Jack O'Connell's Sir Jimmy Crystal is dividing audiences of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's bold legacy sequel. 28 Years Later ending explained: Who is Jimmy and why is he dressed like that? Jack O'Connell's Sir Jimmy Crystal is dividing audiences of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's bold legacy sequel. By Randall Colburn :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/RandallColburnauthorphotoe7e8b48d9f8645588439077e721a5f48.jpg) Randall Colburn Randall Colburn is a writer and editor at . His work has previously appeared on The A.V. Club, The Guardian, The Ringer, and many other publications.

Jack O'Connell's Sir Jimmy Crystal is dividing audiences of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's bold legacy sequel.

28 Years Later ending explained: Who is Jimmy and why is he dressed like that?

Jack O'Connell's Sir Jimmy Crystal is dividing audiences of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's bold legacy sequel.

By Randall Colburn

Randall Colburn

Randall Colburn is a writer and editor at **. His work has previously appeared on *The A.V. Club, The Guardian, The Ringer*, and many other publications.

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on December 16, 2025 10:29 a.m. ET

Spike (Alfie Williams), Isla (Jodie Comer) and Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) in '28 Years Later'. Credit:

Miya Mizuno/Sony Pictures Entertainment

- *28 Years Later* is a sequel to 2002's *28 Days Later* from the original's director-writer combo of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland.

- The nerve-shredding horror film ends on a cliffhanger teasing its upcoming sequel, *The Bone Temple*.

- Jack O'Connell's leering, tracksuit-wearing Jimmy controversially evokes disgraced British entertainer Jimmy Savile.

*28 Years Later* is not the legacy sequel we expected.

That's a good thing, by the way. As studios look to mine their intellectual property in our age of nostalgia, properties are often resurrected with slightly redressed plots and copious callbacks that tend to operate more as fan service than storytelling.

*28 Years Later,* the new sequel to 2002's *28 Days Later* and 2007's *28 Weeks Later*, bucks this trend with a story that not only jettisons cheap nostalgia plays, but pushes the franchise into some weird and subversive places.

"Fear is what horror is all about. And I think not just in England, but all around the world right now, fear is what everyone's feeling," Boyle told *Rolling Stone*. "It's not just in our culture. This fear of the end — it's universal. But you can't let things end. You have to go on."

Discourse around the film has centered heavily on the film's ending, a stage-setting cliffhanger that also spins the tone of the film into an entirely new direction. Though it's proven compelling for some, the final scene has been repellent for others.

Read on as we break down the *28 Years Later* ending and what it means for its 2026 sequel, *The Bone Temple. ***

What is 28 Years Later about?

Aaron Taylor-Johnston as Jamie and Alfie Williams as Spike in '28 Years Later'.

Miya Mizuno/Columbia

As its title implies,* 28 Years Later* unfolds 28 years after the events of the first film, placing it in 2030. As we're told at the beginning of the film, the "Rage Virus" that turns humans into bloodthirsty (and fast) zombie-like creatures, has been pushed out of continental Europe and confined to the British Isles, which remains under quarantine.

On the island of Lindisfarne, a tight-knit community of survivors lives in a fortified community that's connected to the mainland via a tidal causeway. That's where 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his parents, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Isla (Jodie Comer), the latter suffering from an illness that remains unidentified due to the community's lack of a doctor.

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The film is loosely split into three parts, with Spike threading it all together. The first part of the film follows Spike on his first trek into the zombie-infested mainland, where Jamie exposes Spike to the horrors outside their gates while teaching him how to kill the creatures. During a night hiding from the infected, Spike spots a fire in the distance. Jamie tells him to ignore it.

Back at the camp, Jamie learns from an elder in the community that the fire belongs to Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who he's told is unwell. The boy's desire to see his mom healed, however, drives him to sneak her outside the gates so they can seek help from Kelson.

The journey is a perilous and illuminating one, as Jamie and Isla encounter hordes of infected, as well as an alpha, a hulking and seemingly intelligent evolution of the infected. In one of the film's more harrowing scenes, they encounter a pregnant infected in an abandoned train car. Isla helps the infected give birth to a baby who appears untouched by the virus.

Together, Jamie and Isla bring the baby to Kelson, who turns out to be welcoming and accommodating, despite his reputation as a loon. Of course, that's not to say Kelson isn't a *bit* eccentric...**

What is the bone temple in 28 Years Later?

The bone temple in '28 Years Later'.

Sony Pictures Entertainment/YouTube

The bone temple is exactly what it sounds like — a series of sprawling, towering shrines made from the cleaned and bleached skulls and bones of the dead. Creepy as it is, Kelson's intentions are pure: He built the temple as a means of memorializing the dead.

Once settled at Kelson's camp, the doctor is able to ascertain that Isla has a fatal form of cancer, and that there's no saving her. Isla chooses to end her life, and Kelson gives her a painless death. Spike is forced to confront the reality of his mother's passing when Kelson tasks him with placing her skull among the others in the bone temple.

Comer spoke with ** about her character's decision. "You see the journey that she goes on in the movie, let alone what she's probably experienced for the past several years — the kind of inner turmoil and pain," she said. "It is a very real thing that people come to a point of not wanting to experience that any longer. And I think they're both comforted and held by Kelson in this space."**

How does 28 Years Later end?

Spike (Alfie Williams) takes a skull from Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) in '28 Years Later'.

Miya Mizuno/Columbia

Spike returns to his island home with the baby, leaving it outside the gates but refusing to go inside himself.

He goes back to the mainland alone, where he's soon met by hordes of infected. His savior comes in the form of Jimmy (Jack O'Connell), who cuts a striking figure with stringy, blonde locks, a tracksuit, and several gold chains (and an upside-down gold cross) around his neck. His crew is dressed similarly, and they prove shockingly adept at killing infected, performing Power Rangers-like stunts as they slice and dice the creatures.

The film ends with Jimmy inviting Spike to join him.**

Who is Jimmy in 28 Years Later?

Well before we meet him in the closing moments, Jimmy's presence hangs heavy in *28 Years Later*. Early in the film, Jamie and Spike find a dead body with "Jimmy" carved into its belly. We also see graffiti on abandoned buildings with his name — one reads, "Behold, he is coming with the clouds," with "Jimmy" written right next to it.

Per the credits, Jimmy's full name is Sir Jimmy Crystal. His subordinates are all also named Jimmy. The gold cross around his neck also reveals him as the young boy we see in the flashback to 2002 that starts the film. As infected slaughter his loved ones, young Jimmy retreats into a church, where his father gives him the cross and tells him to run. Jimmy's father, meanwhile, welcomes the monsters with ecclesiastical joy, believing it to be the Day of Judgment.

As for Jimmy's appearance? Well, it evokes the hair and style of Jimmy Savile, the former British TV presenter and DJ who, after years of being lauded as one of Britain's most beloved entertainers and philanthropists, was outed as a prolific sexual predator following his death in 2011. Hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse have been lodged against Savile, and he's been summarily scrubbed from his once-vaunted place in British pop culture in the years since.

Jack O'Connell at the April 2025 New York premiere of 'Sinners'.

Arturo Holmes/WireImage

What does it mean? Well, it could mean many things, but, based on remarks made by Boyle and Garland, it seems to portend a focus on culture in the upcoming sequels.

"The whole film, and if we ever get to make the whole trilogy, is in some ways about looking back and looking forwards," said Garland in a chat with *Business Insider*. "The thing about looking back is how selective memory is and that it cherry picks and it has amnesia and crucially it also misremembers and we are living in a time right now, which is absolutely dominated by a misremembered past."

Boyle added, "[Savile is] as much to do with pop culture as he is to do with sportswear, to do with cricket, to do with the honors system. It's all kind of twisting in this partial remembrance, clinging onto things and then recreating them as an image for followers."

These quotes resonate that much more when you consider two other pop culture references made early in the film. In the prologue, young Jimmy is watching *Teletubbies *when the infected storm his house. Later, we see Spike with a *Mighty Morphin Power Rangers* action figure, which he chooses not to put in his bag when heading out to the mainland with Jamie.

Jamie's crew wears multi-colored tracksuits, evoking both the multi-colored Teletubbies and Power Rangers. Their fighting skills are also *Power Rangers*-esque, with flips and jumps preceding their kills.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

What all of this may amount to for Jimmy is a fetishization of the pop culture he grew up consuming. Boyle has noted in numerous interviews, including this chat with Kermode and Mayo, that one of the things that fascinated him about the quarantine zone of *28 Years Later* was the potential for a kind of cultural regression.

Speaking to Jamie and Isla's island community, he told Kermode and Mayo, "Culture stops for them, and it's this abrupt stop and all technology's gone and electricity's gone, and they choose to step back towards a kind of post-war existence, which they kind of identify with, and that begins to become the culture. They don't feel like they're looking forward to anything. They feel like they've stopped."

In his *Rolling Stone* interview, he put it this way: "The virus needs to move forward. The British human beings left to fight it are moving backwards."

Jimmy and his followers may be experiencing their own kind of cultural regression, one rooted in the iconography of pop culture and children's entertainment. (If so, kudos to Boyle and Garland for satirizing modern society's nostalgia obsession in a Hollywood legacy sequel.)**

Will there be a 28 Years Later sequel?

Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) in '28 Years Later'.

Miya Mizuno/Columbia

Yes, *28 Years Later: The Bone Temple* is slated for release on Jan. 16, 2026. Nia DaCosta (*Candyman, The Marvels*) will direct the sequel, with Garland returning as writer.

As the end of *28 Years Later* teases, the sequel will highlight O'Connell's Jimmy. Speaking with *Rolling Stone*, the director said it's "essentially a debate about the nature of evil between Kelson and the head Jimmy."

Fiennes teased the sequel further in a chat with EW, noting that the baby delivered in *28 Years Later* hints at what's to come. "I can say that the themes that we touched on in the scene on the train, the moment of labor, the humanity — it is a critical moment in the life of a mother and child," he said.

"The ultimate human moment is an infected woman who is giving birth to a baby who is not infected," he continued. "The theme of innate humanity — is it still alive in the soul, in the heart, in the mind of an infected person? Are they completely corrupted? Are they only rabid? Or is there the possibility of something? Something human, it's still there."

But notions of "human violence" will also be present in the sequel. "We carry in us the potential for terrible destruction and pain," Fiennes said. "That theme is picked up very strongly in the next film."

If *28 Years Later* is a financial success, Boyle revealed, he'll direct a third film, capping off the trilogy.

Will Cillian Murphy be in the sequel?

Cillian Murphy as Jim in '28 Days Later'.

Peter Mountain/Fox Searchlight

Yes, Sony has confirmed that Cillian Murphy, who starred in* 28 Days Later*, will appear in the sequel. It's the third film, however, that will be "Cillian's movie," Boyle told *Rolling Stone*, adding, "It would bring everything full circle."

Lest we forget, Murphy's character in the original film was named Jim. Hm.**

Where can I watch 28 Years Later?

An alpha in '28 Years Later'.

*28 Years Later* is currently available to stream on Netflix. ****

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Published: December 17, 2025 at 07:38AM on Source: ANDY MAG

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