What Really Happened On 'Bloodline'?

By now, you've been given plenty of time to completely marathon Netflix's Bloodline (and if you haven't, consider yourself very far behind ). The first season managed to wrap up just about every single loose thread of the series, but in doing that Bloodline left us with so many more questions, too. While we technically know what happened to Sarah Rayburn, do we really know the full story? Sure, we got an answer at the end of the season, but are there more pieces to this puzzle? If you've reached the end (last chance to turn back before spoilers) you know that she drowned. That's something that's heavily implied right from the start of the series, but it's not truly confirmed till the end. Through flashbacks to their childhood, the Rayburn children seem to relive the incident again and again. We see how everything began to fall apart for them the day Danny took Sarah out on the boat. We never see the whole scene play out in full, but this how it happens if we piece together the flashbacks from all 13 episodes. It actually all starts with Mama Ray, and her decision to run away from home (but, we don't really know why. I'm assuming that it was a fight between her and Dad Rayburn). While she's packing her bags, there's a knock at her bedroom door, and Sarah's standing there. Mama Ray shoos her away. That's when oldest child Danny decides to take her out on the boat.

At the time this happened, Sarah was 10 years old, John was 14, and since Danny was the oldest brother, we can put him right around the 15-16 age range. He's not a kid anymore, but he's not an adult yet, either. This is what John points out to him as he and Sarah load onto the boat. John tells him that he can't take her out without an adult (and Sarah asks him to go, too — thinking back to that, it breaks my heart). However, John stays behind on land and the two disappear out onto the ocean. Then, Sarah's seahorse necklace falls off her neck out on the ocean. We don't know how. Did Danny pull it off? Did it get caught on something? Did she jump into the water and it somehow came over her head? (just some Season 2 questions we need answered, Bloodline.) Regardless, it comes off her neck and Sarah goes after it. The necklace falls between two pieces of coral or rock, and Sarah sticks her hand into a crevice to pull it out. Her hand gets stuck. She can't dislodge it. Danny tries to help free her, but he's no use. Sarah's completely stuck underwater, and there's nothing either one of them can do. They're kids, after all. We see Danny swim back to the surface, as Sarah's now lifeless body bobs underwater. Here's another part we don't see — Season 2, I'm talking to you: Somehow, Danny manages to free her, and gets her back onto the boat. He hightails it back to shore, flagging down whatever family member he can, but it's already too late. Sarah is gone. And now you know why the Rayburn family is majorly messed up!

Long and the short of it is that Sarah drowned. So while we've got that answer, there are still so many questions. John at one point implies that the fact that she drowned was all Danny's fault — not because he couldn't free her, but maybe because he had something to do with it in the first place. How did Sarah's necklace get into the water, anyway? John also mentions that Danny basically "murdered" their sister, so did little teenager Danny premeditate this whole thing? Did he and Sarah have some sort of beef growing up? (She was only 10!)

Bloodline also makes a pretty big deal out of the fact that Danny took Sarah out "unsupervised." Yes, taking a 10-year-old out into the ocean alone is a bad thing, but Danny was older. It seemed that if John had gone with them, the whole situation would have been OK, you know? Part of me feels like we're missing part of the Sarah puzzle — why it was such a big issue with the fact that Danny wasn't the "supervision" she really needed out on the water? It would seem that John — who at least seemed a little more mature, even for a 14-year-old — could have acted as the adult in the boat.

But that didn't happen. And John lost Sarah.

Netflix's already renewed Bloodline for Season 2. In a perfect world, Season 2 will premiere next week. But life's not perfect, so I guess we'll just have to wait in agony to get the answers to all of our followup questions.

Image: Saeed Adyani/Netflix (2); netflix/tumblr