(Warning: This post contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of “Fate: The Winx Saga.”)
In the Season 1 finale of Netflix’s “Fate: The Winx Saga,” a live-action adaptation of the Italian cartoon “Winx Club,” fire fairy Bloom (played by Abigail Cowen) goes through a metamorphosis that allows her to defeat the army of Burned Ones threatening her magical boarding school.
Bloom — who thought she was a regular human teen up until a flaming accident at home led to her admission into Alfea — goes into full-on fire fairy mode, fiery wings and all, to shoot out burning blasts at the evil creatures.
It’s in this moment, after our six-episode journey with the “changeling” who was placed with a human family at birth, that viewers learn just how powerful Bloom really is — and when she herself learns, too.
“The whole reason that Bloom was put into the Firstworld was because she had these insane powers and she is one of the most powerful fairies, probably, that the Otherworld has ever seen,” Cowen told TheWrap. “And I think that’s what Ms. Dowling [Alfea’s headmistress, played by Eve Best] knew, and what people speculated. But in that moment, I think, just my personal opinion, that’s the tip of the iceberg. That’s just kind of a little teaser into what her powers are going to be. And hopefully for the second season, if we get a second season, I think that’s just the beginning of them. I think that’s why we waited until the very end to tease and show the audience, like, get ready, this is about to get very intense.”
Bloom does not yet understand the gift she possesses, which the villainous former headmistress Rosalind (Lesley Sharp) told Farah Dowling is an ancient power called “The Dragon Flame,” a power that was used to create the Burned Ones in the first place. But Cowen said that even though Bloom still doesn’t know what she is fully capable of, she finally knows who she is.
“It didn’t hit Bloom until that moment, actually. I feel like that was the most her she’s ever felt,” Cowen said. “I thought that was just a really special, beautiful moment for her because she was finally able to really come into her powers and not have to really, not necessarily control them, but not subdue them. She finally was able to truly, truly embrace them. I think that was empowering for her and I’m excited to see, again, if we get a second season, where she goes with that and what that does for her and her self-esteem and her overall sense of self. And if she is really able to hone in on them and be a really huge force in the Otherworld.”
Should “Fate: The Winx Saga” get a second season, Bloom would have one much more immediate concern than developing her powers: The fact that Alfea is now under the management of Rosalind (who has secretly just killed Dowling), fairy queen Luna (Kate Fleetwood) and Andreas (Ken Duken), Sky’s (Danny Griffin) father who everyone thought was dead, but was really in hiding all these years raising Rosalind’s prodigy, Beatrix (Sadie Soverall).
In the closing moments of the finale, Bloom and her friends — light fairy Princess Stella (Hannah van der Westhuysen), water fairy Aisha (Precious Mustapha), earth fairy Terra (Eliot Salt) and mind fairy Musa (Elisha Applebaum) — return to school after a weekend in the human world during which Bloom told her parents that she was switched at birth and has been at a fairy academy, not boarding school in Switzerland, this whole time. That’s when they see the new heads of Alfea and are very afraid to find out what this change means.
“The nature of this show, the minute that you think things are going right and things are finally on track, there’s a curveball that’s thrown at you,” Cowen said. “And that’s a huge part of Bloom’s journey and Bloom’s life. But that ending scene is just I think terrifying for what is to come… There are a lot of things to be uncovered about the school that people don’t know. I feel like there might be a battle of power. I don’t really know actually, but it’s definitely opening up some room for conflict, I would say, for the coming year.”
“Fate: The Winx Saga” Season 1 is streaming now on Netflix.