Not a Stranger Ending Explained: What Caused Funda’s Meltdown?

The Turkish psychological thriller series ‘Not a Stranger’ follows the story of a new mother who inadvertently invites a storm of chaos into her family and home. A few months after the birth of her baby girl, Mavi, the mother, Funda, is ready to return to her work as a renowned painter. Nonetheless, finding a trustworthy nanny to look over her newborn child proves to be a difficult ordeal. Therefore, the mother is overjoyed when she finds the perfect candidate, Nazli. Yet, once she welcomes the strange woman into her house, the painter realizes everything is not what it seems. As the nanny integrates herself into the lives of Funda, her baby, and her husband, Ilker, things grow complicated. Soon enough, the mother grows disillusioned by what parts of her life she can trust as she begins to anticipate betrayal and backstabbing from all sides. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Not a Stranger Recap

Funda Inal is set to return to work after she settles into her new role as a mother to a newborn baby girl. She’s fairly nervous about the prospect, given the pivotal ways in which her life seems to have been changed in light of her newfound motherhood. Moreover, she’s worried about leaving her toddler with a nanny, despite her husband’s assurance that everything would be alright. In fact, when the day comes to meet with a work friend to talk about a new exhibition, she ends up firing the prospective nanny on her first day and taking the baby with her. Still, she knows this can’t be a viable solution, especially when she’s given a timeline of two months before the installation of the next exhibit. Miraculously, the following day, during her mommy-and-me swimming classes, she realizes that her instructor, Nazli, is an ideal candidate for the job. The other woman used to be a baby nurse and is currently in the market for a new job.

Therefore, Funda ends up offering her the job of a live-in nanny on the spot. The next two days go by in a breeze, and Nazli even helps in setting up her home studio again. Yet, things take a turn when Ilker returns from his work trip and meets his new employee. As it turns out, the husband and the new nanny know each other from a shared past together. Ilker reveals the truth of the situation to his wife instantly, but conceals the reality of his past relationship with the woman. Instead, he claims they only had a one-night stand. Funda appreciates his honesty and grows intrigued by the situation. Thus, she ends up allowing Nazli to stay in the position regardless of the other’s colorful past with her husband. Little does she know, this arrangement between them wasn’t a coincidence, but rather a conclusion planned by the nanny. Over the course of the next few days, a precarious dynamic forms between the three of them.

Funda is drawn to Nazli’s air of mystery. As such, she befriends her and uses her as a model for her art. Alternatively, plagued by memories of their shared past, Ilker continues to get drawn toward his ex, while staying vigilant about hiding this development from his wife. However, the nanny holds her cards close. She confronts him about how he dumped her under the pretense of moving to London, only to end up back in the country. Simultaneously, she continues gaining his wife’s trust. Around the same time, Funda learns of Emre, her nanny’s boyfriend. Eventually, one overnight conference takes the painter away from home. On this night, Ilker and Nazli’s game of cat-and-mouse comes to a head, and the two sleep together. In the aftermath, the gravity of keeping this secret creates notable friction around the house. The painter begins to grow suspicious of infidelity, but can’t prove anything outright. Consequently, she gives the nanny a few days off and decides that she will put her career on the back burner again after the upcoming exhibition.

During this break, Ilker shows up at Nazli’s hotel room to hook up with her, but the duo ends up getting caught by Emre. Yet, before he can reach out to Funda to share the truth of their partners’ affair, he ends up in a brutal roadside accident. While he’s in a coma, his girlfriend lies to the painter about how she was the one who found out about his infidelity moments before the accident. All of this strikes a sympathetic chord for the mother, who tells Nazli to move back in with her family. Nonetheless, her suspicions never fade away. In the coming days, the painter grows focused on completing the artworks for the exhibition. However, she gets so engrossed in the process that it drives her into a manic downspiral. Eventually, this results in a massive meltdown on the day of the exhibit, which almost puts young Mavi’s life in danger. Thus, with no other avenues left open, the mother has no choice but to admit herself into a mental hospital, leaving the nanny to look over her daughter.

Not a Stranger Ending: Why Does Funda End Up in a Mental Hospital? What Caused Her Meltdown?

Over the course of the story, Funda’s state continues to deteriorate until it reaches its drastic conclusion. Yet nothing about her eventual meltdown lines up with her actual history and behavioral pattern. Emre’s death seems to become a turning point for the painter as she immerses herself in completing her artworks for her exhibition. She becomes too lost in the artistic process that she begins to lose track of days and suffers severe memory loss. The day of the exhibition is no different. The artist remains off-balance and even begins to hallucinate Emre’s ghost. As a result, of the same, she chases down shadows in the exhibits garage until she accidentally walks into the path of a motorbike while she’s holding young Mavi.

Even though the baby and the mother are safe, the latter can’t forgive herself for putting her kid in such a dangerous situation. Initially, she believes that all of this is a result of her attempting to juggle motherhood with her artistry. Funda had a complex relationship with her own mother, who gave up on her career after the birth of her son. For the same reason, she always told herself that she wouldn’t make the same mistakes as her mother. Nonetheless, she’s constantly made to feel like she can’t have both a career and a healthy relationship with her daughter. Consequently, she begins to believe that her artistic passions are to blame for her recent downward spiral. As she’s drawing these conclusions, she’s still in her manic state. Thus, she resorts to extreme measures and ends up burning down her home studio.

This feat of pyromania cements the danger of Funda’s mental state, compelling her to seek professional help. Surprisingly enough, it’s only a matter of months before her state improves significantly. Even so, her guilt and her fear of facing her family again keep her from returning home. Her friend, Kemal, also notices the peculiarity of the situation. Naturally, when he sets out to investigate the source behind the painter’s abrupt meltdown, he inevitably connects the dots back to Nazli. On the night of the exhibition, Funda tells Kemal about the apparent one-night stand between her husband and her nanny. This detail makes him curious enough to dig into the latter’s past. Once he finds out the true reason behind her suspension as a baby nurse, he realizes that Nazli is unequivocally the person responsible for the painter’s current state.

As it turns out, Nazli had been playing the long game all this time. First, she intentionally inserted herself into Funda’s life, subtly pitching herself as an option for a nanny to the mother. Once she earned her trust and slithered her way into the family’s residence, she started slowly drugging the painter. As the live-in nanny, she would often find herself with the responsibility of bringing food and drinks for the family members. Thus, she started mixing small doses of sedatives in her drinks. Initially, this manifested as migraines and hangovers. Nonetheless, in the build-up to the exhibition, Nazli got the artist hooked on her sedative-infused chamomile tea. This gradual poisoning is what resulted in the eventual meltdown, which paved the way for Funda to act irrationally to the point of raising concerns about her mental state.

Does Nazli Succeed in Stealing Funda’s Life?

Even though Nazli’s employment under the Inal family seems coincidental, it is all revealed to be a part of a master plan. A few years ago, she crossed paths with Ilker and the two fell into a whirlwind romance. From the get-go, they remained honest about the brief nature of their affair, sharing that he would be leaving for London in four months. At first, she agreed to be with him for those months with the knowledge that they would have to say goodbye. Nonetheless, in those four months, she fell in love with him. As a result, his eventual departure left her heartbroken. However, something unexpected happened afterward. After Ilker leaves the country, Nazli discovers that she’s pregnant with his child.

Yet, when she tries to broach the subject with him over the phone, he makes it clear that he doesn’t want to have a child with her. A few months later, Nazli learned about Ilker’s engagement to Funda, one of his longtime friends. The news left her so shaken up and devastated that she accidentally walked into incoming traffic and got hit by a car. The accident was near-lethal and led to the death of her unborn baby. Worse yet, it robbed her of the ability to ever have kids in the future. In the aftermath, Emre helped Nazli with her recovery, and she almost managed to put Ilker behind her. That is, until a few months after Mavi’s birth, he reached out to her via social media. Infuriatingly enough, he ghosts her after a single emoji sent. This interaction sends her back into a downward spiral. Nazli becomes obsessed with Funda and figuring out why Ilker chose the painter over her.

As a result, she ends up joining her swimming classes as an instructor to get closer to her. In doing so, she inadvertently gets to know Mavi. Her own pregnancy loss, infertility, and their connection to Ilker compel her to grow fond of the baby. She becomes convinced that Funda has actually stolen the life that should’ve been hers. If the architect hadn’t left for London, he would’ve never married the painter, and Nazli would’ve never lost her own child. Therefore, she develops a new goal to steal this life from Funda. Eventually, by orchestrating her meltdown, Nazli succeeds in her endeavor. She has created a distance between the mother and her family, while staying behind to fill the vacuum. Even so, at the end of the season, we see Funda spying on her nanny, suggesting that while the latter may have won the battle, the war is yet to unravel.

Why Did Nazli Quit Nursing?

Nazli’s past, beyond her relationship with Ilker, remains one of the most intriguing aspects of her character. Her experience as a baby nurse is what compels Funda to hire her as a nanny. Yet, she never gets to learn the real reason why she eventually walked away from the profession. All that the nanny shares is that she encountered an accident in her life, which made it impossible for her to continue pursuing her career. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the entire truth. In actuality, it was an unforgivable indiscretion that led to the end of Nazli’s time as a baby nurse. Kemal learns about the same as he digs into the strange woman’s past. After getting in contact with one of her old colleagues, the artist learns that during her time as a baby nurse, the nanny actually almost caused the death of a toddler.

Nazli continued working at the hospital after losing her own baby. However, in that time, she would develop close bonds with the infants in her care due to her own complex relationship with motherhood. Eventually, she started drugging one of the newborns with sedatives. On her part, Nazli claims that this was an act of love to tame down the baby’s suffering. This action may have some connection to the fact that her beloved grandmother made the nurse give her sedatives to end her life during her own terminal treatment. Nevertheless, Nazli’s actions put the baby in a coma. Although the hospital was able to save the baby’s life, they ended up firing Nazli. Yet, in an effort to save their own image, they covered up the scandal.

Does Kemal Keep Nazli’s Secret? Why?

The truth about Nazli’s time as a baby nurse helps Kemal decipher what the nanny has done to Funda. Once he has put the puzzle pieces together, he goes to the Inal residence to confront the stranger about her actions. Once Nazli realizes she can’t defend herself, she switches strategies. Kemal isn’t only a friend to Funda. Instead, he is actually her ex-boyfriend, who once left his wife for her. Even now, he has recently separated from his partner, Ceren, due to his persisting feelings for the other artist. Therefore, it’s no secret that he holds out a torch for Funda and wants to eventually win her over. Nazli uses the knowledge of Kemal’s feelings to turn him from an enemy into an ally.

Nazli tells Kemal that he can have the life that he actually wants if he plays it smart and commits to the long game, much like she herself did. Before getting together with Ilker, Funda was Kemal’s girlfriend. Therefore, the duo’s unexpected union in London changed the course of everyone’s lives. However, if the artist lets Nazli’s plan play out, the course can be corrected. If the painter continues to blame herself for her meltdown, she will believe she must choose between motherhood and her career. Since Nazli has already overtaken her life, this would push her back into her artistic passions. Thus, creating distance between her and Ilker, which would allow Kemal to swoop in as a viable romantic option eventually. Ultimately, the promise of such a reality unfolding compels Kemal to keep Nazli’s secret.