Cabinet of Curiosities Episode 1 Ending Explained: Lot 36 Do Nick and Roland Survive? Who Was Dottie Wolmer?

Halloween is just around the corner and, as usual, Netflix has started to release a lot of horror content. One of his most interesting productions is Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. We explain the ending of the first episode, Lot 36, which is based on a story, Del Toro, himself wrote. These are the key points of the chapter.

“Behind every form of beauty is darkness,” says Pickman’s character who paints pictures that corrupt the mind. Then, to Ben Barnes‘s question: “Where can we find these elusive truths? ”- again, in the fifth chapter of Cabinet of Curiosities – the talented artist replies: “Where fear dwells“. In an emblematic dialogue because the entire Netflix anthology series curated by Guillermo del Toro, who is also the executive producer of this collection of self-contained horror films, is dedicated to the life (impossible without suffering), to truth, to art in the modern world, but above all to the primitive, widespread and powerful feeling of fear explored in the most ancestral and authorial forms. The director of The Labyrinth of the Faun gives us a work that looks at the work of Rodman Edward Serling (for example if you see the subject of Lot 36) and Alfred Hitchcock.

Here we analyze the ending of the first two independent episodes: Lot 36 directed by Guillermo Navarro and Graveyard Rats which sees Vincenzo Natali behind the camera, available on the streaming platform from 25 October 2022. Lot 36 and Graveyard Rats already include the monsters dear to del Toro, the monsters generated by fear, always different but which return in the eight episodes of the series taking the forms of spirits, mice, creaks of old houses, witches and alien creatures: testimonies of other worlds, of natural history and unnatural.

Cabinet of Curiosities Episode 1 Lot 36: Plot Summary

It is 1991 and the Gulf War has just broken out. An elderly man, while continuing his routine of ready meals and television for the umpteenth day, dies of a heart attack. His warehouse, lot 36 of the title, is auctioned and bought by Nick Appleton (Tim Blake Nelson), a Vietnam veteran man, unwilling to listen to others, with a racist anger that is not too repressed, and with a big debt problem. Nick buys warehouses and resells the valuables he finds inside him, but now the time to pay off his tormentor is running out. Lot 36 must contain valuables. And, whether he likes it or not, Nick will find them. These objects, however, will lead our protagonist to experience an unexpected situation, which not even his cynical sarcasm can face. As if that weren’t enough, old surveillance videos show the old warehouse owner taking strange actions before entering.

Cabinet of Curiosities Episode 1 Lot 36 Ending Explained

Many vices poison human life, greed is one of the most insidious and terrible, capable of taking men to the darkest places. The first two stories to which Guillermo del Toro introduces us – in an almost floating version like a spirit – are Lot 36 and Graveyard Rat, two horror stories that offer more than food for thought on the theme of morality. The first is based on a short story by Guillermo del Toro himself and stars Tim Blake Nelson in the role of Nick Appleton, a racist, divorced and heavily indebted man, who tries to solve his economic problems by investing in the purchases of private warehouses built in the 1940s, which ended up at auction after the death of the owners. Nick’s latest purchase is lot 36, a small venue that he discovers full of Nazi memorabilia: whatever is inside it has become his legitimate property after purchase.

But that same day, a Mexican woman named Amelia begs him to show her what family memories he can save from a warehouse that the protagonist had previously purchased. The man cruelly refuses and then returns to his interesting new purchase. Together with an auctioneer who can’t wait to find the fourth book of a precious and obscure collection discovered in the new warehouse, he discovers a secret room where the body of the sister of the ex (deceased) owner of the place lies. It turns out that the latter belonged to a family that manufactured weapons for the Nazis and that he was a man who knew evil and applied it on an almost absolute scale; that he had invoked a tentacled demonic entity and that he offered this his sister Dottie as a conduit to possess.

Nick, in his desperation to obtain the rare occult book and the money the auctioneer had promised him, breaks the protective spell around the demon found in the secret room of lot 36, freeing him. The demon immediately devours the auctioneer while Nick manages to escape. When he reaches the door (closed from the outside) he sees Miss Amelia and begs her to open it. The woman does not open the door and even Nick is devoured by the demon, while the stench from the monster’s assault reaches us before and after this classic ending that leans on the traditions of moral horror stories.

Lot 36 Ending Explained: Do Nick and Roland Survive?

• After acquiring the contents of Warehouse 36, thinking there might be something of value in there, he contacts Agatha and Roland to sell them various antiques.
• Agatha finds three books that are hidden inside a seance table. ‘Liber Primus Daemonia,’ Liber Secundus Symvolia’ and ‘Liber Tertius Perlipsi’.
• Roland seems to know the books and offers Nick $300,000 if he finds the fourth volume, which has not yet appeared.
• Searching for the fourth book, Nick discovers that there is a passageway in the room. He and Roland arrive in another room where they find the corpse of a woman and the fourth book, inside a pentagon drawn on the floor.
• Nick ignores Roland’s warnings and enters the pentagon, awakening a demon that devours Roland. Nick tries to escape, but the person who owned the warehouse before Nick bought it locks him inside.
• Because of his greed, Nick is eaten by the monster. If he had listened to Roland or treated the former owner better, he would still be alive.

Who Was Dottie Wolmer?

• Dottie Wolmer was the sister of the warehouse’s former owner. They belonged to a family that manufactured weapons for the Nazis. After the war, they emigrated to America.
• It is implied that the owner used the books and seance table to summon the demon, then offer Dottie as a vessel. However, he betrayed the entity, trapping it inside the pentagram.
• When Nick breaks the seal, the fourth book catches fire, signalling the completion of the ritual. The demon is tied to Earth. Nick and Roland are his first victims, but there will be many more.