What It Means For Eiza González’s Riya

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for Ash (2025)

Flying Lotus’ visceral thriller Ash is an exciting entry in the deep space horror subgenre, and its mid-credits scene left the door open for more to the story. Starring Eiza González and Aaron Paul, Ash focuses on the grisly aftermath of an incident that left all members of the crew dead but one, who wakes up with no knowledge of who she is or what happened. When another man enters the base claiming to be a surviving member of her team, she is forced to decide whether to trust him, all while trying to unlock her own fragmented, nightmarish memories.

The paranoia and dread escalate until Riya (González) is confronted with the awful truth: the crew is dead because of an alien parasite that can take over someone’s body by infesting their brain. Riya discovers that with everyone else dead, she’s become the new host of the parasite, which is responsible for her memory loss and has been manipulating her. She manages to extract and seemingly kill the parasite, and returns to the orbiting station above the planet just as oxygen runs out on the base, but a mid-credits scene indicates that the video game-inspired Ash‘s story isn’t over yet.

Ash’s Mid-Credits Scene Shows The Alien Parasite Has Spread

It Made Its Way Off The Planet

Ash, which is now playing in most major theaters, ends with Riya piloting a vessel out to the orbiting space station that aligns with the planetary base at intervals. With the base all but dead in the water with no oxygen reserves and a breach in the side of the building, the orbiting station offers the last hope for some sort of salvation for Riya. Once there she can not only survive, but it’s implied there are others she can call to across space who might be able to retrieve or assist her.

The final scene is of a content Riya approaching the orbiting station, which implies she may yet survive. However, shortly after the credits begin to roll, another brief image is shown of the orbiting station itself, but it’s revealed that the organic tentacles of the alien parasite (or of its organic housing vessel, it’s never made 100% clear) have wrapped themselves around the entirety of the station. It’s reminiscent of how similar tentacles wound themselves around the machinery running the planetary station earlier in the movie, and it makes it clear that the parasite was stowed away in Riya’s vessel somehow.

Ash’s Credits Scene Teases A Potential Sequel

The Door Is Left Open For More

Ash contains a scene in which the alien parasite’s motivations are explained, which provides some interesting background that, while not groundbreaking in the genre, aligns with the mid-credits scene to open the door for a potential future for Ash‘s narrative. As the parasite relayed directly to Riya while infesting her mind, the reason it sought to invade the human base and turn the crew members against each other was so that it could ultimately infect all of humanity.

Due to our biological inefficiency and self-destructive nature, it wanted to eliminate or assimilate our species, and it only needed one person to do that. That’s why it attempted to keep Riya alive and get her to the orbiting station by manifesting Brion in her mind: it wanted to get off the planet and bring humanity into its singular “existence”, which it’s implied is a sort of hive-mind singularity. With the parasite surviving, its chaos could be unleashed upon a much larger population than the six-person crew it decimated on the planet Ash.

What Ash’s Mid-Credits Scene Means For Riya: Did She Die?

Her Fate Is Left Uncertain

While the mid-credits scene showcases the parasite itself, it doesn’t provide clarity on the fate of Riya herself. Based on the parasite’s ultimate goal, it seems as though it would be incentivized to still keep her alive, as she could once again act as the ultimate disguise for the creature as it tries to infect other people. While it did try to kill her in the horrific tentacled form that burst out of Brion’s reanimated corpse, it still stands to benefit from keeping her alive, especially if it was able to invade her skull once again.

However, it only needs one human to accomplish its mission, and it may find that trying to invade a person who is aware of its existence is nothing more than an unnecessary variable. Having taken over the orbiting station, it could theoretically infect the next person who comes aboard, a situation it could manufacture if it took over Riya again. Ultimately, it seems unlikely that a sequel would ever happen given the movie’s projected box office return and the fact that the story ended very effectively, but the mid-credits scene of Ash certainly leaves the door open.

Movie

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Ash

5/10

Release Date

March 21, 2025

Runtime

95 Minutes

Director

Flying Lotus

Writers

Jonni Remmler

Producers

Neill Blomkamp, Matthew Metcalfe, Nate Bolotin, Aram Tertzakian, Nick Spicer, Maile Daugherty, Adam Riback