‘Tom Jones’ Ending Explained: Who Are Tom’s Parents? Will There Be a Season 2?

Masterpiece‘s latest romantic confection, Tom Jones, reached its happily ever after tonight. After narrowly losing both his beloved Sophia (Sophie Wilde) and his life (!), Tom Jones (Solly McLeod) gets the reunion he never saw coming. After four episodes of being a parentless foundling, left in Squire Allworthy’s (James Fleet) bed by teenager Jenny Jones (Isobelle Molloy), and kicked out onto the streets, Tom finally is welcomed home. Not only that, but he is finally reunited with his long-lost mother.

Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones has been lauded since its publication for the miraculous ways in which its labyrinthine plot threads eventually resolve themselves. Needless to say, the show has to speed some reveals up and take creative license to wrap the story up in a mini-series format. One such change? Showrunner and writer Gwyneth Hughes never kills Tom’s mother off before he can meet her. Fielding lets the character die off page, letting a letter resolve the mystery. Instead, PBS opted for an emotional meeting of mother and son.

But who is Tom’s real mother? Has the flirtatious Mrs. Waters (Susannah Fielding) secretly been Jenny Jones this whole time? How do Blifil (James Wilbraham) and Lady Bellaston (Hannah Waddingham) team up to foil Tom? Does Masterpiece’s Tom Jones reveal Tom’s real father? And will there be a Tom Jones Season 2? Here’s everything you need to know about the ending of Tom Jones on Masterpiece on PBS…

Tom Jones Ending Explained: Who is Tom’s Mother? How Do Tom and Sophia Get Their Happy Ending?

“Coleridge said that [Tom Jones has] got one of the three most perfect plots in the history of literature and it has,” Tom Jones writer and showrunner Gwyneth Hughes told Decider. “But it takes Fielding 120 pages to unravel the plot at the end.”

“Everything folds in, everything works. It’s utterly brilliant, but I haven’t got 120 pages for the whole show. So I had to really simplify the ultimate turnout.”

To make a long story short, Lady Bellaston and Blifil team up to take Tom down. Blifil pays Fitzpatrick (Julian Rhind-Tutt) to storm one of Lady Bellaston’s parties, knowing Tom will be there in front of Sophia. Fitzpatrick picks a fight with Tom, who stabs Fitzpatrick and is promptly arrested. When Mrs. Waters and Aunt Harriet (Tamzin Merchant) piece together what Fitzpatrick has done, they team up to force him to drop the charges and they both leave him.

Mrs. Waters has an even trickier wrong to put right. After Partridge (Daniel Rigby) recognizes her leaving Tom’s cell as Jenny Jones, she realizes that the former schoolmaster is likely to tell Tom that she is his biological mother. (An incest twist??) But the truth is a teenaged Jenny took the fall for Tom’s real mother…Squire Allworthy’s sister Bridget Blifil (Felicity Montegu). Blifil is furious to hear this and leaves the London townhouse. Mrs. Waters stays to ensure that either she or Bridget tells Tom the truth, thus absolving him of Oedipal guilt.

What follows is an emotional reunion between Bridget and her son, and Squire Allworthy who still loves his biological nephew as his son. It’s a reunion not in Fielding’s book, where at this point, Bridget is long dead.

“It’s such an amazing scene when he’s reunited with his mom,” Tom Jones EP James Gandhi told Decider. “Because in the book, she dies off-screen basically, doesn’t she? It feels like, Why? You could have a big emotional scene.”

Hughes revealed that she initially thought she would follow Fielding’s plot, but another one of her producers, Damien Timmer suggested keeping Bridget alive in the adaptation.

“It became clear to all of us that we needed to grit our teeth and let Bridget survive in order for Tom to have this moment, you know?” Hughes said. “There may be Fielding people who disapprove, but I like having Bridget there all the way through.”

With Tom’s true parentage revealed, his status moves up enough in Squire Western’s eyes that he allows a match between Tom and Sophia. Our heroes live happily ever after, but if Bridget is Tom’s mother, who is his real dad?

Who is Tom’s Father in Masterpiece’s Tom Jones? Is It Partridge?

Did you get an inkling that Partridge, the guy constantly trying to assert that there’s no way he’s Tom’s father could very well be his father? You know, the guy who has a connection with Jenny Jones, but is weirdly recognized by Bridget when he arrives at Squire Allworthy’s house? Turns out he’s not! Masterpiece might have played fast and loose with keeping Bridget Allworthy alive until the series’s end, but they didn’t invent a new reveal about Tom’s father.

“No, you’re not meant to infer that it’s Partridge, although I don’t mind,” Hughes said. “Partridge is so lovely.”

“Who Tom’s father is, is irrelevant in a way because he has Allworthy and Bridget at the end,” Gandhi said. “That’s what’s so interesting about it. Who cares who his father is? Because now he has this family.”

Hughes confirmed this was their intention. “What I was trying to do was I was kind of going out in the days before DNA. Nobody could be sure who their father was true.”

“I think to learn not to care about that is a very adult kind of thing. So I think what Tom says is something quite radical. We’ve got enough. Let’s just, let’s just be together on our own,” Hughes said.

Will There Be a Tom Jones Season 2 on Masterpiece on PBS?

While Tom and Sophia live happily ever after, there is one loose end in the series: when Blifil seeks solace from…Lady Bellaston??

“That was Gwyn’s invention, entirely, when the door opens and Blifil walks into hell, basically, with Lady Bellaston,” Gandhi said. So what happens next? Is it a set up for a potential Tom Jones Season 2 on Masterpiece?

“I mean, I would love to see what happens after that door was shut, but I don’t know,” Gandhi said. “It’s hard, isn’t it? Because it’s happy ever after. Do we want to know what happens after they walk into the sunset? I think I feel quite happy with knowing that Tom and Sophia are very happy together.”

“Oh, well, we never discussed [a Season 2],” Hughes said. “I know that sounds really weird. But because it’s a big classic work. Yeah, I don’t know. What would you do? God, you put an idea in my mind now.”

But before Hughes can consider her nascent idea for Tom Jones Season 2, she’s already lined up another project with Gandhi and Mammoth Screen. But don’t expect it to be another period drama.

“Actually, it’s contemporary,” Gandhi spilled. “It’s completely different. I mean, it’s so different but it is very early. We hope it will happen. But who knows?”