'Blood & Water' Season 1 Ending Explained: Will Fikile and Puleng find out how their father is implicated?
Spoilers for Season 1 of 'Blood & Water'
While Netflix's second South African original series is short with just six episodes like 'Queen Sono', 'Blood & Water' managed to pack a lot into the first season. The story began with Puleng Khumalo (Ama Qamata) transferring to Parkhurst College — an elite prep school — to figure out whether a student there, Fikile "Fiks" Bhele (Khosi Ngema) happened to be her older sister who was kidnapped after her birth from the hospital 17 years ago.
By the final episode, Puleng's search had caused a fallout between the two girls — with their quick temper and misunderstandings making the situation worse. Fikile's affair with her swim coach, Chad Morgan (Ryle de Morny) was revealed to the school Principal and when Chad's pregnant wife, Riley (Shamilla Miller) confronted Fikile at the school, things became really ugly.
In the sixth episode, we see that a chat group called "Sidechick Chronicles" had been created with the explicit purpose of cyberbullying Fikile, who was added to the group as well. So when Puleng comes for dinner at her boyfriend, Karabo ‘KB’ Molapo's (Thabang Molaba) house — where she finds out at the last minute that KB's dad's friends are also there, including Fikile's mom and Fikile — things take a turn for the worse.
Fikile blurts out at dinner that Puleng's father was accused of child trafficking for selling his own daughter and KB's dad reveals that Puleng's father's trial date had been pushed forward. We know at this point that we can't trust KB's father, Matla Molapo (Sello Maake Ka-Ncube) because he is somehow linked with Puleng's sister being kidnapped.
When Puleng quickly leaves the dinner because of the hostile treatment, KB does not go after her. Instead, KB and Fikile end up talking in his bedroom. We can see that KB really does like Puleng, but since he doesn't understand what exactly is going on with her, he is not able to make himself completely vulnerable with her — this could explain why KB ends up kissing Fikile, though it's not an excuse.
While KB and Puleng end up confessing to each other that they love the other and take a big step at a party at the school one night, Puleng's laptop gets stolen from her home. Puleng talks about the break-in to Wade Daniels (Dillon Windvogel) and even about a black SUV with an emblem that had been following her for a few days. Wade shows her that the emblem belongs to KB's dad's company.
At Puleng's father's trial, Puleng learns that her father registered a baby for adoption at Point of Grace, the same adoption agency linked to KB's father, and was implicated in a child trafficking scam. Later, when Fikile meets Chris Ackerman (Arno Greeff), they talk about how Puleng had been interested in Fikile since they first met at the party from the first episode. Fikile decides to confront Puleng at the school, where she finally tells her that Fikile is really her sister.
Unfortunately, this is where the first season of 'Blood & Water' ends and with the ongoing pandemic, the next season might take a while to come. That leaves us a lot of time to speculate and we hope at this juncture, Fikile and Puleng try and work together to figure out what could be going on. Of course, we also have to consider how KB and the others might react if they found out about the truth.
The biggest mystery is how Puleng's father is involved in the kidnapping of his own child. Why would he have registered their baby up for adoption? And if he intended to do so, why is he fighting to find out where that child is? Something does not add up. All episodes of Season 1 of 'Blood & Water' are now streaming on Netflix.