This article contains spoilers for Lupin Part 3 in its discussion of stories, endings, and cultural legacies.
The thing about stories is that they have no real starting points and no real endings. What we think of as beginnings and ends are just arbitrary points imposed by the storyteller to give the tale the greatest possible impact. That lack of certainty is part of why fan fiction, adaptation, and transposition are such rich fields, reflections of the cultural legacies of their source material. It’s also something that Lupin Part 3 feels keenly aware of, both in its fundamental framing and in the way it repeatedly points towards and deflects from endings.
That reflection takes place on two levels. One is a cynical mirror of the modern media landscape, where increasingly stiff competition pushes companies towards safe bets and the tendency to draw from the same well-plundered wells over and over. I’m sure I don’t need to relitigate the endless parade of new The Lord of the Rings projects or the apparent refusal to let almost any moderately successful franchise end, no matter what media form it originates in. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, in particular, has almost made a selling point out of constantly teasing the next thing after each supposedly standalone story has found its conclusion.
Related: Lupin Part 3’s Surprising Ending, Explained
In this landscape, endings are more like ellipses, and that’s an idea that Lupin Part 3 plays on. It begins from the very first episode of the latest season. Having realized the damaging effect that his fugitive status is having on his family, protagonist Assane Diop (Omar Sy) returns to Paris and asks his wife Claire (Ludivine Sagnier) to start a new life with him. When she refuses, Assane embarks on what might be his most daring heist to date — which ends with him plummeting from the rooftops. It makes for shocking, compelling television, but it’s also a blatant fake-out. We know that Assane will somehow be alive and well in the next episode. As the series becomes fond of reminding us, “there is no such thing as death for Lupin.”
Just so, there’s apparently no such thing as death for Fast & Furious, Game of Thrones, or Ocean’s Eleven either. Each apparent conclusion is just a pregnant pause until the next sleight of hand reveals a half-baked reason to feed us a new, familiar story. It’s a theme that recurs throughout this third season of Lupin, too.
While the storytellers can’t very well pretend to kill Assane again, they can hint towards other endings. So, at one point, this modern-day Arsène Lupin pledges to his own Ganimard, Youssef Guédira, that he will surrender to the police in exchange for assistance with getting back certain artifacts. The sting operation is successful, but Assane slips away — another delayed ending. Of course, it can’t last. In the final episode, Assane follows through and gives himself up to Guédira, and a letter to Claire tells her (and us) that “it’s time for the world to forget Assane Diop.” With most lingering questions cleared up, it feels, finally, like a full stop. But there is no such thing as death for a successful property, and the series delivers one final twist that strongly hints at more to come. The series is in conversation with itself, telling us that, as long as people keep watching, the creators will keep finding ways to prolong this story until, like Star Wars, all it can talk about is itself.
That’s the negative, disappointed layer of reflection posed by Part 3 of Lupin; the other layer is brighter, and one that I think is easy to overlook amidst the barrage of films, TV series, and games that seem born more from a financial motive than a creative or passionate one. This layer, too, muses upon the undying nature of stories but in a very different light. That reflection begins far before this latest release, going back to the fundamental premise of Lupin — significantly that, despite the title, the Netflix series isn’t an adaptation of Maurice Leblanc’s classic stories of the gentleman thief.
As the orphaned son of working class migrants, Assane Diop is not Arsène Lupin. Instead, Assane came across the classic books thanks to his father, and they were a touchstone during his youthful search for selfhood and identity. The stories gave him a framework for survival, particularly as he found a home among criminals. The series pays those dues. The quote I mentioned earlier, “there is no such thing as death for Lupin”, is taken from ‘Elizabeth Swan-Neck’, one of the stories collected in The Confessions of Arsène Lupin. Guédira has an advantage over his law enforcement colleagues in the hunt for Assane because he too is very familiar with the stories. Assane passes the stories on to his own son, who likewise finds wisdom and comfort within their pages. The series is littered with such breadcrumbs.
That comes to a head in Part 3, by which time Assane has become something of a folk hero. When his apparent love of Lupin becomes public knowledge, there’s something of a mania, a run on the books across the entire nation. Art influences life influences art. We’re inspired by the stories that resonate with us; they shape our lives, and we, in turn, prolong them by keeping them alive in our hearts and minds, passing them on and sharing them in much the same way that Assane and Guédira do. Books and films only have their cultural legacies because of how we contribute to them.
Here, too, Lupin reflects upon itself. Just as Assane isn’t Arsène, Lupin isn’t Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar. Instead, it’s an entirely original work in conversation with its spiritual predecessor. As such, it’s quite different from Sherlock, Elementary, or their ilk, which transpose stories or characters across time and space. They make stories feel stodgy and static, relatively immutable, whereas Lupin lays bare exactly why stories never die: they’re endlessly dynamic. Endings aren’t really ends. They just hand stories over to audiences, where they will inevitably find their afterlives.
