Inside Job Cliffhanger Ending Explained: What's Next For Cognito Inc.
Warning: the following contains SPOILERS for Inside Job.
Netflix’s October 2021 lineup featured the premiere of Inside Job, and here's what happened in the twist ending. Created by former Gravity Falls and Regular Show writer Shion Takeuchi, Inside Job follows anti-social genius and potential supervillain Reagan Ridley (Lizzy Caplan) as she leads a team of experts for Cognito Inc., a deep state company that profits from creating and maintaining some of the most famous conspiracies in pop culture.
In Inside Job episode 9, “Mole Hunt,” Cognito Inc. then-CEO J.R. (Andy Daly) gets initiated into the Shadow Board. This means Reagan is finally becoming CEO. But when someone steals the unspoken file – Cognito Inc.’s master dossier of every conspiracy the company has committed – J.R. threatens to put everyone in Shadow Prison X if Reagan doesn’t find the mole by the end of the day.
Inside Job episode 10, “Inside Reagan,” reveals that the mole was Bear-o, the robot that Reagan’s dad Rand Ridley programmed to keep Reagan happy. The crew eventually defeats Bear-o. However, in the final scene, the Shadow Board informs Reagan that, because the mole incident shows her inexperience, the job of CEO will be going to the person with the most shares of the company: Rand Ridley. Here’s a breakdown of everything that happened in the ending of Netflix’s Inside Job.
Neither Reagan nor Rand can recall Bear-o’s shutdown code, so they improvise a way to get inside Reagan’s brain by salvaging parts from Rand’s old Inception helmet and then submerging themselves in a tank of Magic Myc’s (Brett Gelman) psychedelic juice. Inside Reagan’s repressed memories, she finds out that Rand used the same helmet to erase her memories of Orrin Carthwait, her only childhood friend, in order to maximize Reagan’s potential – Rand’s own personal insurance policy for always having a hold over Cognito Inc.
This is Inside Job’s biggest twist because it reveals Rand’s true selfish motives – to use Reagan’s genius for personal gain, even if it means erasing the only true childhood friend that Reagan had, at the risk of damaging his daughter’s brain. In fact, this twist reveals the deep roots of Reagan and Rand’s toxic relationship as father and daughter, similar to the revelations in the Rick & Morty season 5 finale. Even though they successfully retrieve the shutdown code from Reagan’s memories, which turns out to be “Orrin,” the victory over Bear-o is short-lived. It is immediately followed by Reagan practically banishing Rand – not just from Cognito Inc., but from her life. However, as the ending reveals, it’s not that easy to get rid of Rand Ridley.
After the Bear-o crisis is averted, Reagan gets ready to take J.R.’s place as Cognito Inc. CEO. However, the Shadow Board informs her that the next CEO will be her father Rand instead. There’s much evidence to suggest that this was Rand’s plan all along. Apart from erasing Reagan’s memories to use her as his personal insurance policy against the company, Rand Ridley also built and programmed Bear-o, whose actions lead to Reagan being passed over as CEO, leaving Rand as the next logical candidate for the Shadow Board. Indeed, it would seem that Inside Job’s biggest real-life conspiracy is Rand Ridley himself, the disgruntled mad scientist and former employee with the motive – as well as all the means – to take down Cognito Inc. and rebuild it according to his personal vision of world domination.
Moreover, Rand could have been staying with Reagan, as well as living and acting like a slob, just to avoid any suspicion that he has been planning a huge inside job. And with Bear-o taking the blame for stealing the unspoken file, Rand has positioned himself to the Shadow Board as the current best candidate for CEO – especially after J.R. was deemed an unfit candidate. Even if the Shadow Board sees all the evidence of how Rand deliberately sabotaged Cognito Inc. to gain the title, Rand’s actions would be respected by the Robes, as it shows that he has the ruthlessness to run the company with efficiency. Rand is not only a worse father than Rick Sanchez, but he’s also more blatantly evil.
As Rand reveals in his secret surveillance room under Cognito Inc., he has eyes on everyone in the building at all times. Moreover, as revealed by Reagan’s repressed memory of the time Rand erased parts of her brain, Rand has wanted to take down J.R. since Reagan was just a kid. Again, Rand has all the motives and every means needed to inform the Shadow Board about the full scale of J.R.’s under-the-table deals, which J.R. did to finance his own volcanic supervillain lair. On the other hand, as Oprah reveals that she was also aware of the mole in Cognito Inc. when she threatened to blackmail J.R., it could’ve been the Illuminati at work. But even then, it wouldn’t be far-fetched if the Illuminati’s involvement in Cognito Inc.’s affairs was just part of Rand’s bigger plans to takeover.
While Inside Job employs a classic twist ending in which the protagonist’s mentor or authority figure is revealed to be the real villain all along, Rand’s ascend to CEO introduces a new and interesting supervillain and conundrum for Reagan to face and solve, which also means that she can no longer put her family issues aside for work, as the two have become one and the same. While Inside Job’s hook is its colorful crack team of experts working to maintain deep state conspiracies, it’s really about the journey of one woman to confront and potentially break free from the shadow of her abusive father, who will stop at nothing to keep Reagan under his direct control. At the same time, Reagan’s vision of using Cognito Inc. to help instead of taking advantage of people, which contradicts the company’s primary directive of profiting off conspiracies, puts a new and somewhat unique spin on the concept of the beloved antihero.
In short, Inside Job succeeds at using dark humor, sci-fi, and every single conspiracy in the book to tell an emotionally complex story about family, corporate succession, and political espionage. And its cliffhanger finale perfectly sets up the continuation of this story in Inside Job season 2. For now, it remains to be seen whether or not the animated Netflix series can maintain the momentum of its increasingly complex storyline in its next season.