The Bone Temple

After watching The Bone Temple, I realized it is now the best movie within the franchise. I started to think about the ending and the more I sat with it, the more I loved it. Here is my psychoanalysis of the ending.

Spoilers ahead. If you have not watched it, stop reading now.

The Petrine cross turned Satanic symbol represents a perversion of sacrifice. Christ’s crucifixion is voluntary, redemptive, selfless. Jimmy’s death mirrors it but inverts the meaning: he is not redeemed. He did not choose it. He is pinned by the very violence he worshipped. It is poetic justice, the destruction he served consuming him in its own iconography. When I think more about this scene, twenty eight years in this world means Jimmy grew up entirely shaped by the collapse. The “old neck” speaking in his head takes on new weight here because it represents the pre apocalypse world, trauma, or a psychotic break rationalized as divine communication. He has built an identity around being chosen by darkness. He has fused with a destructive inner voice, an internal tormentor, and mistaken it for God.

Kelson trying to cure the infected is the ultimate heresy to Jimmy. If the infected can be healed, the entire apocalyptic order and the power structures built on it become meaningless. Kelson threatens not just Jimmy’s theology but his entire psychological architecture. Cure the infected, and Jimmy is no longer a prophet. He is just a traumatized person in a ruined world.

Jimmy stabbed Kelson to prove he was not the “old neck,” to prove he had agency, that his violence was chosen and therefore meaningful. But the final scene reveals the opposite. He was never in control. He was never a prophet. He was just a man who let something dark speak through him, and in the end he dies helpless, crucified by his own people, killed by the living proof that his entire belief system was a lie. And Kelson’s response was that healing is real, redemption is possible, and your nihilism is not profound. It is just cowardice dressed in ritual.

When I think about Samson, the infected operate on pure rage, pure drive. No hierarchy, no negotiation or recognition. They are a horde of undifferentiated destruction, a mass that has dissolved individual identity into a shared drive. There is no self, no ego boundary, just collective rage. It is the most extreme version of mob psychology. So when one of them starts to change, when the drugs begin restoring even a flicker of selfhood in Samson, the others sense it immediately. They do not attack him because he is weak. They attack him because he is becoming different. He is no longer one of them.

This mirrors what Jimmy does to Kelson. Jimmy and the infected are doing the same thing at different levels of complexity. The horde attacks the curing Samson on instinct. Jimmy attacks the doctor on ideology. But the underlying logic is identical: anyone moving toward healing is a threat to the system built on sickness.

Kelson gave Samson a few minutes of being human. And in those few minutes he was attacked by the only “community” he had, made aware enough to feel pain, fear, and gratitude, and given just enough self to understand what he was losing as it faded. Samson using Kelson’s name is also an act of recognition. Jimmy never truly saw anyone. He used people, sacrificed them, turned them into symbols. Samson does what Jimmy never could: see another person as a person and name them.

Kelson is not being philosophical in the abstract. He says memento mori because he knows exactly what is about to happen. The cure is temporary. The drugs are fading. Samson is about to lose himself again and become rage once more. And Kelson accepts it. He has done what he came to do. The cure worked, even if only for a moment, and that moment was real.

Memento mori indeed. Remember you will die, but worse, remember you were briefly alive.