. 

She believes that because her brother discovered their father’s vile schemes, Henry did something to him and removed Maura’s memories. However, in the end, this becomes one layer of a highly complex mystery.

The Creator, first mentioned by the boy, is not Henry but Maura. In the real world, she lived with her husband, Daniel, and their son, Elliot. Things had been great for them until Elliot fell sick, and there was no cure for his condition. 

Maura couldn’t bear the thought of losing her son, so she found a way to be with him forever. While Daniel didn’t feel so good about his wife’s refusal to accept the reality of their son’s situation, he decided to go forward with her plan anyway.

For their first Simulation, Daniel and Maura created a playroom for Elliot. When that was a success, they built bigger worlds that could feel like real ones. Slowly, the scope of Maura’s Simulation got more extensive, and things started to get out of hand. Henry got involved with the project at some point but had different intentions.

Using this to his advantage, Henry misused his daughter’s technology by creating more simulations inside his direct Simulation to study the dark depths of the human brain. Maura explains his downward spiral in a brief conversation with Eyk by recalling that her mother had Alzheimer’s, which gradually destroyed her ability to recognize family members. 

After her death, Henry started coping with his loss by meticulously studying the human mind, hoping to find answers for his wife’s illness.

With time, he took this too far by making his daughter and her family victims of his experiments. The fact that Maura purposefully chose to erase her memories to deal with the traumatic death of her son proves to be both a boon and a barn for Henry. 

While it allows him to manipulate and use her technology for his benefit, he finds himself in trouble when he realizes that only Maura possesses the code to escape the simulations.

2. What Happened to the Boy and Eyk? 

While Maura finally gets to leave the ship (only to end up in another), the fate of other passengers remains somewhat uncertain. The most important people for her in the entire journey turn out to be Eyk and Elliot. The captain of Kerberos plays an integral role in helping Maura figure out what is happening around them. On the other hand, Elliot is the piece of the puzzle that Maura’s mind seems to have created for her. 

While Henry might have liked to control and use the simulations for his experiments, he wanted to avoid being stuck in one. After none of his usual methods work and he gets his hands on Elliot, he gives Maura a choice. 

In return for her son, she should hand over the key that will allow Henry to wake up. Daniel comes up with a plan to change the code, and in the meantime, the Simulation starts to end and moves into the archives. This is where Maura reunites with Eyk, who was thrown into the archives by Daniel.

In his memory, Elliot discovers that his mother injected him with the thing that wiped his memories. Like everyone else, he is in a simulation too, which means that when the Simulation ends, this version of him also disintegrates.

He will wake up when the following Simulation is activated, but Elliot does not exist in the real world. While it is true that Daniel and Maura had a son, it is also revealed that Elliot was terminally ill. Maura created the Simulation to be with her son, but multiple hints throughout the show reveal that Elliot died before that could happen.

The fact that Maura willingly lets go of her memory to “forget the pain” is the biggest clue. As confirmation, we have Elliot’s grave. In the real world, he is buried underneath it, which is why, in the Simulation, his playroom shows up in the same place. 

In a scene, we discover that this is the exact spot where Elliot and Maura spent a picnic together, where he found Alfred the bug, and then, as advised by his mother, he let it go free. 

The place holds sentimental importance to Maura, so it makes sense that she buried her son there. So, while Elliot still shows up in the Simulation, where he could’ve been written in as just another code, he is dead in the real world.

3. Has Maura Escaped the Simulation? 

The Season 1 Ending indicates that Maura has escaped the Simulation. 

After escaping the Simulation in the Netflix horror sci-fi series, Maura wakes up in a space station where she finds the other passengers plugged into a machine. This confirms that no one died on that ship. 

She finds a screen that reveals the space station’s name as “Project Prometheus” and the current year as “2099.” This is followed by a “Welcome to Reality” message from Cirian, which confirms that he knows about his sister’s escape from the Simulation. 

Since 1899 season 1 ends after this, one can only guess whether Maura has escaped all simulations or gets trapped in another. However, since the space station shares its name with the ship, it is possibly another simulated reality created by Cirian.

Another detail confirming this is the phrase “may your coffee kick in before reality does” that Cirian leaves for Maura in the space station. In a previous scene, Anker and Ramiro find the exact phrase written all over a book in the ship’s control room.

Although 1899 never explains the phrase’s significance, it seems to be Cirian’s way of poking fun at his prisoners. By alluding to the false sense of wakefulness that comes when the brain is flooded with dopamine after the consumption of coffee, Cirian seems to insult Maura and others who willingly chose to live in fake simulations to deal with the burdens of their realities. 

Since he greets her with the same message in the space station, he may be about to put her and the passengers through another puzzling simulation in 1899 season 2.

4. About 1899

1899 is a multilingual German epic period mystery-science fiction streaming television series created by Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar. It premiered on Netflix on 17 November 2022.

Set in 1899, the series follows a group of European migrants traveling to New York City on a steamship named Kerberos to start new lives. But they encounter another migrant ship, the Prometheus, adrift on the open sea leading to a horrifying nightmare of staggering proportions.

The show stars Emily Beecham, Aneurin Barnard, Andreas Pietschmann, Miguel Bernardeau, José Pimentão, Isabella Wei, Fflyn Edwards, and Anton Lesser.