Death by Lightning Finale: Why Lucretia’s Return to the Table Changes Everything

Netflix's 'Death by Lightning' wraps on a quiet gut punch, and it sticks. Here's how the show lands the plane, who gets the last word, and why the most brutal part of James Garfield's story isn't the bullet.

The finale's last image is a table and an empty chair

We end with Lucretia Garfield back at the table James built at the start of the series. Life keeps moving — her daughter Mollie gets married — but the chair across from her stays empty. It isn't just a sentimental callback; it reads as a stubborn act of survival. The show treats Lucretia as the spine of the story, and creator Mike Makowsky has called her the quiet force people overlooked because of what happened to her husband. In other words: had she been given the room, she could have done real damage (the good kind) as First Lady.

How Garfield really died (and why it was so avoidable)

James Garfield, America's 20th president, is shot by Charles Guiteau at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington. He survives the initial attack. What kills him is what comes after.

Garfield is treated by a collection of doctors led by Dr. Bliss, with Dr. Purvis — the first Black physician to attend a sitting president — on the team. Purvis warns Bliss to sterilize his instruments. Bliss waves off antiseptic methods as unnecessary. That decision becomes the tragedy. The constant poking around the wound with unsterilized tools leads to infection that slowly, painfully ends Garfield's life. Historian Candice Millard has pointed out that the bullet itself missed vital organs and the spinal cord; the medicine failed him, not the shot.

"Guiteau may have fired the bullet, but he's not Garfield's ultimate murderer."

That's Makowsky, and the show leans into that cruel irony. Michael Shannon's Garfield spends his final stretch on a deathbed that turns into a fight between outdated practice and reality — and reality loses.

Guiteau: obsession, denial, and a final performance

Matthew Macfadyen plays Guiteau like a man who thinks the world owes him a cabinet job. He hovers around the campaign, gives speeches, and works rooms he has no business in. When the appointment he thinks he deserves doesn't materialize, he escalates to the station, the gun, and the arrest.

In prison, the show gives Lucretia the sharpest knife: she tells him, straight up, that his memory will amount to nothing. Macfadyen has said that for a man built on vanity, that's the worst thing he could hear. Guiteau still stages one last bit of theater at his execution — a final poem and a glassy stare — but it lands exactly the way she said it would.

Chester A. Arthur, unlikely reformer

Nick Offerman's Chester A. Arthur starts as a company man — loyal to Senator Roscoe Conkling and the spoils system that keeps the gears greasy. He's not set up as a hero. But Garfield's example gnaws at him. After the assassination, Arthur steps into the job with a surprising amount of humility. Offerman has talked about how, in history, a woman's letters helped jolt Arthur's conscience; in the series, it's Garfield and Lucretia who carry that moral voice.

From there, Arthur does the thing no one expects: he backs civil service reform and starts dismantling the corruption he once rode. The show frames it as a rediscovery of his better self, and it sticks as his legacy.

Where everyone ends up

• Lucretia Garfield: Returns to the table James built, steadies her family as Mollie marries, and becomes the show's quiet center of gravity.
• James Garfield (Michael Shannon): Survives the shooting but dies from infection made worse by unsterilized, outdated medical care — despite warnings from Dr. Purvis, the first Black physician to treat a sitting president.
• Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen): Arrested after the railroad station attack, confronted by Lucretia in prison, executed after delivering a final poem and a dead-eyed stare.
• Chester A. Arthur (Nick Offerman): Goes from Conkling's loyalist to reform-minded president, embracing civil service changes after Garfield's death.

'Death by Lightning' is streaming on Netflix if you want the whole messy, infuriating, and surprisingly hopeful arc.