What Happened to Edgar in Eric? Here’s If He Makes It Home At The Show’s End

Major spoilers for Eric ahead . It’s a new thriller from Netflix about a father’s desperate search for his missing nine-year-old son. So what happened to Edgar in Eric and does he find his way home? The show stars Benedict Cumberbatch as his father, Vincent.

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Set in 1980s New York, Eric is a new emotional thriller from Abi Morgan. Vincent, one of New York’s leading puppeteers and creator of the hugely popular children’s television show , Good Day Sunshine , struggles to cope with the loss of his son, Edgar, becoming increasingly distressed and volatile.

Full of self-loathing and guilt around Edgar’s disappearance, he clings to his son’s drawings of a blue monster puppet, Eric, convinced that if he can get him on TV, then Edgar will come home. As Vincent’s progressively destructive behavior alienates his family, his work colleagues, and the detectives trying to help him, it’s Eric, a delusion of necessity, who becomes his only ally in the pursuit to bring his son home. So what happened to Edgar? Read on—for spoilers, obviously.

What happened to Edgar on Eric ?

Edgar goes missing after walking to school, leaving of his own volition after seeing his parents Vincent and Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann) continuing a fight they began the night before. Vincent himself becomes a suspect in Edgar’s disappearance at one point, but the truth is that Edgar ran away from home. He wasn’t kidnapped or taken by anyone.

When Vincent’s child goes missing, “there’s this split between reality and Vincent’s reality,” Benedict told Netflix’s Tudum. “He’s trying to hold on to both things to steer him back towards his son.” As he hallucinates Edgar’s drawings of Eric into existence to help him find his son, Vincent’s mental health deteriorates.

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Throughout six episodes, Edgar follows an unhoused named Yuusuf (Bamar Kane) and discovers a large community living underground in an abandoned area of the New York subway system. Yuusuf looks after Edgar for a time, but the young boy ends up wandering the streets after his return home the first time fails.

In the show’s finale, Edgar is found and is reunited with his father in a bittersweet ending. “This is a story about people finding their home ,” Cumberbatch said. “Whether it’s a child, a homeless person, a gay Black cop, a wife in an unhappy marriage, or even Eric on the show, it’s all about finding a place.”

While the reviews for Eric have been mixed, critics have praised Cumberbatch’s performance . “ Cumberbatch , as you might expect, is mesmerizing as the viciously narcissistic Vincent, pretty much drunk on his own talent long before he turns to the bottle to cope with Edgar’s disappearance, and psychologically unraveling in the wake of both,” wrote The Guardian.

Meanwhile, Variety wrote that “Cumberbatch, returning to television after a stint in blockbuster films, is capable of depicting Vincent’s self-destruction without forcing something so literal on the audience.” The Daily Beast wasn’t so kind. “ Eric is a showcase for Cumberbatch’s skill at embodying a prick bastard, and he does so with reasonable aplomb as Vincent, the Jim Henson-ish creator of a Sesame Street -style kids show called Good Day Sunshine . The idea that a horrible person like Vincent could be the mastermind behind a feel-good program like this is contrived nonsense,” they critiqued.