Prairie collapses. There is no magical light or mysterious disappearance. She simply collapses, and then she is carried away in an ambulance with one of the students running after it desperately calling for her.  I found this ending particularly interesting because of the immense amount of satisfaction I got from watching what I felt was closure, despite an incredibly open-ended finale. Was Prairie going to die? Was this her "transportation to another realm"? Was this all coincidence? Or was this destiny? Was she sane? Or was she insane, but as fortune would have it, her actions and their consequences led to salvation for others after all? The ending really answers none of this, other than just giving us a sense of hope for what may be. It isn't until the second season, when we learn that - upon her death - she has been thrown into another version of herself in another world where things are very, very different, and proceeds to have a new adventure there. But even without this continuation, I feel the first season would have been incredibly successful as a one-off for its play on the realization of destiny, if nothing else.

My friend proceeded to tell me the story of how an unlikely series of events in real life led to arriving at a beach cottage to find his grandfather on the floor after a stroke, and how this event - for a time - made him wonder if everything in his life played out the way it did in order to put him right there and then to save his grandfather's life. This notion of destiny playing out in often-unexpected ways led to some comparisons to other stories with similar manifestations of fate: in particular, stories in which people have been in the right place at the right time, sometimes because of a series of events that were expected to lead to some other purpose, or perhaps even seemed to have no rhyme or reason...