‘Death By Lightning’ Ending Explained: How Accurate Is Netflix’s Historical Drama About James Garfield and Charles Guiteau?

Netflix‘s new drama Death By Lightning tells the wild story of how President James A. Garfield (Michael Shannon) was killed by Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen).

**Spoilers for Death By Lightning, now streaming on Netflix**

Over the course of the show’s four hour-long episodes, we learn about Guiteau’s time in a free love colony, Garfield’s bananas path to the Presidency, Alexander Graham Bell’s (Richard Rankin) early metal detector, among even more unbelievable details.

 “It seemed way too crazy to be true,” Death By Lightning creator Mike Makowsky told DECIDER.

Makowsky first learned about Garfield and Guiteau when he read Candice Milliard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President and the non-fiction book had him reeling. “I felt like I needed to every three pages go on Wikipedia to make sure that this historian in Kansas hadn’t made up all of this shit about James Garfield,” he said.

As it turns out, much of Death By Lightning is pretty gosh darn accurate. James A. Garfield really did win the presidential nomination after a heated Conclave-like Republican National Convention. Chester A. Arthur (Nick Offerman) really was a corrupt Stalwart who found himself Vice President, and later President, without ever running for public office. Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham) really was having a flagrant affair with the First Lady of Rhode Island. Charles Guiteau really was rejected by every single woman at the Oneida colony. They really did call him “Gitout” and he really did sing that bonkers song at the gallows.

If anything, Death By Lightning omits even more bonkers details that would flesh out the story even more.

“I really think that the show is, unfortunately, just like the tip of the iceberg and there are so many fascinating rabbit holes you can go down with all of these subjects,” Makowsky said.

So what was cut from Death By Lightning? How did James Garfield really die? Here’s what you need to know about the end of Death By Lightning…

Death By Lightning Ending Explained: How Did James A. Garfield Die?

Death By Lightning explains exactly how and why a mentally-unhinged con man named Charles Guiteau assassinated President James A. Garfield. Guiteau became obsessed with the Republican presidential nominee and began to delude himself that he was single-handedly responsible for Garfield’s success. When Garfield and his allies refused to give Guiteau a cushy ambassadorship, Guiteau turned on his idol. He became convinced that Garfield was a tyrant and that the only hope for America would be his death. Conveniently, assassinating Garfield would also make Guiteau a hero. At least, that was his thought process…

Just as Death By Lightning depicts, Guiteau did buy a pearl-handled pistol because he thought it would make a nicer museum piece. He did begin stalking the President, even sitting behind him at church. (Stalking Presidents was easier in 1881, before there was a Secret Service.) Guiteau eventually did shoot Garfield twice at a Washington DC train station and he was immediately arrested.

Garfield was initially treated on the scene by Dr. Charles Purvis (Shaun Parkes), a Black physician of renown, before being placed in the care of Doctor Willard Bliss (Željko Ivanek). The President did survive the initial shooting, only to die months later of sepsis. While most modern scholars believe Bliss’s poor care contributed to Garfield’s death, there is some debate about whether or not he really would have survived. Some believe that there is evidence his gall bladder ruptured and that would have killed him anyways. (Oh, and yes, Alexander Graham Bell did try to find the bullet with an early metal detector!)

While Death By Lightning does a great job accurately depict all of these events, it omits a really juicy chapter of the story. We never see Guiteau’s bonkers trial!

Mike Makowsky told DECIDER that he originally wrote six episodes, but had to cut the story down to four episodes to get the series made.

“Guiteau’s trial, I’m still so sad that we didn’t get to render that on screen with his poor patent law lawyer brother-in-law representing him at trial,” Makowsky said. “I read a thousand pages of trial transcripts. It is so crazy.”

However, Makowsky ultimately sees the benefit of excising the trial from the show. “One thing that I think we all kind of felt universally after the episode had been written was that — because the trial took place after Garfield had already died —and I think, in terms of the story that we were trying to tell, once Garfield is no longer a presence, it then just becomes the Guiteau [show],” he said. “Almost lending him too much oxygen in the wake of Garfield’s death, perhaps to an unwelcome extent.”

Indeed, one of the major themes of Death By Lightning‘s ending is that no one would remember Guiteau or, in fact, Garfield.