Spoilers for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes ahead.
The Hunger Games has never been a franchise that shies away from the deaths of your favorite characters. Rue, Finnick Odair, Primrose Everdeen; it’s the brutal nature of the game in Panem. But while those deaths felt both definite and devastating, the conclusion of Lucy Gray Baird’s story in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes leaves much more room for interpretation than any character death or disappearance before her.
So, what can we say goes down at the end of Francis Lawrence’s nearly three-hour prequel? The final scene between Corionalus Snow (Tom Blyth) and Lucy (Rachel Zegler), the tribute turned victor of the tenth Hunger Games, is filled with tension and betrayal as Snow loses what he loves most dear: Lucy Gray and control. This loss is what sets him on the path toward becoming the murderous, control-hungry president of Panem we later see in the original Hunger Games trilogy.
In the third act of Lawrence’s film (which mirrors author Suzanne Collins’s three-part novel), Snow and Lucy are together in District 12 after she returns from the Capitol; she continues to perform with her nomadic musical troupe, the Covey, while he is forced to join the Peacekeepers with his best friend and Academy classmate Sejanus Plinth (Josh Andrés Rivera) as punishment for cheating in the Games. As Snow and Lucy Gray’s romance blossoms, Plinth spends his days devising an escape plan with a fellow rebel named Spruce. But one night after one of Lucy Gray’s performances, Snow and Lucy Gray find Sejanus and Spruce arguing over a stash of Peacekeeper guns they’ve stolen. Mayfair Lipp (the District 12 mayor’s daughter) and her boyfriend Billy Taupe then stumble into the chaos, and soon Mayfair is threatening to leave and tell her father about the guns. The scuffle ends with Spruce and Snow, determined to avoid being implicated and under pressure to clean up his friend Sejanus’s mess, shooting Mayfair and Billy down.
Mayfair had a long-standing grudge against Lucy Gray (who happens to be Billy’s ex), so her mayor father suspects the new victor of involvement in his daughter’s death. Lucy Gray urges Snow to run away from District 12 with her, but before they do, Snow ties up loose ends by sending a jabberjay recording of Sejanus’s plan to Head Gamemaker Dr. Gaul (Viola Davis), which results in his friend being hanged for treason. (Again, the man would do anything to keep his nose clean.) As the pair escape up north away from Panem, Lucy Gray tells Snow, “It’d be nice, in my new life, not to kill anyone else,” referencing her gruesome time in the Games. Snow replies, “Three seems enough for one lifetime,” sparking Lucy Gray’s suspicions about Snow’s involvement with Sejanus’s death.
Once the couple reaches a cabin up north, Snow discovers the guns Spruce hid. He’s relieved at the opportunity to discard them and sever his second-to-last tie to the crime — but the last tie, of course, is Lucy Gray. It’s when Lucy Gray leaves to dig up some katniss, an arrowhead plant whose roots can be eaten (coincidence much?), that their doomed relationship reaches a boiling point. Snow goes out to look for her but finds only the shawl he gifted her; when he picks it up, a snake underneath swiftly bites his arm. Spiraling in confusion and shock, Snow screams out for Lucy Gray and begins shooting wildly at a horde of mockingjays that fly around him and sing back Lucy Gray’s “Hanging Tree” ballad. Are you, are you comin’ to the tree? / Where they strung up a man, they say, who murdered three / Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be. We see Lucy Gray seemingly nicked by a bullet — and then the camera pans up to a tree. We hear more gunshots but never see Lucy falling or dying. She doesn’t appear onscreen again; all Snow can find of her afterward are some footprints leading to nowhere in the forest. After a while, Snow leaves the forest to dump the guns into a lake and returns to District 12, and then back home to the Capitol on Dr. Gaul’s orders.
Both the book and movie leave Lucy Gray’s ending quite ambiguous. Dean of the Academy Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) underscores that point to Snow in the final moments of the film, confirming that she’s simply vanished without a trace. Dr. Gaul even wipes all the video footage of Lucy Gray’s games. In the Hunger Games novel, which takes place some 65 years after the events of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Katniss Everdeen mentions that District 12 has only ever had two victors, and Haymitch is the only one still alive. Now we know who the other was. Big-swing theories about what happened to Lucy Gray range from imagining her as an ancestor of Katniss (she’s not), or the woman who became District 13 president Alma Coin, whom Katniss kills in Mockingjay Part II (highly doubtful), or Greasy Sae, a black-market seller in District 12 who’s fond of Katniss — the latter is a high-ranking theory due to “Greasy Sae” rhyming with “Lucy Gray.”
But, simply put, Lucy Gray’s disappearance will likely always be a mystery. Her name all but tells us as much: She’s named after William Wordsworth’s poem “Lucy Gray,” the story of a young girl who becomes lost in a snowstorm. “Yet some maintain that to this day / She is a living child / That you may see sweet Lucy Gray / Upon the lonesome wild,” the poem ends. “And sings a solitary song / That whistles in the wind.” Like Snow, we’re only left to wonder. While all that’s left of her may be just a whistle in the wind, it’s a song that survives to haunt Snow once again.