This article contains majorThe Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakesspoilers.
What ever happened to Lucy Gray?
Of course that is the point.
For Casca, that mystery is revealed to be finding a way to make the Hunger Games end.
Instead he is haunted by the cleaner, happier life he forsook for the power and privilege he covets.
Soon, the only person who would even remember this monster was once a man is Lucy Gray.
And shes dead… right?
But when Coriolanus goes to the spot where she was struck, there is no body.
And her voice lingers on as the mockingjays above carry her song, The Hanging Tree.
Did he shoot her?
Did he kill the woman he claimed to love?
And why does the film, like the book its based on, leave us in doubt?
The Dark Side is always there in all of us, and it is the little choices we make.
Those little choices can often lead, invariably, to the big ones that define us.
Theyre also, frankly, a little more richly defined.
Serjanus political radicalism is both shortsighted and a risk to his associates.
On the page, Lucys sleuthing out of the betrayal is left open to greater interpretation.
This makes Corios choices all the chillier in the prose.
Who was the third, Corio?
The gun is his final test, and at least in the book he fails it immediately.
He realizes how it looks and tells himself to put it down.
He even concedes he doesnt know how to build a roof!
It is the same mental baby steps he took to rationalize sending Sejanus to the hangmans noose.
In the film, there is more ambiguity about Corio and less about Lucy Gray.
He doesnt seem the least bit homicidal about Lucy Gray until he discovers her scarfand the snake beneath it.
Either way, the point is Corio makes assumptions about Lucy Gray and himself.
He doesnt turn to evil because of external forces.
No one else is to blame.
Did Lucy Gray Intend to Kill Coriolanus with the Snake?
He proved himself to be a friend, and from there warmth and affection grew.
That trust was shattered when Corio let slip he murdered a third person that summer and wouldnt admit who.
But even if not, she left him a final, final test that he spectacularly failed.
Like Lucy Grays ultimate fate, this forces Snow to second-guess his assumptions.
But we strongly doubt it.
Like the gun in the house, the snake was a test.
How would Corio react?
Did Lucy Gray Die or… Did Her Song Return to the Capitol?
Which brings us back to the original question, what happened to Lucy Gray?
In the film, however, its a lot harder to hide the facts of the situation.
We see him shoot her silhouette, only for there to be no body in broad daylight.
She did not die, and in his bones, Corio knows she did not die.
Her survival bordered on the seditious, and the Capitol does not want folks to remember that fact.
For Corio, this is another relief, as he will never have to see Lucy Grays face again.
We did not realize how true that was untilSongbirds & Snakes.
She loved katniss potatoes!
Heck, even her status as a victor will have been forgotten within a decade.
She couldve left those woods sometime down the line and had children who were more assimilated into the district.
Its why he speaks from experience when he warns Katniss, Its the things we love that destroy us.
And this time, he couldnt pretend he never heard her mockingjays song.
