When Scandal ended Thursday, Shonda Rhimes gave the audience a parting gift/mystery: two black girls (one of them being Rhimes’ daughter, Harper) looking up at an oil painting of Olivia hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. What does it mean?

“The juicy part is the question isn’t answered, so we all get to talk about it for the rest of time, and have our ideas and maybe our ideas will change as we change,” said Bellamy Young to Entertainment Weekly. “But representation means everything. It’s really beautiful that it’s up there. That portrait in particular, if you freeze frame and really look it over, it’s done like all the great oil painting of times, and it tells a story and that story is huge and really encapsulates what we’ve been doing for seven seasons in one beautiful piece of iconography. I was mesmerized.”

“I think everyone is going to go away with a different answer to what that means to them,” said Guillermo Diaz. “To me, my first thought was, ‘Oh, Olivia Pope becomes president,’ and these young black women are seeing this portrait of the first black female president. That’s what I took away from it.”

Katie Lowes told the outlet she visited the gallery while the cast was in Washington D.C. filming the episode. She said the script for the finale came before the now iconic moment of the little girl marveling at Michelle Obama’s portrait.

“I felt really proud to be a part of the show. I know the end’s ambiguous, but it made me feel proud to be a part of a show to make an ambiguous statement like that. I got to be a part of a show that was entertaining, but also thought-provoking.”