All the Light We Cannot See Finale: 3 Major Differences from the Book
The show turned out to be an excellent adaptation, but some changes were quite controversial.
Summary
- Adapting a Pulitzer Prize-winning book is a difficult task, but the creators of the new Netflix series have managed it.
- And while the plot remains largely faithful to the novel, there are a number of changes.
- These changes include the fate of the main characters and the ending.
Adapting books into thoughtful and well-executed television stories is never an easy task. And it's even harder when you're dealing with not just a popular book with an immensely devoted fan base, but a Pulitzer Prize-winning one. We're talking about All the Lights We Cannot See, based on the eponymous war novel by American author Anthony Doerr, which debuted on Netflix less than two weeks ago.
Fortunately, people who are no strangers to the world of Hollywood and who are truly capable of creating deep stories volunteered to adapt the series. Steven Knight developed the concept and served as sole writer, while Dan Levine, Josh Barry and Shawn Levy, who also directed, served as producers. And yet, while the series was faithful to its source material, it had a number of deviations. Let's take a look at the most significant and divisive.
Unlike in the show, Marie-Laure is reunited with Etienne in the novel
Although the book is darker, showing all the horrors of World War II, one storyline was much more hopeful than in the TV series. It concerns Hugh Laurie's Etienne, the great-uncle of Marie-Laure (Aria Mia Loberti), to whom she and her father (Mark Ruffalo ) fled to Saint-Malo after the Nazis invaded Paris.
As we know, Etienne is killed in a bomb blast in the Netflix limited series, but in the book he is imprisoned by Reinhold von Rumpel (Lars Eidinger). He is later released after the Allies liberate Saint-Malo from German occupation in 1944. He is reunited with Marie-Laure and they move to Paris, to the house where the protagonist lived with her father. The girl decides to follow in her father's footsteps and becomes a marine biologist at the Natural History Museum.
In the show, Werner's fate is uncertain, but in the book, it's definitive and tragic
However, the fate of Werner Pfennig, played by the talented Louis Hofmann, is a much less dark aspect of the series. As in the novel, Werner voluntarily surrenders to the Americans, but this is where the differences begin. In the adaptation, the ending of the character is left open, leaving room for interpretation by the audience, although the creators did not rule out the possibility of Werner's death. In the book, however, he falls seriously ill in the POW camp and dies in a delirium when he accidentally steps on a mine.
The show has a somewhat alternate (and more hopeful) ending
The most controversial moment, perhaps, was the show's ending, which differed radically from the book. The show used the rather clichéd trope of Marie-Laure throwing the Sea of Flames gem into the sea, but author Anthony Doerr gave readers the opportunity to learn about the aftermath of the events thirty years later, and then in 2014.
Werner and Marie-Laure hid the gem in a locked grotto. Thirty years later, Werner's fate is discovered by his sister Jutta (Luna Wedler), who was actually completely forgotten at the end of the series. To find out more about her brother's story, she travels to Saint-Malo and then to Paris, where she finds the adult Marie-Laure and gives her the model with the key to the grotto inside.