🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

When a mysterious woman with magenta hair and money to burn tells you a box is cursed, you believe her. Or, if you’re the kids of Freeridge, you at least debate it. 

In the first episode, the crew purchases a box that belonged to the late Marisol “Abuelita” Martinez (Peggy Blow), of Freeridge precursor show On My Block, and the debate over the maybe-cursed object threatens to tear the whole friend group apart. So… is the box actually cursed? Have the Core Four “taken the darkness in,” as Demi (Ciara Riley Wilson) believes? Well, as bruja Juanita (Carla Jimenez) can tell you, it’s complicated. 

The box itself is not cursed. Mariluna Martinez (also Blow) confirms as much to Gloria (Keyla Monterroso Mejia) in Freeridge Episode 7. Mariluna would know, since she’s the person who claimed the box was cursed in the first place — and is Marisol’s twin sister. Mariluna gave Marisol the box when the former left her family to marry a rich man named Henry. “The curse was our inside joke. Telling people things were cursed just made us laugh! I love pranks and games,” Mariluna breezily tells Gloria.  

Yet, the box did technically invite bad energy into the crew’s life. As Juanita tells Demi and Ines (Bryana Salaz) in Episode 7, “The box was not cursed. But your belief in it made it real. But now you don’t believe. So it’s not.” The only remaining problem, Juanita explains, is that while undoing the box curse, the kids “might have brought upon another one.” Only time will tell. 

“I do believe that the theme of bringing on our own curses is something that is so relatable to everyone every day,” Salaz — who practices daily affirmations — tells Tudum. “I believe in speaking things into existence. So if you’re speaking negatively, then you are bringing a curse upon yourself.” 

Wilson, on the other hand, sees the sliver of good the curse conversation brought to Freeridge. “It almost doesn’t matter if the curse was real or not,” she says, “because it made us sit down and reevaluate our lives to see what we control and what we feel like is out of our control.” 

The cursed box isn’t the only bit of mysticism running through Freeridge. From gnomies to all those prophecies, the series is full of supernatural surprises — which provided plenty of food for thought for its cast. The actors of Freeridge were as eager as their characters to dig into their series’ biggest mysteries. 

The gnomies and Juanita 

Freeridge gives On My Block viewers a shock by finally introducing Juanita, a woman previously only glimpsed as a ceramic gnome passionately coveted by Jamal (Brett Gray) and Chivo (Emilio Rivera). Juanita is real! And she’s a pedigreed psychic. 

“[The gnomie] is voluptuous. She’s full figured. I love it,” says Monterroso Mejia. “I said, ‘Who’s going to be Juanita?’ When I saw [her, it was] literally perfect.” 

Freeridge’s creator, Lauren Iungerich, still can’t help but giggle when thinking about the flesh-and-blood Juanita’s entrance into the On My Block universe. “We simply wanted to answer some long-awaited questions and found a crazy way to do it,” Iungerich tells Tudum. “Breaking that episode where we meet the real Juanita was the best day in the writers’ room.” 

Juanita plays a key role in Freeridge. In addition to explaining the box curse to Ines and Demi, she finally shares the complete history of how the mystical gnomies came to be. Juanita first created gnomies when she was studying ceramic arts and post-modern mysticism in college. Juanita meshed her two passions into one by soul binding the spirits of the dead into the vessels. “They help the spirits transition and [help] the loved ones left behind,” she explains. 

So, if Juanita has her own gnomie, does that mean she’s dead? No, of course not. The Juanita gnomie was created after the real-life woman broke up with Chivo years prior. “Breakups can feel like a death,” she explains, and the gnomie helps Chivo cope. 

Demi’s prophecy  

Freeridge Episode 3 is prophecy-heavy. The first character to receive one from witch-influencer Cinnamon (Jami Alix) is Demi. Cinnamon tells her, “Your problem is that you are trying to fix something that is broken. But to solve your problem, something must be broken to be fixed.”  

At first, Demi assumes the prophecy is about a hidden panel in the mystery box. But it could also be applied to her crush on Cam (Tenzing Norgay Trainor). The sparring pair only resolve their conflicted romantic history once they date — and, crucially, break up. On top of that mystical foretelling, we learn in the finale that Demi’s grandmother told her that her “forever penis” would be a guy with a “wonky wink.” Get your mind out of the gutter: She means eyes, and Cam can’t wink — he just blinks. 

Both Wilson and Trainor still hope their characters find their way back to each other. 

“Cam and Demi should end up together. Their relationship, which was a friendship for most of their life, is so deep-rooted,” Riley says. “They tried [romance] and it didn’t work out. But their connection is really special, and it’s not just going to go away.”   

Trainor adds, “Cam and Demi are definitely meant to end up together because even after everything they go through, they always somehow find a way back to each other.” 

The group prophecy 

After giving Demi her prophecy, Cinnamon mutters to the entire group, “Fortune favors the bold.” Gloria evokes these words in the finale, when Mariluna invites the kids to play a wild game. (Remember, she loves games.) Mariluna can either write Gloria a check for $1 million right this second, or Gloria could “choose to spend that million in three months with nothing to show for it. And win 10…” million dollars. 

Although Gloria has played it safe her entire life, she decides to embrace her good luck and go for the big money. 

Cam’s prophecy 

Cinnamon the TikTok witch also has a prophecy for Cam, telling him, “Whatever you choose is going to be the wrong choice. But ultimately you have to choose not to choose. And that will be the choice.” Ever the worrier, Cam asks “So what’s the right choice?” All Cinnamon says is “Correct.” 

Eventually Cam realizes that he should break up with Demi, after first choosing her over his initial love interest, Andre (Zaire Adams). At last, Cam has chosen nothing, and that was the right choice for him. “He can’t deal with options,” Trainor says of Cam. “He just needs to just do him, and that’s it.” 

The “sister” prophecy 

Later in Episode 3, Cinnamon approaches Gloria with her own personalized premonition. “One sister will be the downfall of the other,” she tells her. Recalling filming, Monterroso Mejia says, “The whole time I thought it was about us,” gesturing to her on-screen sibling Salaz. But the finale reveals the prophecy was about two other sisters: the Martinezes.  

“I went to Lauren, our co-creator, and said, ‘You’re a genius. I just put it together,’” Monterroso Mejia adds. Salaz admits she was “caught off-guard” by the twist. 

Sadly, the prophecy seems to bring misfortune to Mariluna’s door. In the finale, she is approached by On My Block’s Santos gang members Sad Eyes (Steve Louis Villegas) and Joker (Joshua Armando Ticas), who assume Mariluna is her dead sister. They think Marisol got her hands on the earlier show’s vanished fortune and faked her death to enjoy the cash. 

Which brings us to the last prophecy of Freeridge. 

The death prophecy 

Cinnamon ends her prophesying with three words: “Someone’s gonna die.” Her head filled with thoughts of sisters and downfall, Monterroso Mejia thought that her character was on the chopping block. Salaz says that everyone else believed Ines, not Gloria, was the doomed sister. But it’s neither. 

In the final scene of Season 1, the Santos approach Mariluna outside of her house. The camera cuts away to the kids inside, and they hear a gunshot. We do not see if Mariluna was injured, but we do see her leg hanging out of her car. The suggestion is that Mariluna is dead. 

Monterroso Mejia isn’t ready to believe Gloria’s friend and benefactor is gone just yet. “Mariluna better not [be dead]. She’s got to give us $10 million. Where’s my check?” she jokes. 

No matter what happens, Salaz isn’t quite sure the Martinez sisters are safe just yet. “I want to believe we are,” she says. “But this is Freeridge — so no one’s ever safe.”