The Emmys love The Queen’s Gambit—this is no surprise. But among the show’s impressive haul of 18 total nominations, five alone are for the crafts work on one specific episode: the finale. Titled “End Game,” the installment brings Scott Frank’s rousing tale of chess and addiction to a thrilling conclusion, culminating in an epic final match. Yet while the extravagant globe-trotting and tense competition remain its most obviously memorable moments, the quietly heartbreaking opening minutes lay the rich emotional stakes bare—and deliver some of the most human moments in the entire show.
They also provide the best showcase for Moses Ingram, who herself earned a surprise supporting-actress Emmy nod for her first onscreen role. Ingram plays Jolene as a child in the earliest episodes, meeting and bonding with a young Beth (Isla Johnston, later Anya Taylor-Joy) at an orphanage, and as an adult in the finale, surprising a spiraling Beth at her Lexington, Kentucky, home. Their tender reunion is “the most real and the most gritty” moment in the show, says cinematographer Steven Meizler. We explored how it came to be with Ingram, as well as Meizler and costume designer Gabriele Binder—both Emmy-nominated for their work on the episode.
After a flashback “End Game” opens on a wide shot of Jolene wandering Beth’s residence, impressed by its size and disturbed by its disarray: the empty wine bottles and dirty dishes and scattered takeout containers. The two women haven’t seen each other since they were children, and the scenario is oddly familiar to Jolene: Her old friend is once again in need of help.
“The scene is the closest to reality, away from the fairy tale that we’d constructed, the magic,” Meizler says. “I didn’t do anything color-wise. I didn’t desaturate anything. It’s more through set dressing and a less warm light. I wanted the sun to burn out this stuff a little bit.”
The Jolene we see here is not the one left behind at the Methuen Home. Unlike Taylor-Joy, Ingram was tasked with playing her character both as a child and an adult—helpful for continuity, but a challenge in charting such seismic change. Our first glimpse of her in the finale shows a matured Jolene—bright, confident, and transformed. She’s out of the orphanage’s uniform and into heavy boots, a leather jacket, and a glorious Afro. “There’s this new confidence that I didn’t assume she had when she was younger,” says Ingram. “Growing up in a place [where you’re] the only person that looks like you, it’s very hard to love what you see when you look in the mirror.” By this point, the actor says, Jolene “had been to places where she’d been affirmed and people had told her she was beautiful. She’s now standing on two feet, which I thought was really dope.”
Binder approached the character’s costuming with the same intent, working off of research of the Black Power movement. The outfit signals “I’m Black, I know that I’m Black, and I’m proud that I’m Black,” Binder says. She used the turtleneck as Jolene’s “private” adornment, the piece she’d wear in the comfort of old company.
Ingram communicates a lot in the scene’s early silences: a pained look, which Meizler frames in a close-up, as she fully takes in the state of Beth’s life and says, almost to herself, “God, Beth.” Though we haven’t seen the two characters together since the beginning of the show, the connection is immediately reestablished.
Filming for the first time away from the orphanage, this was also a lesson for Ingram in television production. “The fact that this was not an actual house and learning the difference between exterior [and interior]—I was really shocked at this set,” she says. “It felt like theater. It was real dirt. It was real old pizza. I was like, Wow, this is details. Scott was easy with it and let it fly. There were a couple of lines in there actually that weren’t written initially…. So it was an active scene.”
The sequence then shifts to evening, and into the bathroom, where Jolene and Beth wash up side by side—the former working on her hair, the latter brushing her teeth. Even visually, the sense of routine is clear. “Both in the beginning scene and this bathroom scene, the shadows are so deep,” Meizler says. “It really helps show the essence of their characters…. There was just something I wanted to lean into. I felt this connection between them.”
“We were all crammed into this tiny bathroom trying to get this scene done—and it was also very late,” Ingram adds with a laugh. “I love scenes that [show] that mundane, everyday thing, because that’s when you learn the most about a person and their routines and what they do when no one’s around. This is something that Jolene would be doing if no one was around. It’s vulnerable and intimate when you’re exposed in that way.”
There’s a shift in Jolene’s look here too—from her commanding arrival attire to a softer yellow nightgown—“this very feminine kind of baby doll thing,” as Binder puts it. “She has a very warm, feminine side, but she can’t show it so openly.” In this moment Jolene also gives Beth her life update: She found her voice in college and is working as a paralegal, saving up for law school to become “a radical.” Ingram plays the scene with a sense of bursting possibility, the thrill of a purpose coming through.
That the scene is so classically lit accentuates this subtly emotional turn. “I liked the darkness in here,” Meizler says. “It accentuates their emotions. It’s a lot darker than I would’ve ever imagined.”
Beth and Jolene slowly make their way into the bedroom, the latter having found, in the medicine cabinet, a stash of the pills they’d been introduced to at the orphanage. Beth sits on the bed and confesses to her struggles; simply by looking Jolene in the eye, you sense Beth coming to terms with her addiction, the paralysis that the loss of her adoptive mother, Alma (Marielle Heller), has kept her in. Jolene has come back into her life at the time she needs her most.
“We wanted to show the simplicity of a friendship,” Meizler says.
As Beth admits to Jolene—and really, to herself—what she needs to change going forward, her friend appears unmoved. She stands in front of a mirror, modeling scattered items of clothing while casually listening. In the clothing Jolene picks up, Binder wanted to home in on her and Beth’s “two absolutely different worlds,” and how their bond transcends them. The costume designer considers the evolution of their reunion: “Jolene arrives when Beth is still, let’s say, misdressing, with the overexaggerated makeup. Then Jolene comes and grounds her, and they have this moment where they’re forced close together—where they both have the same costumes.” In other words, they quickly get back on each other’s level.
There’s an authentic wryness in Ingram’s take on the love between Jolene and Beth here. “For Jolene, it’s like, Girl, you can choose. Right now you’re choosing drama, you’re choosing chaos, and the minute you choose otherwise, your life will change,” Ingram says. “That’s the real dichotomy between the two of them.” The star’s favorite line reflecting this dynamic comes when Jolene tells her old friend, finally turning around from the mirror, “You sound like Susan Hayward in one of those movies.”
Then a kind of sweetness overcomes the scene. Jolene tells Beth she got her a present, pulls out from her bag the chess book she stole from her when they were kids—jealous that she’d been adopted—and lays next to her on the bed. “It was me all along,” Jolene says with a smile. They’re not quite looking at each other, but each radiates ease. Of this close two-shot, Meizler says, “In a lot of Queen’s Gambit, we were trying to echo stuff from before. This echoed back to the orphanage.”
That’s really where the quiet power of this whole sequence comes from. There’s a full circle nature to it, a sense of Beth beginning to heal before the episode’s pace quickens and she again takes the chess world by storm. “It’s such a strange thing that we leave Jolene for so many episodes,” Meizler says. “But to bring her back for this was a really strong, surprising thing. And really beautiful.”
Ingram had spent more than four months filming in Berlin, and this being her first big on-camera job, had a lot to absorb. “I learned a lot about having patience for myself and having grace and knowing that nobody has all of the answers,” she says. “This is totally different from anything I was used to, but so fun. Such a worth-it experience. I also learned that if you’re not present, you will miss an experience.”
Fortunately, she was able to take it all in. As for that shocker Emmy nomination? She’s still at a loss for words. “It’s really wild every time I think about it,” she says. “If I learned anything from this experience, it’s [that] anything can happen.”
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