🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Freeridge comes agonizingly close to letting its exhausted heroes live happily, wealthily ever after. After breakups, money woes and a possible curse situation, the Core Four finally get some good news. New friend/former antagonist Mariluna (Peggy Blow) offers Gloria (Keyla Monterroso Mejia) $1 million, either to do with as she pleases or as part of a complicated challenge: spend the entire $1million in three months “with nothing to show for it” and receive $10 million in return. 

But then Mariluna is seemingly shot during an off-screen confrontation with Sad Eyes (Steve Louis Villegas) and Joker (Joshua Armando Ticas). The final image of Season 1 shows Mariluna’s legs dangling out of her Bentley. Is Mariluna officially dead? The Freeridge cast isn’t so convinced. 

“We heard the gunshot. We saw Gloria’s face,” Tenzing Norgay Trainor, who plays the Core Four’s lone boy, Cam, tells Tudum. Bryana Salaz, who portrays chaos agent Ines, advances a hopeful theory. “I saw a twitch,” she says. “I think the ambulance got there in time.” 

Monterroso Mejia is simply focused on her character’s bag. “Mariluna better not [be dead]. She’s got to give us $10 million,” she says with a laugh. “I’m all, ‘Where’s my check?’ ”

There’s also a much more emotional reason Monterroso Mejia wants to keep Mariluna around: her admiration for “badass” scene partner Peggy Blow. According to co-creator Lauren Iungerich, the role of Mariluna was Blow’s “own original idea” after initially playing Marisol “Abuelita” Martinez in On My Block; the Freeridge writers room ran with it. Monterroso Mejia was an On My Block fan before she was cast in Freeridge, and she relished every second of working with Blow and watching her work. 

“I was a little starstruck in the beginning,” she admits. “But you see Peggy pull up in the Bentley and she’s not Abuelita no more. She was incredible.” 

Although Mariluna’s fate still hangs in the balance, some other Freeridge mysteries are ready to be uncovered. 

Where did the box come from? 

In the Freeridge premiere, Cam buys a possibly cursed box — bearing an “MM” monogram — at the Martinez family garage sale. 

But On My Block fans first saw the box long ago. In the final season’s Episode 9, a hospitalized Abuelita dispatches Jamal (Brett Gray) to her bedroom to bring her “the good kind” of drugs. Looking under Abuelita’s bed for her stash, Jamal instead pulls out the MM box. “Don’t open it! It’s cursed,” she tells him. Why keep a cursed box? “Because if you give away the curse, it makes it worse,” she claims. 

In the next episode, On My Block’s series finale, Abuelita notably mentions wanting to outlive her “evil twin sister.” Mariluna is that sister. The final episodes of On My Block plant the seeds of Freeridge Season 1’s major mystery. 

What’s in the box?! 

Not a curse, despite what Abuelita said. 

What’s really going on with Rusty? 

When Gloria first meets new classmate Rusty (Michael Solomon), she detects something suspicious about him. He is her shady tío Tonio’s (J.R. Villarreal) unnecessary assistant, after all... But by Episode 3, it seems the truth about Rusty has finally come out: He’s a former child actor. His turn as Trusty Rusty in fictional kids show Rusty & the Manotaur is beloved by the students of Freeridge High. Eventually both Gloria and Ines hook up with Rusty, but Gloria is the one to start a serious relationship with him. 

But there’s one shoe left to drop. In Episode 7, Ines finds a Help Wanted ad that her uncle posted for an “Attractive Teenage Boy.” The gig is to “flirt with teenage nieces to distract from their dad’s cancer” for $18 an hour. Tonio was never paying Rusty to be his assistant, but to spend time with Gloria and Ines as their father, Tonio’s brother Javier (Jean Paul San Pedro), struggles with his health.  

“That’s a big old twist, isn’t it? I found out when we got all the scripts and I was like, ‘Big old gasp,’ ” Ciara Riley Wilson, who plays Demi, says. She credits her castmates for making the twist work on-screen even better than on the page. “The surprise hit hard again,” when she watched Freeridge Season 1, she continues, “because we actually see the relationship that he has with Gloria. It’s so beautiful and genuine that [the twist] is like a sucker punch in the gut.”

What does that kiss mean? 

After Ines reveals Rusty’s secret to Gloria in the Season 1 finale, the two commiserate about their broken relationships. A little bit wine drunk and in his feelings, Rusty tells Ines to kiss him to get over her lingering attraction to him. The kiss-off, however, is unexpectedly passionate; they both feel it, but stop when Gloria interrupts them. She doesn’t see the kiss and surprisingly apologizes to Ines and Rusty for the hurtful things she said to both of them, making them feel even more guilty. 

Salaz “loved” that kiss, since it revealed the depth of Rusty’s connections with both of the Salazar sisters. “One of them is obviously very genuine, very pure and you want to root for that,” she says. “But then there’s the other side that’s that forbidden thing that makes it so much more tempting.” 

It’s so tempting, Salaz thinks, that even Ines was taken aback by the moment. “That kiss was self sabotage, and she didn’t expect to feel what she felt,” she says. As Freeridge Season 1 concludes, this love triangle is very precariously balanced. 

Is Monterroso Mejia really an arm bar champ?  

Gloria’s claim to fame is breaking the Freeridge High hanging arm bar record. Is her portrayer similarly talented? “Oh, hell no,” Monterroso Mejia says with a laugh. 

“I’m a voluptuous girl,” she proudly continues. When Monterroso Mejia initially heard her character would break the record, she asked if there would be special effects to achieve the scene. There were. “I’m not going to lie, in that wide shot, I was standing on apple boxes,” she explains. Those apple boxes were wrapped in the green material that makes digital compositing possible.

But no matter how trying the scene was, Monterroso Mejia faked it until she made it, no stunt double necessary. “It was all me,” she concludes. 

What’s it like to work with Tío Emilio?  

After explaining the history of gnomies — they’re the marriage of ceramics and soul binding — postmodern bruja Juanita introduces her first project, Tío Emilio. He’s a wonky bowl with googly eyes… and also, her uncle. “He died before I mastered the wheel,” Juanita explains. Though he lacks the artistic mastery of her subsequent vessels, Juanita still figures eating food from her late loved ones would be comforting. 

Tío Emilio quickly takes a liking to Demi, following her around from their Episode 7 meeting into the subsequent finale. “That bowl was hilarious,” Wilson says. “It’s hard when you’re filming and they’re moving the bowl around. Sometimes you’re not even looking at a bowl, just screaming at the air.”