'Citadel' Season 1 Ending Explained: Here's why [SPOILER] betrayed Citadel

Spoilers for 'Citadel' Season 1

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: If you have followed ‘Citadel’ closely, you’d remember Dahlia saying how one of ‘Citadel’s agents went rogue and brought down the entire organization. From the beginning, Dahlia has been blaming the Citadel for taking the lives of innocent people and wanted to take revenge. Whenever she talked about Citadel, it felt like she had some personal motive and wanted to bury Citadel six feet under the ground.

In the final episode of Season 1 of the Amazon Prime Video series, we see Dahlia forcing Mason Kane (Richard Madden) and Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) to steal nuclear cores from Russia’s automated nuclear missile if they want to save their daughter. Mason and one of Dahlia’s men, Davik, take the jump from Manticore’s stealth jet and land over the submarine in the Pacific Ocean. He opens the control module and is able to enter the submarine. How? Eight years ago, Mason visited the same submarine and added a secondary protocol code that was known to Mason. That’s why Dahlia chose her for the mission. Mason and Nadia were able to procure the nuclear cores and it was time to head back to Valencia and save their daughter. Let’s take a look if they were able to save their daughter or not.

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Were Mason and Nadia able to save their daughter from Dahlia?

Mason, Nadia, and Spence head to Valencia, where they had to meet Christoff to hand over the nuclear codes. The sooner they will give nuclear cores to Christoff, the sooner they will be able to get their daughter back. As soon as they meet, Mason says that he wants to see their daughter and only then, he will give the cores. They get to see their daughter, but Dahlia warns them that if they tried to do something foolish, she will order her men to kill the little girl.

Mason gives the cores to Dahlia’s people, but soon they realize that they are encrypted. The flashback sequences revealed that after completing the ‘Red Cell Mission’, Mason never gave control module access to Citadel and now, he doesn’t know how to open it.

Nadia and Mason attack Manticore's agents while Spence kills the man who was holding their daughter. After an epic fight sequence, Mason and Nadia were able to save their daughter and went back to Citadel headquarters to discuss the next steps.

Who was responsible for burning Citadel down?

After saving their daughter, all of them head to Citadel headquarters where Spence told everyone that he has finally found a way to bring back Mason’s memory. However, it seems Nadia didn’t want Mason to have his memory back and was really scared. Strange, isn’t it? Nadia has now reunited with her family and if Mason gets his memory back, it would make their relationship stronger. But it looks like Nadia didn’t want Mason to know about the things he had done in the past.

Spence revealed that he has the potion that would bring Mason’s memory and as soon as he injects the potion, Mason gets to know everything about his past life. He was angry and upset after learning about the things he had done and wished that he had never taken the potion.

One of the biggest revelations that came out during the final episode is that viewers finally got to see who betrayed Citadel and helped in destroying the organization.

Once again, we are taken into a flashback sequence, where it is revealed that Mason visited Dahlia after he got to know that his own organization is lying to him. At the time, Dahlia was a diplomat and Mason came to meet her so that she could help him in finding Nadia. Dahlia was a little upset when she learned that Mason is meeting her just to ask for a favor and not actually meet her to know how she is doing. However, Dahlia said that she would help her. Now, here comes the most interesting part. As soon as the conversation ends, it is revealed that Dahlia, who is now leading a diabolical organization called Manticore, is actually Mason’s MOTHER!

We get to know that almost 30 years back, an explosion took place in a building in Serbia that killed 157 people. Mason’s father was one of the casualties and Dahlia was injured. Since then, Dahlia wanted to know the truth about the explosion. She tried a lot to forget what happened, but couldn’t. So she decided to embark on a journey to find the truth and left Mason with his grandmother. Soon, Dahlia got to know the entire truth and found out that someone had carried out a missile attack that ended up killing hundreds of people. In the end, Dahlia was able to find out that Citadel was responsible for the attack. Their target was something else, but they had the wrong coordinates, and three air missiles went on to hit the wrong target. Dahlia wants Mason to uncover Citadel’s secrets and wants him to use them to bring Citadel into the light and finally hold them accountable for what they have done. She wanted to have the secrets so that she could press charges in court.

The ending of that conversation made us realize that Mason told his mother everything about Citadel. He even told her about the real identities of agents and Dahlia killed every single one of them.

It was not Nadia, but Mason Kane who was responsible for the fall of Citadel, and after everything that happened, Mason believed he would like to forget everything once again. With 'Citadel' already renewed for Season 2, we are surely going to see Mason and Nadia coming back for more thrilling adventures.

'Citadel' Season 1 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.