The Ending Of Lupin Part 3 Explained

"Lupin" is a French TV series that takes its inspiration from the tales of Arséne Lupin, a gentleman thief created by novelist Maurice LeBlanc. The series follows Assane Diop (Omar Sy), a man who models himself after Lupin. Assane is the closest thing to the living embodiment of Lupin in modern-day France. His choice of career is complicated by the fact that he has a wife, Claire (Ludivine Sagnier), and a son, Raoul (Etan Simon). While he can plan elaborate heists and do all manner of incredible things, he can't quite figure out how to navigate his personal life.

In the first two parts of "Lupin," Assane avenged his father's death by bringing down the man who framed him, Hubert Pellegrini (Hervé Pierre). Pellegrini is in jail in Part 3 and it seems like Assane has no more dragons to slay — until his estranged mother Mariama (Naky Sy Savané) is taken by unknown forces and calls begging for his help. Assane is soon back to his thieving ways, but this time it's in service of someone he doesn't really know. Does he manage to catch the person who's blackmailing him, and, more importantly, does he get his mother back? Here is the ending of "Lupin" Part 3, explained.

"Lupin" starts with a heist at the Louvre. Assane steals a necklace that happens to belong to someone from his past — the daughter of Hubert Pellegrini, the man his father used to chauffeur for. Part 1 and Part 2 deal specifically with this scenario: Assane wants to set up Pellegrini because Pellegrini wrongly accused his father of stealing the necklace and his father died in prison because of it. In the end, Assane gets Pellegrini to confess at a concert for his daughter's charity. Not only does he get his man, he also manages to give the charitable contributions — the majority of which Pellegrini was stealing — to the charity as originally planned.

The ending should have been a satisfying one for Assane, but the police want him, too. He tells his family he's going into hiding and heads off grid to avoid capture. One year later, with his wife having to answer for his actions, he has to come back. He arranges a robbery so brazen that it attracts attention, but that's all part of the plan. Assane steals the Black Pearl, a supposedly priceless pearl, and then ends up falling off the roof as he's escaping. He seemingly dies, but this is just a ruse. Assane soon learns that his long-lost mother has been taken by someone, and that someone — not believing that Assane is truly dead — blackmails him to continue stealing for them.

Assane believes that his mother was taken by Jean-Luc Keller, the man who took him under his wing as a youngster but then pressured him and his friend Bruno to steal for him. Keller is out of prison after 25 years and wants revenge on Assane. His mother gets away from Keller and reunites with Assane, while Claire — who has finally proven that Assane is alive by tricking Assane's best friend Benjamin into confirming it — has reunited with him, too. Now Assane can set up Keller to take the fall, but he needs one more favor to do so.

He pretends to be a Colonel in the Chadian army and goes to a ceremony that the Minister of the Interior is attending. During the ceremony he steals from the Minister's office, then he calls him and gets him to release a prisoner in exchange for what he stole. The prisoner who's released is Keller's girlfriend, Manon. Assane turns her against Keller and she gets him to go to the Arc de Triomphe that night, where Assane meets him instead of Manon. Assane convinces Keller to give up the pearl as the police are closing in, but he's arrested anyway. Assane gives himself up, too — but not before he gets the pearl to Bruno. In prison, he learns that his neighbor is none other than Pellegrini.

Assane makes one of his most daring escapes ever in the second episode of Part 3, but nobody is around to see it. He fakes his death by falling off a high building and has the help of Benjamin and his accomplice in Part 2, Philippe Corbet, to further the ruse. But the real magic is how he makes it out of a coffin that's been nailed shut and buried six feet under.

It turns out he was buried with a screwdriver which he uses to unscrew the head of the coffin. Then he pushes it out and takes the small tunnel he and Benjamin dug from the head of the coffin to the tunnels under the cemetery, and J'Accuse, his dog, is there with the key to the tunnel so he can get out.

He emerges in broad daylight, but he disguises himself as someone who works there and no one pays him any mind. It's a brilliant plan that would have kept both Claire and Raoul safe if it hadn't been for Keller and his accomplices kidnapping Assane's mother.

Keller is someone Assane knew when he was 17 through Bruno, his friend. Bruno was an orphan like Assane. Keller offered to say he was Bruno and his sister's godparent and that he was living with them in order to keep child services off Bruno's back. Keller runs a gym that Bruno takes Assane to, and Keller teaches him how to fight. In fact, Keller teaches a lot of neighborhood children to fight — and then gets them to pay a steep entrance fee so they can fight in tournaments.

Young Claire has his number immediately, but Assane and Bruno don't realize what a problem Keller is until he asks them to steal for him. When they're trying to escape, a motorcycle cop picks up on Keller's erratic driving and tries to pull him over, so he has Bruno shoot him. After that, Keller hits a parked car and his SUV flips over. Assane and Bruno make it out but Keller is in far worse shape than them, so Assane puts the gun Bruno used in Keller's hand and he and Bruno run away just as the cops are coming. Keller blames Assane for the time he spent in jail and has plans to take his revenge 25 years later.

How did Assane get Benjamin to take the fall for him? Well, he didn't exactly. Benjamin was doing a job with Assane when the cops thought Assane was dead. More importantly, Benjamin was the one who ran, and they were happy to chase him. Assane had been told by Keller to take a unique bracelet from its owner, Tara Xang. It has five sapphires and a difficult clasp, and the owner is going to be at a gala at a local chateau wearing the bracelet. Assane scopes out the situation and realizes that if he and Benjamin can pose as coat checkers, they can lift the bracelet while the woman is being helped into her jacket.

Assane carries out his part but then he drops the bracelet. It looks like Benjamin dropped it, though, especially since Benjamin runs with the bracelet onto the grounds — he even manages to affix it to a drone and send it to Manon. When he gets to the hedge maze, he finds that Assane has given him the wrong directions and he runs into a dead end with the cops on his heels. Benjamin is arrested, which is all part of Keller's plan to get Assane to betray a friend. However, Benjamin doesn't sell out Assane. In fact, despite thinking that Assane set him up, he stays surprisingly loyal to his friend. He doesn't even reveal that Assane is alive, and Assane returns the favor by getting Benjamin out of jail when he's arrested.

Youssef Guédira has always had a soft spot for Assane, despite being a cop. He loves the "Lupin" novels, too, and his memory for their details is almost as good as Assane's, so he tends to get a little caught up in Assane's schemes. This time around, he ends up becoming an accomplice. He gets Assane to confess to his crimes in exchange for his help, which Assane takes in the form of Guédira dressing in disguise and going to a meeting with Manon as a buyer for the Manet painting Assane stole earlier.

Guédira (with Assane's help via an ear piece) manages to arrange the sale of the painting, but then the cops arrive. Assane splits, telling Guédira he can keep the painting and the costume just before the police burst in on Guédira and find out what he's doing. Assane also manages to erase his confession from Guédira's phone so it seems like Guédira doesn't have any reason to be there other than wanting to be, putting him on very thin ice with his colleagues. Luckily, the detective in charge likes him. The same can't be said for Manon, who is arrested and has both the painting and the sapphire bracelet taken from her.

Mariama escapes from Keller when she realizes her life is in danger. First, she releases herself from the zip ties he had around her wrists. Then, she ties up bed sheets and throws them out of the window to make it look as though she went out of that way. When Keller comes in and sees the bed sheets, he assumes she's already escaped, so he doesn't notice that she's actually hiding under the bed. When he leaves the door to her room unlocked, she sees herself out. She then puts an anonymous ad in the paper for Assane to come and find her and they have their joyful reunion.

It turns out Mariama has become quite the thief herself in the years since Assane last saw her. She went to jail in Senegal (where Assane and his father are originally from) for trying to steal from her boss, who had docked her and all his workers' pay. When she got out, she had few options but to steal. She got together some money to move to France just as Assane was faking his death. Now that the pair are finally back together, she's willing to help him with the final heist on the Minister of the Interior, creating a distraction so Assane can get into the Minister's office.

Assane gets Keller to give him the Black Pearl at the Arc de Triomphe, telling him that it's necessary if Keller doesn't want to be arrested. Of course, Keller is arrested anyway (for the attempted murder of his associate). But the real question is how did Assane get the Black Pearl out of the Arc de Triomphe? Assane has a rose that he says was intended for his date. But, because he supposedly got stood up by said date, he gives the rose to a random woman so it won't go to waste, right before he's arrested.

The woman, fortunately, doesn't see Assane's arrest because she's busy fleeing. All she sees is his friend Bruno finding her and telling her that he is the date that seemed to ditch the guy that gave her the rose. He tells her it was a mistake and that he hadn't stood the guy up, and the woman gives the rose to him. When Bruno is away from her, he moves back the petals of the flower to reveal the Black Pearl inside. He uses the pearl to reopen Keller's gym, but presumably he does it the right way.

Assane decides not to go with Claire, Raoul, and Mariama during his final heist. While it's not exactly clear when, he seems to have decided that Claire was right in what she told him before he faked his death: He should turn himself in to the authorities.

After he gets the Manet painting and the bracelet back into the hands of the police and gives himself up, he asks them for three things. The first is Benjamin's freedom, which the police gladly grant. The second is delivering a letter to Benjamin that he can pass on to Claire so she knows why he decided to turn himself in. And the third is some reading material.

Since his demands are small in comparison to the magnitude of his crimes, they're all granted, and the people Assane cares about most — Claire, Raoul, Mariama, and Benjamin — are free to start a new life outside of France. Meanwhile, Assane has finally taken responsibility for everything he's done.

Assane is the one who sent Pellegrini to prison at the end of "Lupin" Part 2, much to Pellegrini's surprise. Pellegrini is almost as good at manipulating things as Assane is, except Pellegrini has always been fabulously wealthy and has therefore been given many more favors over the years. Pellegrini is obviously keeping tabs on Assane from afar in "Lupin" Part 3 — he appears to have manipulated things so Assane ended up in the same prison as him.

Once Assane is banged up next door to him, Pellegrini sends him a picture of him as a teenager posing with a Lupin book, "The Cagliostro's Revenge." We'll have to wait for Part 4 to see what happens next, but creator George Kay has more or less confirmed that Pellegrini pulled some strings to get Assane into that cell. "For me, there's no question that Pellegrini is behind something there," he told Radio Times. "It would be wrong to suggest he is if he's not. Nothing happens by accident in 'Lupin.'"

According to creator George Kay, a big theme of "Lupin" Part 3 is invisibility, something carried over from the first two installments. "Invisibility in Part 3 is a necessity because Assane's the most wanted man in France, so he cannot do the things he used to do," he told Radio Times. In a separate interview with the same outlet, Kay went into more detail about the finale of Part 3, calling it "a very open ending." He added: "It's the equivalent of, 'What we've just been through for seven hours, is that really what just happened?' Which feels good. And it's quite a soft question, it's a bit of a haunting. You're like, 'Hang on a sec.' It's a great place to end the season."

While "Lupin" Part 4 has yet to be officially confirmed, it's clear that Kay is planning for it — and he sees Pellegrini being a big part of the continuing story. "I definitely think Pellegrini is going to come back into our show," he said. "The thing about writing 'Lupin' is you want to box yourself right into a corner, but you've got to have the escape route, otherwise it's completely haywire." According to Kay, Pellegrini will always be Assane's archenemy, and having him return at the end of Part 3 was part of "building the legacy of that central antagonism" into the show. Whatever happens in Part 4, you can expect to see Assane and Pellegrini facing off against each other once again.

Though "Lupin" Part 3 had nothing to do with Part 1 and Part 2 in theory, Part 4 looks like it will have everything to do with them. Pellegrini will reinsert himself into Assane's life, and while it's hard to say what he'll do, it certainly won't be comfortable for his new prison neighbor. Also, the four people Assane cares for most in the world will be gone, so who will he turn to when Pellegrini starts to make his plan known?

Guédira seems a likely suspect, but given his most recent task helping Assane, he may not be up to it. Assane's old friend Bruno could be another possibility, though he's busy running his gym and may want nothing more to do with Assane. Of course, Benjamin, Mariama, Raoul, or Claire could come back and help, but it's hard to say if they'd be willing to. So, the question remains, who will help Assane when he needs someone the most? A new person may end up taking on the responsibility in Part 4.