'The Body' Creator Quinn Shephard on Faith, Queer Teens and Grace's Coma

Netflix's new drama "The Body" ends its first season with a two-word whisper: "I'm God." Creator Quinn Shephard says that moment, and every supernatural event leading to it, will never receive a definitive explanation.

"If we ever fully defined it, it would break the rule of the show," Shephard told Variety. "The show is meant to mimic faith, so there's people who believe, there's people who don't and there's people in the middle, like me, who are like, 'I don't know.'"

Shephard, a lesbian raised in the church who has stepped away without fully rejecting it, built the series around that unresolved relationship with God. The premise: mass hysteria spreading from a Catholic school dance team.

What happens to Grace?

The plot turns on a Halloween party at an abandoned convent. Devout Catholic standout Grace (Sofia Wylie) is pressured to take Ecstasy by co-captain Elise (Sara Boustany) during a mock satanic ritual. Co-captain Anya (Kristina Bogic) and rejected recruit Lisbeth (Geena Meszaros) find Grace convulsing. Anya supplied the pill, fears punishment, and the pair return Grace's body home, tuck her into bed and text a friend from her phone to establish plausible deniability. Then Grace breathes.

She spends the season in a coma. Elise fakes a vision of Grace in front of the school; the team follows; the town concludes Grace performs healing miracles from her deathbed and worships on her family's lawn. When Anya finally confesses to Father Franklin (Nnamdi Asomugha), Grace wakes.

How did Shephard write Anya and Elise?

The two best friends are clearly in love and were sexually involved at the party, though Anya insists she is straight and loyal to boyfriend Steven (Orlando Norman). Shephard drew on her own life and friends' stories, setting the show in the pre-smartphone, pre-marriage-equality era.

"Being lesbian felt like a bit," Shephard said of that period. "It's not that it wasn't being talked about; it's that it wasn't cool."

For Anya, Shephard argued, the primary fear is not hell but lost identity: "Am I going to lose my girlhood? Am I going to lose my status?" Shephard wanted "a very unsanitized, messy first queer love story" rather than sanitized coming-out arcs. Season 2, she added, has more queer material to explore.

Is Lisbeth attracted to Anya?

Shephard resists that reading. Lisbeth, she said, is driven by survival, not sexuality — a child of trauma with "slightly asexual and sociopathic tendencies" that reflect her circumstances, not her permanent self.

"I don't think she's inherently bad. I just think she's opportunistic in the first season, and too smart for her own good," Shephard said. "She can play three-dimensional chess. She is starting mass hysteria to protect her brother and gain access to the dance team."

Lisbeth's feelings for Anya mix obsession, irritation and genuine friendship — the closet visit is "the happiest day of Lisbeth's life."

What about Maddie — and God?

Maddie (Shirley Chen), the one honest holdout, ends the show believing. Writer Lily Houghton's story about losing both parents shaped the character. Maddie's prophecy — that Grace wakes when everyone confesses — comes true.

Shephard's internal rule: every supernatural theory needs a countertheory, and the audience decides which show it is watching. She cited near-death experiences as the model: hallucination or afterlife, unknowable until death.

The finale's ambiguity — coma chatter, afterlife vision, forgotten words — is "a perfect encapsulation of what we'd like to do with the next season."