Breaking Down the Brutal Ending of Half Man

Warning: This piece contains spoilers for Half Man

Richard Gadd, whose semi-autobiographical 2024 series Baby Reindeer earned six Emmys and countless appearances on best of lists, roared back to television this spring with HBO’s Half Man. It’s a project he started writing in 2019, before he made Baby Reindeer. 

The haunting and hypnotic story follows stepbrothers Niall (Mitchell Robertson as a teen, Jamie Bell as an adult) and Ruben (Stuart Campell as a teen, Gadd as an adult) over 30 years, as their uneasy yet unshakeable bond becomes an increasingly toxic relationship. 

“In 2019, there was a lot of discussion around male violence and male behavior. I never really set out to answer any questions about masculinity or the manosphere or anything like that, but the discussion around masculinity did spark something in me,” says Gadd. 

Here, Gadd breaks down the explosive ending of Half Man and how the show’s tense final fifteen minutes deliver the fates of Niall and Ruben, finally revealing what happens at Niall’s wedding to Alby (Charlie de Melo). 

A prison meeting that changes everything

The finale begins with the barn showdown between Niall and Ruben. “How long did you wait before you swooped in and took what’s mine?” Ruben asks.

Before he can answer, the show goes back in time to reveal that Niall, who previously slept with Ruben's wife Mona (Amy Manson), is actually the biological father of Ruben's son Baird. Throughout the finale, Niall continues to struggle with his identity, using chemsex parties as a crutch that are slowly but surely derailing his life. At a sexual health clinic, Niall spots Alby, who’s working as a nurse. Niall hasn’t seen Alby since Ruben brutally attacked him when they were teenagers. But now, their chemistry is undeniable, and they start seeing each other. Niall’s life starts to turn around. 

In Half Man’s brutal, spectacular last 15 minutes, Niall, with Alby’s encouragement, visits Ruben in prison, where he’s serving time after assaulting a man who had an affair with Mona. Niall finally comes out to Ruben, the person he’s always been terrified to tell about his sexuality. But Ruben is nothing short of accepting, while also admitting that he’d expected it for quite some time. Looking right into Niall’s eyes, he says, “You’ve wasted your whole life dancing to other people’s tunes, but you’ve never had the rhythm.” It’s an exposing moment highlighting that Ruben sees Niall for exactly who he is.

“There’s a human capacity to repress yourself and create a prison of your own making, to the point where it feels like the world is against you,” says Gadd. “What Reuben essentially says to him there is, you've always been an individual, and you should have been proud of that. You've wasted your whole life trying to be a sheep, trying to blend in with the nine-to-fivers, the straight guys, and the heterosexual couples, but you've never had the rhythm. You've always been separate from that.”

Niall tells Ruben that his hurtful language over the years was a big part of his endless self-loathing. But Ruben curtly responds that the only real homophobe is Niall himself. “I remember speaking to the composers [Evgueni Galperine and Sacha Galpering] over this bit for ages,” recalls Gadd, who wanted the sound cue that highlighted Niall’s realization that  Ruben is telling him the truth. “The music kind of mutates in that moment, and only turns into something sweeter when Ruben makes a joke later. He hits Niall where it hurts, and Niall thinks ‘Oh my god, I should have been proud of being different.’” 

Despite the tension that’s been festering between them over the years, there’s a sense of calm between them, as Niall has finally revealed a big part of his life to Ruben. It encourages Ruben to be vulnerable, too. He reveals to Niall that when he was young, his father sexually abused him. Male sexual abuse is a topic Gadd also deals with in Baby Reindeer, with an equally brilliant sensitivity that he does in Half Man. He tells Niall with tears streaming down his face, “In a lot of ways, it’s the closest I’ve ever been with someone.”

Just as Ruben sees Niall completely for who he is, for the first time Niall can see Ruben with his walls coming down in a state of complete vulnerability. “I think that line speaks to the way he felt he was too innocent to know any better, and ever since that moment, he’s built this kind of prison of defensiveness around himself. There was a freedom taken from him in that moment, and his life changed,” says Gadd.

“Until he breaks down with Niall, he’d never allowed himself to feel vulnerable. His best form of defense is always attack. He’s built a life around trying to make up for this thing that happened to him, which he sees, wrongly, as a dent to his character.”

Ruben also says that the assault from his father has made him “a f-cking half man.” That’s a feeling of inadequacy that not only infests Ruben’s mind, but Niall’s as well. “It stifles the way they live their lives,” says Gadd. “it’s why they need each other so badly, because they get validation that the other has what the other doesn’t, in a way they feel whole when they’re together, for better or worse.” Both Niall and Ruben are in a lifelong fight against an endless feeling that they’re lesser, which manifests in dangerous behavior—extreme violence for Ruben, and sexual recklessness and hard drugs, often together, for Niall.

“What would save them is shaking off these ideas that being sexually confused is a dent to their masculinity, or that being sexually abused is a dent to their masculinity,” says Gadd. “But in their prism of maledom, that's how they feel, and it blights their life to the absolute extreme. If only they found vulnerability and communication and acceptance sooner—things might have been okay.”

As is wont to happen between old friends, Ruben and Niall’s exchange soon becomes lighter. They share more secrets from their past, meeting each one in bouts of glorious laughter. 

But this rare moment of joy between the pair is undercut with tension as Niall reveals his biggest secret: that he slept with Mona and Baird is his son.

How Half Man ends

Niall tells Ruben the truth in an off-the-cuff manner, as if it’s an everyday thing to do. The laughter stops immediately, and a familiar look of bubbling rage returns to Ruben’s eyes. We then cut to the long-teased moment on the day of Niall and Alby’s wedding, when Niall and Ruben face off in the muddy barn. The two engage in a brutal flight on the barn floor, and there’s an almost sexual rhythm to the way they attack one another, with Ruben on top of Niall. 

“There are certainly subliminals to their relationship, which I intentionally wrote,” says Gadd, though he adds, “the love they do have, before it is anything sexual, is sort of heartfelt and kind of overwhelming. As if they shouldn’t feel this way for each other as men, which also stifles them.”

In the fight, Ruben begins to strangle Niall, though Niall protects himself by stabbing Ruben in the side with a knife. But it's a temporary relief, as Ruben gets back on top of Niall and puts his hands around his neck, choking him to death. “I f-cking love you brother,” Ruben repeats. 

When Ruben turns up uninvited to Niall’s wedding, he is feeling completely emasculated by Niall’s actions. “His only way to get his power back is to kill him with his bare hands,” says Gadd. “It’s a display of physical dominance, and that’s all Ruben knows in times of huge disempowerment and crisis.”

In the final moment of Half Man, Ruben gets off of Niall, and sits on a bale of hay. He stares at Niall’s corpse, and lets out a grunt, before the show fades to black. Interestingly, we know Ruben dies too, as we saw his body being taken out of the barn at the end of Episode 4. But we only see Niall’s death, and not Ruben’s.

Gadd is protective of the ending, preferring that people take what they want from it, and he left things intentionally ambiguous. “In a roundabout way, the show has asked you to fill in the gaps between episodes—the years that go by, the things that have happened. Therefore, it felt fitting in a lot of ways, that for a fundamentally contorted and complicated relationship, that there was an ending that was left open to interpretation,” says Gadd.

Gadd asks about my own interpretation of the ending. To me, Ruben’s final seconds on screen are a what-if moment, not dissimilar (though tonally opposite) to The Graduate’s final scene. Ruben has accomplished his goal to kill Niall and regain his sense of power. But the two are so thoroughly intertwined that they cannot live without each other. They’re each other’s uroboros, each other’s whole. Without Niall, there’s nothing left for Ruben to do but die. Whether it's the stab wound that kills him or whether he takes his own life doesn’t really matter.