Prime Video’s ‘Mammals’ follows a chef as he uncovers a harrowing secret about his wife’s promiscuous affairs with other men.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Jamie and Amandine are away on a holiday, spending their time at an idyllic spot facing a serene landscape. They also find out that Tom Jones is staying next door.
However, the jovial atmosphere turns dark and grim when the pregnant Amandine starts bleeding. They find out that they have suffered the tragic loss of their unborn child.
Amid all the grieving, Jamie’s world is further shaken off by Amandin’s promiscuous text chats with someone named Paul. Jamie starts following his wife and covertly observes as she meets a man who consoles her and later they also have sex.
Jamie eventually meets this man at his home and warns him to never see his wife again, or he would expose his secret to his fiancé. However, Jamie finds out, to his other shock, that this man is not Paul.
More shocking secrets devastate Jamie, who’s being helped by his brother-in-law Jeff in digging and uncovering secrets about all these affairs.
Meanwhile, he’s also busy with the opening of his first restaurant and he can’t concentrate on any of it in light of the horrors he’s just come face to face with.
Amandine’s new quest to find her magic and passion has led her to a violin tutor and their increasingly proximate dynamics further rub Jamie off the wrong way.
Tensions mount to a high and Jamie can’t take it anymore. At the opening of his restaurant, Jamie goes off script during his speech and blurts out, right in front of all guests, the reality of his relationship and his wife’s promiscuity.
Meanwhile, Jeff and his wife (Jamie’s sister) Lue are going through their own rough patch in the marriage. Lue stays docile and detached from most things, not responding much to her husband or anything that transpires around her really.
Instead, she fantasizes and thinks of herself as one of the characters in an autobiography she keeps reading. Her fantasy ends with the woman whose cheating husband she sleeps with catching them in the act and killing the man, while Lue escapes.
It’s revealed that she knows her husband has been cheating on her but he doesn’t know that she knows yet. There’s a flashback to when Jamie and Amandine first met and fell in love, eloping together not too long after that, with no money but all the love and belief in the magic of it.
In the present day, Amandine messages Jamie which makes him put two and two together and he finds out who Paul is. It’s his brother-in-law himself who has been sleeping with Amandine and his adultery has been gnawing at him for so long, but he submits to his carnal desires all the same.
Jamie meets Amandine and she tells him why she cheated and later on, she reveals the development in their relationship that triggered the series of promiscuity. Jamie is put in front of the mirror and Mammals ends with the major twist hitting Jamie and the viewers simultaneously.
Mammals ending explained in detail:
Who is Paul?
Paul is Jamie’s brother-in-law and Lue’s husband Jeff. He was among the three men that Amandine had sexual relationships, outside their marriage.
Jeff has been the one helping Jamie out in his pursuit of all the men Amandine has been sleeping with. He is a professor of veterinary neurology and is also techy with gadgets so Jamie turns to him to hack into Amandine’s devices and uncover his secrets.
Jamie realizes that Jeff is Paul when Amandine texts him, days after the dramatic way the curtains on their marriage are pulled away by Jamie at the restaurant opening. Amandine gives him the clue by texting him “All you need is love.”
It’s the title of one of the songs from The Beatles and it reminds Jamie of the time he, Amandine, Lue, and Jeff dressed up as the band members for a party. Jeff was cosplaying as Paul in that instance.
Why does Jeff cheat on his wife?
Why does anyone in the show cheat at all? Because, as the show explicitly suggests, they’re all mammals and are slaves to their carnal drives and pent-up sexual desires.
Jeff is no different. Being a veterinary neurology professor, he’s no stranger to mammalian tendencies and yet he can’t escape his promiscuity, even at the cost of a broken relationship and several ruined lives, should the truth ever come out.
It does to his wife and he doesn’t know it, but he does know that he’s done wrong. While going outside your social contacts to satisfy your libido might come naturally to mammals, cheating doesn’t.
It is a betrayal of those who expect loyalty and truth, at the very least. Jeff knows this and the guilt rips him apart from the inside, which is why he initially attempts suicide, but can’t go through with it.
Lue knows of this as well, which is why she remains quiet, repressing all that she wants to confront her husband with, but doesn’t, in fear of him possibly committing suicide.
Why does Amandine cheat?
Amandine can’t confine herself to monogamy, she has sexual desires she needs to attend to. She admits that monogamy is hard and restrictive.
She regrets and dreads having sex with Jeff at first, but she admits the promiscuous and scandalous nature of their situation turns her on even more, and that she was really satisfied with the sex.
She tells Jamie all this and also that faithful champions of monogamy also secretly desire and fantasize about having sex with others, but don’t end up following their instincts when they actually want to.
Is Jamie a cheater too?
Yes, Jamie cheated on Amandine a year prior to the current events in the show. The revelation comes in the last episode when Amandine shows Jamie the video she recorded of him with another woman on a trip.
It’s understood that this gave Amandine the pass to follow up on her sexual desires as well. But his wife’s promiscuity is something the hypocrite Jamie can’t digest.
At the end of Mammals, Jamie is shown the mirror and as Amadine leaves, Jamie beholds the metaphorical whale that started and symbolised their relationship, now out of the water and dying, signifying the end of their relationship as well.
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