Obsession: The wish isn't real, it never was.
Bear establishes early on that he is NOT a reliable narrator. The show is told from HIS perspective the entire time.
My theory is: He is date raping Nikki with drugs.
In the beginning, Bear's cat dies from pills. Pills he has marked as "don't eat".
Bear makes comments about "having sleeping pills in his pockets" in the car with Sarah.
Bear follows Nikki over to get drinks and then offers to take her home, which is atypical.
Ian claims Nikki is acting like she took drugs.
Because he spiked her drink. And continues to drug her.
All of Nikki's symptoms match her being drugged, pissing and pooping herself. Her being easy to tell what to do. After he drugs her and realizes she will love him when she does, he continues to drug her. And random moments of her being lucid and PUSHING HIM AWAY because he keeps SEXUALLY ASSAULTING HER.
The "one wish willow" has a weird line on the packaging "spark the middle and break in half". Anyone who has ever had to cut pills in half knows they often say "score the middle and break in half" in the directions.
Similar when Bear calls the hotline, it is open really late at night and sounds like some random dude who is ACTUALLY a drug dealer. He doesn't want his wish (the drug) to go away. He just wants to "alter" it. But he can't. And what he's done is a crime. So the only way he can get out of it is to kill himself.
When Nikki is paralyzed and cannot move but asks him to kill her we see the first glitch in his story. He could let her go but he DOESNT. He says "is it really that bad to be with me?" Because he is keeping her prisoner. WITH DRUGS. This is the only time we really see what is really happening.
Sarah also ends up at Bear's house with no clothes on rather than buried. Which feels like glitch in his story telling, because he brought her body home to use and rape.
The story isn't about a wish coming true. It's about date rape, coercion and a man realizing the only way out of his rape fantasy after Nikki "wakes up" is to kill himself so he can live in his victim fantasy instead of prison.
And instead of kill himself with the gun, he takes the same drug he gave her. Only after he takes that drug does he suddenly feel the same way that Nikki had the entire time. He didn't sacrifice himself FOR her. He died to escape consequences.
At the end we see the TV flip upside down, static instead of the movie that was playing before. To hint that what we saw isn't reality.