The show’s producers learned a lot from the characters of their show and decided to squeeze all the juice they could from the story (is it even a story at this point?) to fill their own pockets. The usual. This is not to say that I didn’t find the season entertaining. After all these years it’s impossible not to be attached to the characters and the show succeeds at keeping you on the edge of your seat with all the rising tension. Easy to binge-watch but also easy to forget after a few days. Despite the shocking moments, the sad deaths and the good deaths, this season did not match the level of seasons one and two.
If the purpose of extending the show was classic fan-service, the producers failed at that by denying their audience their greatest desire: Arturo’s death. No character in the history of television resembles a worm more than Arturito. The man was shot twice by Monica and just when we started to cheer … she saved him. The band got him out of the bank and into safety so he could be a waste of oxygen for another day. However, something interesting about the situation is how much it pushed Monica’s arc, which has been one of the most interesting to watch across the seasons. Monica started out as a regular person who wouldn’t hurt a fly, then she got entangled with Denver, joined the band, joined the second heist while leaving her child behind, to almost becoming a murderer. I’ll give her that.
But besides Monica, no other character got any significant arc this season. They stayed in the exact same place as before and part of this is due to the fact that the writers chose to include more gunfights than meaningful moments that revealed character. There were a few, like Manila’s love confession, Palermo’s change of heart when Helsinki almost died, and Bogota’s decision to spare Gandía. But the predominant elements of the season were gunshots and flashbacks. Too many flashbacks.
Throughout the five episodes we saw the great Pedro Alonso reprising his role as Berlín/Andrés, this time with a sassy girlfriend and a grown-up son. Together, they join forces with Marsella and Bogotá to go on a heist for stolen artifacts. A lot of screen time was given to this storyline and by the end of part one it seemed entirely pointless and irrelevant, but I suspect there will be some kind of major reveal in part two that finally tells us why we should care about Berlín and his son. The time spent in this random story could’ve been used to give the main characters better arc before the show’s definitive end, but it seems like the producers just refused to let go of Pedro Alonso. He’s a great actor and his character was one of the best, but he did all he needed to do already. The rest is just filler. It disrespects the character that so many people came to love. A slightly better flashback was between Denver and Moscow, his late father, dearly missed by all the fans. Their brief story was tied to the family’s relationship with Julia/Manila and it allowed for more depth to the hot-headed Denver.
Tokyo’s flashback was … messy. Introduced from the first episode, we got a glimpse of Tokyo robbing a bank with the love of her life before he was brutally killed and she was forced to go on the run. The narrative spilled over to the other episodes with no connection to the main plot, like Berlin’s story, and only in the final episode was it understood why the flashback mattered. We received Tokyo’s full story before her death. Appropriate? Yes. But it would’ve had greater impact if they’d gotten the timing right by introducing the flashback a little later. The problem with the season was that they tried to jam so many things together into five episodes and tell loose stories that look interesting on the surface level but add little to the greater plot. They burned the resource of the flashback, and it is disappointing because it had worked well for the show in previous seasons, but in number five it became a distraction.
Something positive worth mentioning is Alicia Sierra. She could get her own spin-off series and I’d watch it simply because of Najwa Nimri and her amazing acting skills. Sierra was a formidable adversary for El Profesor so it was fun to watch them interact and try to outsmart the other. Her plans were interrupted by actual childbirth in a dirty warehouse and that gave El Profesor the opportunity to get free and also show off his midwife skills. How realistic was it that the man could successfully deliver a baby that was upside down with no professional medical training or equipment? Not buying it. Just because the guy is smarter than everyone else doesn’t mean he gets to have every skill on the planet. Delivering Victoria was the most significant thing he did during the first five episodes so I hope he become smore involved and decisive in the final installment where we expect the band to avenge Tokyo.
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money heist