This article contains full spoilers for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Mad Max: Fury Road. If you’re curious about a post-credits scene for Furiosa, there isn’t one! Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has finally hit theaters and, if you’re here and have moved on past the spoiler warning, we assume that you’ve already gotten your dose of the wasteland. If not, well, you were warned.The Fury Road prequel has a pretty cut and dry ending, largely because its takes us directly into one of the most universally beloved films of the last 20 years: Mad Max: Fury Road. The final scene before the credits roll takes place maybe only hours before we meet Furiosa at the beginning of the 2015 installment of the franchise, as she smuggles Immortan Joe’s harem into her War Rig. Still, Furiosa does get a few moments to herself before she gathers the wives into the belly of her death-dealing semi and attempts to race their way to freedom. Furiosa Ending Explained As Anya Taylor Joy’s Furiosa and Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus see their grudge match crescendo, their confrontation leads to an ending that’s almost entirely up to the viewer to interpret. A narrator (who we believe is George Shevstov’s History Man, but don’t quote us) describes the methods with which Furiosa is rumored to have dispatched Dementus while the different scenarios play out on screen; a single bullet, roasting on a makeshift cross, and being dragged behind her wasteland hot rod. The point is, it’s a story that’s becoming legend, being passed down through the ages. What ages? We’re not sure, because no time passes between the end of Furiosa and Fury Road. Still, this is an idea that George Miller has very explicitly toyed with since Max Rockatansky’s V8 interceptor first sought revenge in the Wasteland. Speaking to IGN’s Scott Collura, Miller had this to say about the revenge tale… “There is a kind of cultural evolution,” Miller starts. “Where stories are told over and over again. But somehow they have to have some sort of resonance with their times. And we’ve been telling revenge stories in all cultures, specifically with Greek mythologies and mainly biblical stories, particularly Old Testament. It’s big in that world. In all mythology. So how do you tell a variation of it?”The Dick TreeThe really interesting version of the Legend of Furiosa’s Revenge — and simultaneously the most and least plausible one, even if it’s also the ending that the film implies is the true outcome — finds Furiosa planting a seed she’d kept since Dementus first abducted her as a child somehow in Dementus’ midsection. High in the citadel, Dementus is doomed to exist as the living soil for a tree from which he takes his only bit of sustenance, the condensation falling from its leaves. It’s an image that’s part freaky symbiosis, part snake eating its own tail but all classical mythology vibes. The idea that this man might be fated to literally bare fruit for a woman whose childhood he irreparably destroyed, so that she might continue her quest to return home ranks right up there with an eagle eating a dudes liver every day or some asshole having to push a boulder up a hill for eternity.Miller found inspiration for this ending in the mythologies found in his home, Australia. “They always go to something larger” he said of indigenous Australian stories, “where it becomes unapologetically mythological. So that’s what we offer up. Taking vengeance brings you to a full stop or a downward spiral. But we are looking for something else.” The image of the tree (ignoring the placement of the trunk on his lower abdomen that’s gotten us IGN folks referring to it by the shorthand “that dick tree”) does have an additional bit of significance attached to it, however. It represents Furiosa’s ability to coax some growth out of her lifelong commitment to revenge. The single seed that she clung to flowers into a tree, which bears the fruit of her long lost home once again. She demanded that Dementus give her mother back and, in a strange, symbolic way, she forced him to do just that.But that’s just another element of Miller’s entire goal with Furiosa and the Mad Max franchise at this point in its narrative. With each successive entry, the series gets more and more steeped in an oral tradition, including more legend and less hard fact. But that doesn’t mean Miller left everything wide open to interpretation. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga did begin its life as backstory for Charlize Theron’s take on the character in Fury Road, which blossomed into concept art and a screenplay and eventually the film. They took a similar approach to Fury Road’s other lead character as well.“We did the same for Max, in the year before we meet him in Fury Road… that was written not as a screenplay, but as a novella,” Miller explains. “So we had those two stories and everybody, including the cast, every designer, every member of the crew got those as a way of understanding what was happening in Fury Road. There are very specific design organizing ideas behind them all.”But while the worldbuilding done by Miller and his team is undeniably extensive. What happens in the Wasteland, the truth of it all, should still be taken with a grain of probably-irradiated sand. As Miller put it, while talking to us about the dick tree, “I shouldn’t interpret what it means. It’s for everybody to take what it means.”The Return to the Green PlaceWhat’s less up for interpretation are the final moments of the film. Furiosa claims her peach, sharing it with the wives as she loads them in the war rig, sure that she will take them to an oasis where none of them will ever have to deal with the cruelty of man or the harshness of the wasteland again. Of course, where Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ends, Mad Max: Fury Road begins, and we know that Furiosa and the surviving wives find her remaining Vuvalini family only to learn that the Green Place is now uninhabitable swampland. As for what happens next, well, that’s a different ending explained. (Suck it, Immortan Joe.) So what did the ending of the film mean to you? Did you like the sizzle reel of Fury Road that played during the end credits because oh man did we run home and watch that one again. Let us know about it in the comment section and check out the rest of our Furiosa coverage, including the 10 our reviewer gave it, and a more extensive version of our interview with Miller on why Mad Max movies don’t necessarily need Mad Max anymore.
