‘Keep Breathing’ Ending, Explained: Does Liv Survive at the End?

Keep Breathing is a new Warner Bros. Television production for Netflix. The show was created by Martin Gero and Brendan Gall, and stars Melissa Barrera, Jeff Wilbusch, and Austin Stowell. The show tells the story of a successful lawyer who finds herself as the victim of a plane crash. The show moves quite fast and waits no time to throw us into a survival story that will also try to become a character study through the extensive use of flashback sequences. Some of them diminish the tension, but do wonders for the character development.

Keep Breathing is one of those shows that works best as a binge-watch experience. There are only six episodes of around 40 minutes each. Which means you can complete the miniseries in one lazy afternoon and have a good time watching it and seeing if Liv, our main character, manages to survive the wild all alone. The show might not be the most memorable show of the year, but it manages to accomplish its goal of being entertaining. The show also tries to do other things, with less success, though.

Being a miniseries means there is no season two, so the series has a clear and definitive ending. The following paragraphs contain spoilers for the entire season. Read at your own risk.

Who Survives The Plane Crash In Keep Breathing?

The inciting incident for the entire season is a plane crash, a bad one, as the pilot basically loses control of the airplane and crashes into a lake in the middle of nowhere. What is worse is that the three passengers of the plane lose consciousness the moment the plane crashes, and they wake up in the middle of a very terrible situation. Liv, our main character, is one of the passengers. We see how Liv was on some sort of work trip, and we see her desperate to reach the city.

It is here that the show splits the storyline for the first time, trying to trick the audience. The show splits the timeline into two. The present with Liv is in the plane crash, and then the past, before the plane crash. Through these extensive flashbacks, we learn who Liv is as a person and why she was so desperate to reach the city before a certain time period. At first, we are made to think that it has something to do with her work, but later we learn that it is something a lot more personal.

Liv is trapped in an airport before boarding the plane that will crash in the future, Liv finds herself trapped in an airport. She then begs two men who are about to board their own private plane to go with them, and pays them two thousand dollars each to do it. They allowed her to ride with them before crashing. One of the men tells her he is a photographer working for National Geographic. It is all a lie, though, as after the crash it is revealed that both of them were smugglers, transporting drugs and money between the borders.

Because they were smugglers and were doing shady business, they never logged their flight schedules with the airport. This means bad news for Liv, as she becomes the only survivor of the crash. One of the men dies inside the plane, and the other dies on the shore of a lake. Before dying, he reveals the truth of the situation to Liv, no one knows they are out there. No one knows they have crashed. No one is coming to help them.

Does Liv Survive At The End Of, Keep Breathing?

Alone by herself in this empty forest, Liv must try to survive herself. She remembers a few things from her childhood and general knowledge and manages to find sources of food like edible berries. Fishing and other more substantial food sources seem to be a lot more difficult to take advantage of. Thankfully, there is rainwater available to her, and she even builds a compass, so she can guide herself through the woods.

It is during this moment that we explore Liv’s past, and we learn a lot of things about her. The first thing that comes as news to the audience about Liv is that she has abandonment issues. When she was little, her mother left her father and herself, and she never knew about her. This created the root of the issue for Liv. This translates to her being an adult that finds it difficult to get into relationships, as it is clear to her that everybody will leave her sooner or later.

The same happened to her relationship with her father. He tells her that he will always be there for her, and when he dies, she realizes that he has been hiding something from her. There are postcards from her mother. This is when Liv decides that she needs to find her mother. She didn’t need to travel urgently because of work, but to find her mother, who was going to be at a very specific place until the month of September. This being her only chance to meet her mother again was very important to Liv.

Liv takes the crash and her entire survival struggle as a way of forgiving both her parents and seeing that her father was actually really strong because he never gave up on her. He stayed and worked to give her the best life he could. Liv takes her father’s example, and she decides she will not give up no matter what.

When she finally reaches a river, she decides to follow logic and jumps into the river, hoping she will come close to a populated area. The river is cold and long, and it takes her downriver for a long time. In the last scene of the show, we see Liv, apparently dead, being revived by two fishermen who have found her. She is pale and doesn’t move, and the fishermen seem distraught, but Liv starts throwing up water and opens her eyes before the credits roll. Liv lives to fight another day.