Here's What Really Happened to Tate During 'Where the Crawdads Sing'

Some of the events of Where the Crawdads Sing in the book and movie are a little different, but the characters are the same, and the importance of Chase, Kya, and Tate is still there.

So when viewers watched the movie, and Tate sort of left halfway through, viewers were left wondering what happened to Tate in Where the Crawdads Sing.

Where the Crawdads Sing isn't exactly another version of a love triangle, a la The Summer I Turned Pretty. Instead, it's a dark drama set in the south that involves a murder, the mystery of who committed it, and how nature and natural instincts play a role in what people do. The movie is not quite as deep as the novel it is based on, but Tate is still an integral part of the story, in a way.

Although Tate and Kya start off as friends, and then turn into something more, he leaves her when he has to leave town to go to college. He promises to return afterward, but he doesn't. At least, not at first. According to some readers of the book on Goodreads, Tate postpones returning home because he doesn't know how Kya, essentially a wild girl from the marsh, would do in his new world.

It isn't until Kya is with Chase that Tate finally returns home. He even supports Kya when she is on trial for Chase's murder. In the end, when Kya is found not guilty, she and Tate agree to be "common law" married.

They stay together for decades until, when they are much older, Kya dies, presumably of old age.

Taylor John Smith, the actor who plays Tate in Where the Crawdads Sing, spoke to Pop Culturalist about bringing the role to life in the movie and how he wanted to make sure viewers saw that Tate isn't necessarily the "cookie-cutter" good guy. Maybe compared to Chase he is, but Tate is a bit deeper than that.

"He's not perfect. He does make mistakes," Taylor told the outlet, about who Tate is in the movie. "I wanted there to be an aspect of that, especially when he leaves Kya and doesn't come back on the 4th of July. I wanted him to not be just the good guy. He needed to have these edges to him that make him human."

Chase's ending in Where the Crawdads Sing isn't as ambiguous as what happened to Tate before he came home to Kya. Chase dies when he seems to fall off a fire tower. Kya is charged with his murder, but she's found not guilty, and she and Tate go on to live their life together.

Later, after she died as an old woman, Tate finds something she wrote about protecting the prey in nature and killing the predator to do that. He also finds Chase's missing necklace, which had been taken off Chase at the time of his death. Kya killed him, but Tate chooses not to reveal this to anyone in the end.