Please refrain from reading further if you haven’t caught up with Season 5 Part 1 yet. The article contains spoilers.
The first installment of Season 5 ends with Tokyo (Úrsula Corberó) suicide bombing herself and killing Cesar Gandia (José Manuel Poga), the Head of Security at the Bank of Spain and a character most of us despised, especially after he shot & killed Nairobi (Alba Flores) as much as the bragging narcissist Arturo Román (Enrique Arce), the Director of the Royal Mint of Spain turned public speaker after the heist in Seasons 1 and 2.
The Professor (Álvaro Morte) is inconsolable and former Police-Inspector-turned-disgraced-cop Alicia Sierra (Najwa Nimri) is shown trying to comfort him. We already know that the tables were turned on Sierra by Colonel Luis Tomayo (Fernando Cayo), making her a fugitive from the law after she pins all the allegations on Colonel Tomayo and the Spanish government on how she acted on their orders about mercilessly torturing Rio (Miguel Herrán) in police custody and unethically trying to kill Nairobi by luring her to the window using the latter’s son Axel as bait.
Yet the Professor threatens Colonel Tomayo about exposing him for engineering evidence against Alicia Sierra by releasing a recording, gaining some confidence from her. The final installment might have Sierra working more actively by the Professor’s side, where he bargains the clever and unsympathetic ex-Inspector’s help in successfully executing the heist amidst the military operation, and is able to help her restore her former glory.
An alternate plot might have her teaming up and escaping with the robbers, being on the run from the law and with a child to raise. Yet Sierra is more inclined to choose her job above all else if any return to a normal life is offered to her in the future. This possibility depends on Netflix deciding to create the setting for a third heist – while another season does not seem to be on the cards, can we expect a movie from the streaming giant?
We don’t know yet how many other special operatives from Commander Sagasta’s (José Manuel Seda) black ops squad were killed and what consequences our robbers-cum-resistance heroes will be facing following the death of Tokyo, but one thing is for sure – with Tokyo’s death, Money Heist has lost its narrator.
Having seen both the Royal Mint of Spain and Bank of Spain heists through her eyes, with her alluring voice steering us through the plot twists, flashbacks and time-jumps; it is difficult to imagine Money Heist without its central character.
The show cannot be without its binge baits jumping from the present to the past – how else will we know the complete storyline leading to the heists; what plans beyond A, B, C comprised of and how the characters fit into those plans? It seems like that from now on the backstories will be shown in flashbacks where either the characters will be narrating it themselves or can we expect a post-humus Tokyo still doing that one job?
Season 5 also shows flashbacks of Berlin (Pedro Alonso) recruiting his son Rafael (Patrick Criado), an electronics engineer from MIT with a post-degree in cyber-security, to assist him in a heist for stealing Viking gold. We can safely assume that Part 2 will bring us more of Rafael, where he might play a role in helping the Professor get our antihero robbers out of the Bank of Spain war zone, along with the gold.
While his presence in the last installment seems quite obvious, it remains to be seen how he will mark his entrance into the ongoing heist-cum-war – he seems like the last resort the Professor is going to turn to, yet being an electronics engineer he is very much capable of turning the tables on the authorities, and making use of any civic loopholes, especially with the Professor’s chess-like moves already in motion to get Colonel Tomayo to hold the special squads attacks.
While the show has left its mark as one with one of the most unpredictable plots, I do want to see if the show creators will take the good-triumphs-evil route, which in this case is already intertwined with a lot of greys – the ‘robbers’ are more humane than the law enforcers who have more to lose as soon as their ‘law-enforcing tactics’ are out in the open. Will we see some kind of a truce happening between the underdogs and the highbrows? Or will the Professor find his victory with hardly any members of his gung-ho gang left?
Fingers crossed.
