How did The Family Experiment end? | John Marrs (spoilers and ending explained)

This is a spoiler review of The Family Experiment by John Marrs where I go through what happened and how the book ended, as well as my thoughts on the ending. If you are looking for a spoiler-free review, head back to the main page. You can also find a full plot summary of The Family Experiment if you are looking for more.

What were my initial thoughts?

This was a great book! John Marrs always delivers in these terrifying but not-so-implausible speculative fiction stories, which are psychological thrillers to the maximum. There was a lot to follow and keep track of, and Marrs has a tendency to drop twists that are powerful but subtle in execution. You need to pay attention! Looking to spark your memory about the story? Keep reading.

What is The Family Experiment about?

In a time when most people can’t afford to start families of their own, a company called Awakening Entertainment promises to provide parents the technology to order MetaBabies—children that exist entirely in the metaverse but who grow up and interact like real children. Parents can design everything about their metachild. To promote the technology, the company is launching a reality TV show called The Family Experiment. The show follows several carefully selected couples over the course of nine months as they raise their MetaBaby from infancy to adulthood in the metaverse.

Viewers will be able to watch the parents and their MetaBaby 24/7. Viewers can vote to influence the game and eventually select a winner. The winning couple can choose to keep their MetaBaby or to permanently delete their child from the metaverse and take cash to start a real world family of their own (dispersed only on the day of the live birth of their real world child). Losers will have their MetaBaby permanently deleted.

Who are the contestants in The Family Experiment?

Rufus and Kitty are in their late twenties. They are eliminated in the first month of the experiment after a sleep-deprived Rufus shakes their metababy to death. Yikes!

Salena and Jaden are genetic matches (shoutout to The One!) and join The Family Experiment after fertility struggles. They had been saving for IVF until Jaden developed a gambling problem and put them into debt. During the experiment, Salena receives a file that contains dossiers of three single mothers and their babies. Jaden is the father of all three children. When Salena confronts Jaden live on air, he admits he has been allowing women to pay him to help them get pregnant. While they are in their headsets, a woman enters their home and murders Jaden. It was one of the women from the file.

Woody and Tina have a metababy named Belle and a real daughter named Issy who is secretly locked in their basement. Several years ago, Issy was convicted of murdering another child and is now on house arrest until she turns eighteen. Someone breaks in and leaves Issy a device that allows her to circumvent the security systems. Upstairs, Issy learns about Belle and The Family Experiment. Issy logs in as Tina’s avatar and strangles Belle as the world watches in horror. Though viewers think Tina was responsible, she doesn’t face legal consequences for the murder of Belle; the law states that an avatar cannot be killed unlawfully since it was never alive to begin with. 

Cadman and Gabriel have a metababy named River. Cadman is a social media influencer (seen in The Passengers!) that uses his younger boyfriend and their metachild to get brand deals. Several years ago, Gabriel became addicted to a drug called Amazonite (AZ) and eventually developed a brain tumor. Insurance won’t cover treatment because of Gabriel’s addiction so Cadman paid out of pocket, leaving them broke. When their metachild River is found giving AZ to kids at school and one of the metakids overdoses, the show terminates River and kicks Cadman and Gabriel off. It seems that humans can terminate the life of an avatar with no consequences, but the same isn’t true if an avatar causes another avatar’s termination.Someone provides Cadman with a file showing Gabriel has been cheating on him. They also provide Gabriel with a file showing that Cadman framed their metachild River. Hmm…

Dimitri and Zoe are in their forties and grieving the loss of their real-world son Adam. Several years ago, Adam went missing while the family were at a Scottish moor. They call emergency services, but Adam is never found. In the present, someone is sending them reminders about things from their past. Interesting…

Hudson joins The Family Experiment solo to prove that single-parent families can provide as much love as two-parent families. Hudson is familiar to us for a different reason, though. Remember those flashbacks to twelve years earlier? A boy called Hudson was taken to a facility called Ararat with other children whose parents couldn’t afford to keep them. Hudson has secret plan for The Family Experiment that he has kept hidden, and it all ties back to his years at Ararat…

Did you notice that anonymous sources seem to be targeting these contestants? We’ll learn more about that.

What happened at Ararat?

Ararat is a facility where kids are sent after their parents can no longer afford to keep them. After arriving at Ararat, Hudson meets another child named Eva and her brother Cain. Hudson has no memory of his past before arriving. Parents hand their kids over in exchange for their debts being paid off. Some parents have their child’s memory wiped to prevent them from knowing they were abandoned. After months of testing, kids are sent to work as child avatars for customers beta testing the metachild program. Awakening is using the kids to develop children that look, act, and feel real. When a child misbehaves, they are sent away from Ararat. While Hudson does well, both Eva and Cain are sent away.

After ten years, Hudson finally learns the truth about the children taken from Ararat. They are still in the facility and repurposed to teach AI about pain (both physical and emotional). The children are abused with a goal of understanding how far humans can be pushed. When a child reaches a point where they are no longer able to respond, they are given treatments to erase their memory so that the research can start again. Hudson sees his friend Eva is still there, a shell of her former self. Cain is gone. More on this later…

How does the competition end?

The final contestants are Hudson versus Dimitri and Zoe. At the live finale, Hudson drops a bombshell—Dimitri and Zoe’s son didn’t die the day he went missing. Dimitri and Zoe sold Adam to pay off their debts and faked his death to cover it up. We are all wondering if Hudson is Adam, but it turns out he is not. The real Adam died the night he was taken after helping Hudson make it to shore. Part of Zoe and Dimitri’s debt came from an accident where Zoe struck a father and son with her vehicle, paralyzing the father and taking the life of his son. They now pay half their wages to the father. While at Ararat, Hudson grew attached to one of his assignments—a man named Charles who lost his son. Charles was the man who Zoe hit and who later took his own life.

Since Zoe and Dimitri violated the terms of the show, Hudson is the winner but he refuses the prize money. As Hudson reveals the truth behind Ararat and how the metachildren were created using trafficked children, Awakening tries to cut the stream but Hudson has another stream broadcasting everything. When he finishes the reveal, Hudson logs out. In New York, the facility known as Ararat is burned down.

So… who is Hudson?

Hudson is really an orphan named Leo Hamilton who snuck on the dinghy to escape the horrors of community housing. On the boat, he met a scared boy wearing a New York t-shirt who had no memory of who he was. Leo called him ‘Hudson’ because of his shirt. The boy didn’t survive and Leo took his shirt and ID tags, taking his place. Leo later learned the identity of the child who saved him—Adam Taylor-Georgiou, Dimitri and Zoe’s son.

One year before the show, Leo and Cain meet on Mermaid Beach and Cain explained the truth. Awakening Entertainment never plans to release the children, they will either continue to be used for training or be sold for medical use or to be used in brothels. Cain says that Awakening plans to cast Leo on The Family Experiment as a single dad. The people at Awakening know he isn’t really Adam through DNA tests. He has no past and he is malleable. They will pack the cast with other contestants who can be manipulated and ensure Hudson (Leo) wins.

What happens to the other contestants?

One year later, Tina and Woody are getting divorced. Tina found items belonging to the boy Issy killed and assumes Woody helped cover it up. In reality, Issy hit the boy with a brick but he didn’t die. Woody is the one who killed him after the boy threatened to turn Issy in. Woody doesn’t admit to Tina that it was him. After escaping her house, Issy perished at sea after she hid in a cargo container that tipped into the ocean off a shipping boat.

After the show, Cadman accused Gabriel of cheating on him and they break up. A few days later, Cadman received a video showing that the evidence against Gabriel was faked. Cadman gets an alert that Gabriel has gone on to be the public face of a campaign to help provide funding to adoptive parents. Cadman sees Gabriel is happy without him, and makes an anonymous donation.

Salena formed a friendship with the women Jaden fathered children with. Netflix made a dramatized version of her story and Jaden’s murder on The Family Experiment, and Salena used that money to pay for IVF.

Dimitri and Zoe did not get charged with trafficking their own son after the retracted their confession that aired around the world. They live in a police safehouse after an arson attempt on their home.

How does The Family Experiment end?

After Ararat was exposed on The Family Experiment, it was burned down. Leo went to New York and found Eva in a hospital suffering from smoke inhalation and brought her back overseas. In their final scene, Cain and Leo are caring for Eva who is emotionally scarred from the abuse she suffered at Ararat. They are hopeful that one day she’ll recover.

In a flashback, a boy called Matheo was discovered by a family in France and had no memories of where he came from. The family were worried that he had been trafficked and scoured the news for missing children. They realized that the boy was Adam. They offered to get in contact with his parents, but Matheo told them not to. Matheo remembered a boy on the boat telling him that some parents wiped their children’s memory before trafficking them. He knows his parents gave him away. 

Matheo grows up with the family and learns to work on their vineyard. Years later on the finale of The Family Experiment, Matheo’s real parents Dimitri and Zoe were exposed. He realized that Hudson must have been the boy he saved that night when the dinghy capsized before washing up on a shore in France. He feels sad to learn that Hudson thought Adam (Matheo) died saving him. Matheo and his parents started including photos of missing children on their wine bottles in the hopes that some may be found. He is invited to appear with Gabriel and the charity he worked for but declined, not wanting to expose the parents who raised him in case someone recognized him.

What did I think overall?

This was complex and I admit that I struggled to sort out the web of who was Adam, Hudson, Leo, Matheo, and the two boys on the boat. Let me help out in case you didn’t read the recap. Adam was the boy on the boat wearing a New York City t-shirt who “died” saving another boy’s life (we later learn he didn’t die). Adam had his memory wiped, so he didn’t know who he was before arriving and another boy decided to call him “Hudson”. After nearly drowning, Adam washes up on the shores in France and is found by the family who own the vineyard. They discover his real identity (Adam) and that his parents trafficked him; they name him Matheo and raise him as their own. Meanwhile the other boy on the boat was Leo–an orphan who found his way onto the boat thinking he could leave the rundown community housing in the U.K. Leo can’t swim and Adam helps him to shore. Thinking Adam was dead, Leo takes his NYC t-shirt and his tags that contain data on his real identity. Leo pretends to be “Hudson” (Adam) and later learns who Adam really was and what his parents did to him. Leo is who we know as Hudson through the bulk of the book, and he is seeking revenge on Zoe and Dimitri for what they did to their son. Phew!

The Eva storyline was particularly sad. It’s clear that nothing good happens through the door on the left, but we don’t learn that horror until much later. I’ll admit that my mind never even considered that they would be abusing children to the brink of sanity in order to learn negative emotions. At the end, Leo (Hudson) and Cain have found Eva and rescued her, but she is so despondent and childlike that it was heartbreaking to see. This was realistic, but boy was it hard to wrap my head around emotionally!

Many of the contestants were unlikable, but Marrs managed to make them understandable, even if we didn’t like them in the end. Issy was a psychopath who stabbed her own mother and tried to murder another child. But did that justify Woody killing the child to silence him and letting his daughter take the fall? Is that the true love of a parent, no matter who their child ends up becoming? Dimitri and Zoe were struggling to get by and knew that they could no longer give Adam a good life. It’s hard to feel for them, though, when they decide to traffic him to pay the debts they incurred in part because of distracted driving that took another child’s life. Further, it was clear that they knew on some level the setup with sending their child to another family was way too good to be true. They may not have known about Ararat or what would happen there, but what type of person would pay off massive amounts of debt to take in a ten year-old they had never seen or met? Certainly not someone with any good intentions…

Cadman is an all-time jerk, and we learn more about what he has done to Gabriel than we realized. Keeping Gabriel down so he couldn’t leave him, all because he needed a replacement for his match who died. Gabriel is the most likable character in the book, in my opinion. I was shocked to learn the extent Cadman went to–getting Gabriel addicted to drugs (on accident, to be fair), forcing Gabriel to hit his lowest point all with the intention of swooping in as the hero, drugging Gabriel again even though he was in recovery out of jealousy, and framing their metachild for murder to keep the upper hand. Yikes! Even still, Cadman’s final scene where he let Gabriel go even though he wanted to ask him back was redeeming (in part). He finally realized that Gabriel was able to thrive and have a life without him. I wonder what will happen to Cadman from here? We learn that he developed this hard shell as a form of protection. Will he become a better person? Be permanently alone?

What are the takeaways from The Family Experiment?

There was so much to unpack here, and Marrs doesn’t shy away from exploring the dark implications of some of the technologies in his books. As with his previous books, the technology advancement seems great at first. We see parents like Zoe and Dimitri who are grieving a child get to hold one again. Others who thought they would never be able to have kids now can experience it. But as always, there is a darkside to this technology and how it can be exploited (not to mention how it was developed using abused and trafficked children…).

News alerts fill the reader in on some of the troubling aspects to this experiment. Jaden’s murderer is arrested and their child Malachi is terminated in the metaverse when Salena decides not to continue with the program. This distresses viewers, who are outraged at the off-screen death. This was a child who was developed using real children, but the implication is that humans can do what they want to metachildren since they aren’t alive. A parent could decide at any point to just permanently terminate their metachild. Something about it is troubling! Parents can design their child to their exact preferences, but this makes it harder for them to deal with their child’s imperfections. They designed them, after all! Roofus couldn’t handle his daughter crying, and shook her to death (to no consequences, since of course). Tina and Woody learn Belle has been self-harming, which upsets them and makes them wonder if this is a challenge from the television show (their metachild must be perfect; they don’t want another Issy). The reality is that anything that afflict children in the real world can also afflict them in the metaverse, by design. The differing laws between humans and AI were fascinating and highlight a glaring problem. Humans can terminate an AI child or human at any point without consequences, but an AI can be terminated if they cause harm to other AI. My head spun thinking this through. Can humans really do whatever they want to AI? How do we draw a line between what is appropriate in the metaverse but not appropriate in the real world when that line becomes blurred the more people experience differing laws?

Marrs explores how people may become addicted to this alternate reality (something that has already been studied in terms of mental health for those who play video games most of their waking hours). Some parents struggle to find joy in their real-world life after the glamour of their metaverse life. Overtime, what are the implications when someone neglects their personal care because they can’t disengage from the metaverse? Meanwhile a news report covers a warning from psychologists that some viewers are becoming addicted to the show and it’s 24-hour accessibility, causing significant impact to their mental and physical health. I’d argue that sometimes that happens to Big Brother live feed watchers…

More distressing, politicians are pushing to move problems from the real world, such as child sexual abuse, into the metaverse. Ethics committees are concerned on a number of levels, not the least of which is that it may only increase their desire to replicate those actions in the real world. It would be as though they are endorsing pedophilia. It also brings up the question of the appropriateness of designing the metachildren off of real children, only to create them and let them be abused. In particular, Awakening Entertainment learned that they only way to truly create a metachild that felt authentic is to try the range of possible experiences on a real child and assess their response. Yikes!

A thought-provoking book that I thoroughly enjoyed. I recommend checking out Marrs’ other books as well! I loved The One, which I read before my blog (perhaps I’ll re-read to round out my reviews). I also read and loved The Passengers and The Marriage Act. Still on my TBR to round out this collection is The Minders, which doesn’t get spoken about as much as the others for some reason, but exists in the same universe!