Netflix's East of Eden opens with Florence Pugh's Cathy crawling through mud — who beat up Cathy and left her for dead?

East of Eden, Zoe Kazan's seven-episode adaptation of John Steinbeck's 1952 novel, premiered on Netflix on October 1, 2026. Its first image is Florence Pugh's Cathy Ames, brutally beaten, crawling on her belly in the dark toward a farmhouse. Episode 1 ends where it began, with Adam and Charles Trask (Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist) finding her on their porch. Episode 2, "Cathy," explains how she got there.

Spoilers for the first two episodes and the novel follow.

How does Cathy die in East of Eden? Florence Pugh's last scene borrows from Alice in Wonderland

What the series shows

When Charles finds her, he points a gun at her and wants to call the sheriff. Adam carries her inside and sends for a doctor. Questioned later by the local sheriff, Cathy claims she can't remember anything. Charles gets more suspicious when the brothers find a suitcase of money and jewelry.

Episode 2 fills in the rest. After burning down her family's house with her parents inside and faking her own death, Cathy turns to sex work and makes her way to Boston. There she becomes involved with Mr. Edwards (Josh McConville), a married man who runs a brothel business. She wins him over with an invented story about needing money to save her mother's farm, and he falls in love with her. The relationship turns possessive. He accuses her of seeing other men and grabs her, and she helps herself to the cash in his money clip.

Edwards eventually discovers who she really is. He takes her to Connecticut, planning to put her back to work. Cathy tries to run, he catches her and beats her, then smashes her with a rock and leaves, believing he has killed her. She survives long enough to crawl to the nearest house, which belongs to the Trasks.

What the novel says

Steinbeck tells it in chapter 10, in roughly the same order, with several differences:

• Who Edwards is — in the book he is a Boston whoremaster who rotates women through a circuit of New England towns while living outwardly as a respectable married man with two sons.
• What he finds out — Steinbeck's Edwards hires a detective, who turns up a newspaper story about the fire that killed Cathy's parents and about her disappearance.
• The beating — he takes her to rural Connecticut, beats her savagely and leaves her by the roadside to die.
• The aftermath — Edwards goes home to his wife. Cathy drags herself along the ground to the Trask farm, where Adam finds her. Edwards's suitcase and Cathy's box of money are later found at the scene.

The novel builds a biblical image into the crawl. Cathy comes out of the beating with a scar on her forehead, and her crawl on her belly toward the Trask house echoes the serpent cursed in Genesis to move on its belly. The series keeps the scar and makes it a link between Cathy and Charles, who has one of his own.

Charles also gets an extra beat in the book. He tricks Cathy into believing she revealed her past while delirious, then mocks her for believing it.

The biggest change is where it sits

Steinbeck opens with a long description of the Salinas Valley and lets Cathy arrive after the Trask brothers' history is established. Kazan moves the beating to the very first frame, a flash-forward to a moment that comes much later in the story's chronology. The effect is that viewers meet Cathy as a victim before they learn she is a murderer.

The book introduces Cathy through what she does to other people. The series introduces her through what was done to her, and spends the next six episodes holding both facts at once.

The 1981 miniseries, with Jane Seymour as Cathy, named her attacker Jules Edwards, played by Howard Duff. Netflix's version keeps the man and the motive and changes the order in which you learn them.

Previously we wrote: How does East of Eden end? All seven episodes build to one Hebrew word from Genesis