Warning: Below are full spoilers for “Joker: Folie à Deux”

The long-awaited, long-awaited sequel to 2019’s $1 billion-grossing “Joker” has finally arrived with “Joker: Folie à Deux” now in theaters. Joaquin Phoenix reprises his Academy Award-winning role, this time joined by Lady Gaga as this universe’s version of Harley Quinn. And this time it’s a musical.

This “Joker” is many things: it’s a courtroom drama and a prison yarn and a full-on musical, with Joker and Harley singing along according to old standards. But how does it end? That’s what we want to talk about here.

Major spoiler warning before we go any further. If you haven’t seen “Joker: Folie à Deux” yet, go see it and come back later. This article will still be there. We promise.

How does “Joker: Folie à Deux” end?

It ends with Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), in prison and alone, having just been fatally stabbed by another inmate, looking at the camera and bleeding to death. In the background, his attacker takes a knife and cuts himself a new smile, in a manner similar to how he is portrayed in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’, played by Heath Ledger, suggesting this could be the new Joker, someone willing to step into the role Arthur created but couldn’t embody.

Good lord, how does he even get Arthur to kill him?

A prison guard, probably in cahoots with the killer, tells Arthur he has a visitor. This initially seems like the setup for a big reveal. Is it someone from his past? Harley Quinn? Harvey Dent? Anyone? But no, Arthur follows him into an unprotected hallway and is stabbed repeatedly in the stomach.

What happens right before?

A few things.

The final hour – and we do mean a full hour – of ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ is a grim courtroom drama. At one point, Arthur fires his lawyer (Catherine Keener) and begins representing himself. For an entire scene he speaks in a Southern accent, which is admittedly quite fun (and more than a little baffling).

As the jury reads their verdict, a car bomb goes off outside the courtroom. Arthur briefly escapes, aided by some acolytes, and goes to meet Harley Quinn, who finds that his confession in court that the Joker is not his real personality, but something he puts on for show and takes full responsibility for six murders was treason. of themselves and of their love. She abandons him on the “Joker Stairs” from the first film, where he is promptly rearrested and sent back to prison.

Harvey Dent is in this movie, right?

Although played by Harry Lawtey, he is an actor in his late twenties who looks even younger. Not only does he lack the appeal of Billy Dee Williams, Tommy Lee Jones or Aaron Eckhart, but it also makes you wonder how he rose through the ranks so quickly that he’s already Gotham’s district attorney before he turns 30.

Will he be Two-Face in the movie?

Well, that’s an interesting question. After the car bomb goes off, you expect to see the carnage it caused. And you expect Harvey’s face to be half blown off. This is an R-rated movie, after all. But as the camera pans around to look at the damage, you do see him with cuts (or something) on ​​one side of his face. But you can’t really see him well, and it could have been much more explicit that the bombing took away half his face. Like much of “Joker: Folie à Deux,” it fails to fully commit to the piece. Maybe he turned into Two-Face. Maybe he wasn’t. Who knows.

Is there anything else we should know?

The prison guards with whom Arthur had a good relationship (led by Brendan Gleeson’s Jackie Sullivan) also feel betrayed by Arthur. They attack him in the shower before the verdict is read, perhaps sexually assaulting him in the process (like the Harvey Dent thing, it’s pretty unclear). They also kill a friend of his; Arthur sits in his cell and listens to them kill this man.

But nothing actually comes of it; Arthur doesn’t talk about the abuse he suffered or the fact that his friend was murdered in prison. No charges have been filed against the guards, nor does anyone else acknowledge it. It’s just something that happens for no real reason, isn’t explored further by the film, and is then dropped altogether.

Geez.

Yes.

Anything else?

Yes, at one point Harley tells Arthur she is pregnant with his child, after a brief rendezvous in prison. He brings it up again later. But it is very unclear whether they even had sex or whether she tells him the truth about her pregnancy. A weird wrinkle to throw in there, honestly, especially if they don’t explore it in any meaningful way – or at all, really.

So there probably won’t be a “Joker 3?”

We can’t imagine that happening, although there are certainly things still going on – maybe Harley’s daughter (if there even is a daughter) could become that universe’s main Harley Quinn and the man who killed Arthur will become that universe’s Joker become. There’s also the Harvey Dent/Two-Face of it all and whether or not Brendan Gleeson’s character will continue raping and murdering prisoners (you know, something every viewer of “Joker: Folie à Deux” is curious about) . But this film is so unrelentingly unpleasant that it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to come back for a third.

“Joker: Folie à Deux” is in theaters now.