All Of Your Teenage Bounty Hunters Finale Questions, Answered

Teenage Bounty Hunters’ season 1 finale is practicaly a reboot of the Netflix teen drama. The characters (almost) stay the same, but their circumstances shift drastically. Fraternal “twins” Sterling (Maddie Phillips) and Blair Wesley (Anjelica Bette Fellini) find out they were never really fraternal twins at all — they’re first cousins. That’s because Sterling and Blair’s mom Debbie (Virginia Williams) is the real twin in the family. 

Debbie’s twin sister Dana (also Virginia Williams, now with streaky neon nail polish) is Sterling’s biological mother. After 10 episodes of clues, we also learn Dana is the one who blew up an abortion clinic so many years ago. Sterling and Blair’s world — and the logic of their kitschy twin telepathy — is thrown into total chaos. 

All of a sudden Teenage Bounty Hunters evolves from a bounty hunting series with vague familial intrigue to a twisty family soap with some extra bounty hunting flavor for kick. Season 1 finale “Something Sour Patch” moves so quickly through its many twists and turns, it’s easy to get caught up in the curveballs. Luckily for you, we’re here to answer all of your biggest “Sour Patch” questions — with some help from creator and executive producer Kathleen Jordan. 

At the beginning of the Teenage Bounty Hunters season 1 finale, it appears Debbie finally comes clean about her past. After Blair and Sterling visit Debbie’s true hometown of Nandina, GA., she tearfully recognizes the fact that she is wanted for first degree arson and committed the crime because she fell in with an “extreme” and “persuasive” crowd.” This is when we learn exactly what “Debbie” did  — set fire to an abortion clinic — which was not revealed earlier in the season. 

Debbie is now ashamed of the crime, which she recognizes wasn’t Christian behavior. 

Except, once Sterling is kidnapped by Dana, we learn this was another lie. Dana set fire to the abortion clinic, Wesley dad Anderson (Mackenzie Astin) confirms. Debbie and Anderson have helped Dana financially in the years since, but she began blackmailing them for more money during the events of Bounty Hunters. That is why we see Debbie screaming on the phone and visiting her cash-filled storage unit in sixth episode “Master Debater” — she was dealing with the Dana threat. Dana — not Debbie — is the problem-child Culpepper daughter the twins/cousins heard about during the “Our Ham Is Good” Nandina trip.

Since Anderson lost his job at the family business — and therefore couldn’t pay Dana any more — the tense situation came to a head. In response, Debbie and Anderson decided to use whatever funds they had left to help Dana leave the country and permanently escape the authorities. This is why we see them book a rental property in Mexico and Anderson gives Dana the keys to the family truck (we’re initially supposed to assume these moves are to help Debbie evade capture). 

It is suggested that Debbie and Anderson were willing to spend so much time and money to keep Dana quiet to ensure that Sterling’s true parentage was kept a secret. However, we do need to know why it was Debbie's name on the wanted poster — not “Dana Culpepper.”

Although Blair and Sterling were raised as twins, they are not biologically twins. They're cousins. Once you realize how different they naturally look and behave, this seems obvious. However, creator Kathleen Jordan confirmed Teenage Bounty Hunters didn’t drop many many clues about this finale twist, since the writers were more focused on “stringing along the mystery with Debbie.” 

Jordan you can still see the effects of Debbie and Anderson’s deception when you step back and look at their parenting. “The groundwork that we laid there was that their parents have overcompensated so much with their adopted daughter,” Jordan began, “that Sterling has become this kind of perfect little Buckhead girl while Blair has been, [in terms of] their attention and their desires, a little bit left by the wayside.” 

Still, Jordan argues that Blair and Sterling’s twin telepathy is simple proof of how much the girls believed their parents’ lie. “They were told that they were twins, so they're twins,” she said of their mindsets. 

Now, the biggest Teenage Bounty Hunters mysteries are the identity of Sterling’s biological father and Debbie and Dana’s respective pregnancy timelines. Depending on how out of sync they are, it’s possible the Wesley “twins” are actually totally different ages (Blair and Sterling do always argue about who’s older). 

The first half of Teenage Bounty Hunters’ finale ends the series’ best relationship: Sterling and her ex-nemesis April (Devon Hales). April explains that she cannot go public with Sterling because her extremely homophobic father John (Pierce Lackey) has returned from prison and is already asking questions about Sterling. With John back on the outside, April doesn’t feel ready to cause an expected scandal by coming out as a queer girl.

It’s devastating. 

It’s also very dangerous for Sterling and Blair beyond their current family turmoil. As we see in the premiere, John was the twin/cousins’ first solo bounty capture. That means the only person outside of Blair and Sterling's family who knows their bounty hunting secret is walking around free, probably vengeful, and definitely trying to get the inside scoop about them. Aunt Dana might be a problem, but John Stevens is primed to be Teenage Bounty Hunters’ season 2 big bad.