Money Heist
2021-03-10
I usually write about more serious topics here, but saw the entirety of Money Heist (imdb because netflix has weird links) with my fiancee. She’s into what she calls "dramas", but which are really just soap operas.
It aggravated me by the end, and so I’m compelled to write a bunch of words about why I didn’t like it, and exasperation with some of the reasons people do like it.
The Man With The Plan
I generally love heist movies because they’re creative. Rarely do you see a heist movie that’s just "guys run in with guns, take the cash register, and leave". If the movie were built around that, you’d wind up with a character drama, driven by its characters and their lives - rather than the heist, which would have ended fairly quickly and not been particularly interesting. If you want to see what I mean, refer to Heat (1995) - or even Goodfellas which has a number of off-screen heists.
No, heist movies have to have some interesting conceit to even be a heist movie. So when Money Heist starts, that’s what you expect. It has all the trappings of a good heist show - motley crew with a cryptic plan, neat target, and plenty of twists and turns straining the trust of the crew.
The problem is that as it goes on, the show stops being about a cool heist idea, and turns into an interpersonal drama.
Prison Break
Back in 2004, a show called Prison Break aired. The first two seasons were (for the time) fantastically well done. Interesting characters and a plot that marched forward and expressed all the cool ideas the writers had come up with when asking the question "how do you break out of prison if you had infinite time to plan for it?" The show had its share of "unpredictable characters ruin the plan", but at the end of two seasons it wrapped a satisfying story that was clearly planned and written well in advance of shooting.
Then the third season aired, and it was like a different show. Nonsensical decisions by characters, filler plots, and overall a lot of wasted potential. The show continued for a fourth season that limped to the finish line, but it’s generally best if we pretend the show ended after two seasons.
I bring this up because this is precisely what happened to Money Heist. A show about a man with a plan developed over the years, a motley crew, unpredictable elements, and a satisfying two-season arc about beating the authorities at their own game. The two shows even feature a female lead "switching sides" from the authority to the rebels and joining them in their escape (two of them, in the case of money heist).
Then the third season airs, and you can’t even recognize the show anymore.
Remembering the good
I want to linger here for a moment and say that the first two seasons were good. They weren’t exactly Breaking Bad, but they were some of the best international TV that’s been made. And if it were filmed in English, you probably wouldn’t even notice that it was an international show - the quality of filming, pacing, acting, effects, and lighting was all completely fine.
The story was a neat idea - it’s a heist but not a robbery - and the number of measures taken by the crew to ensure its success (plans upon backup plans) made the show fun to watch from start to finish.
What went wrong
The third season introduces a brand new heist; the bank of spain. The crew reunite to steal the national gold reserve, melt it down and exfiltrate it - along with a number of ultra sensitive state secrets stored in a hidden vault within the vault.
A gold heist, or state secret heist, isn’t a stupid thing to start with; it could’ve been a cool conceit if it had used a different set of characters. The problem is that the show originally ended by scattering all the robbers to the four corners of the earth, never to see each other again. It was done for safety, so that none of them could compromise the others if caught. It was understood that the Professor would handle the money appropriately and each of them would get a unique drop by which to receive their cut.
All the characters communicate and reunite in the first episode of the third season. In fact, this communication is what leads to one of them being caught. The professor evidently has a careful and convoluted way to contact each of them, and calls them all together for a second heist to free the caught member (Rio).
This sucks. It doesn’t fit with the believability of the original story (how could the professor have planned a contact method for where each of them chose to go, unless he knew where they all went? Doesn’t that defeat the point of all of them avoiding each other?) and doesn’t do a good job addressing why they all decided to go along with the plan in the first place. Sure, there’s a lot of talk about loyalty and the crew being family, but some of the members have a real family and are convinced to abandon it for the crew.
Babies
Look, there’s one episode where two robbers who hooked up during the heist have a fight because Denver (the man) doesn’t think Stockholm (the woman, who by the way is named that for her Stockholm Syndrome) should participate; instead staying behind to keep their baby safe. There’s a lot wrong with this;
- Someone has to stay behind with the baby; you can’t exactly hire a babysitter.
- The baby should not have both parents involved in a heist that has a real chance of killing or permanently imprisoning both of them
- Stockholm refuses to do it, but doesn’t ask Denver to do it; so she has no alternate plan for how this should go
So what the fuck is this conversation doing? What does Stockholm want to happen? The show could have played this off as "she’s a hopeless romantic who doesn’t think ahead", which would have been a solid move. But instead it plays it off as a sort of "Denver is an old-fashioned man who wants his woman to stay at home", and gets other female characters to come out and harp at him for giving a shit about their child.
Look we’ll get into the female stuff later, but this is emblematic of how far downhill the show went. A character making good points and completely closing the logical loop with all the variations of what could happen is shut down by some overemotional character that doesn’t have a clear outcome or goal in mind. The show then celebrates this and moves on without acknowledging how fucked up the aggressive character is for demanding this of the defensive character.
Lisbon
There’s a moment where the Professor regrets including Lisbon (his girlfriend) in the heist. She’s distracting him and not meaningfully contributing. She takes objection and berates him for not trusting her, of course she’s useful. He notes that "I already beat you at this game", further driving home that she isn’t useful. Then she pivots back to asking if he even wants to be with her.
I… Can’t express how fucked up this exchange is played out. Here’s three reasons that come up in the conversation for why Lisbon should be in the heist;
- Lisbon is useful because she’s as smart as the professor
- Lisbon is useful because she has a part to play
- Lisbon is useful because she’s involved with the professor
She’s not as smart ("I already beat you"), she has no specific part to play (i know because i watched the whole fucking show), and she is involved with the professor. Her argument for why she should be involved pivots through all three of those, and she contradicts one after the other by making her next argument. Finally she pretends like the only reason the Professor wouldn’t want her there is because he doesn’t love her.
What the fuck is this
Just because you don’t go to work with your wife doesn’t mean you don’t love her. Our loved ones are distractions in a lot of circumstances, especially high-stress ones where we feel responsible to ensure their wellbeing. It should not be some huge controversy to want to ensure the safety of your wife while you’re out taking hostages to blackmail the Spanish government. Especially when she has no meaningful part to play in the heist.
Both this and the baby example above have the same problem. But i have to give some credit to the writers, because American writers would have certainly avoided the issue entirely by overpowering the female characters and dumbing-down the male characters. Lisbon would have become a genius planner, and the Professor would have become a scatterbrained clutz. Denver would have crippling emotional issues and Stockholm would have boxed two soldiers at once, or some bullshit.
Manila and retconning
We can’t really go on without talking about the newest robber; Manila. Introduced midway through season 4, Manila is shown as a plant. He’s placed undercover with the hostages in order to subvert any attempts at hostage rebellion. He "returns" in the second heist to do the same job.
Before we get into Manila’s backstory, let’s just acknowledge how incongruous this is. We already had a hostage rebellion in the first season; they smuggled tools and blew up a wall to free 17 (18? I forget) hostages; it was led by Arturo. What the fuck was Manila doing then? And why would you use the same plant in two heists? The very first thing that any authority would do is profile every hostage, and suddenly notice that one guy is present at two heists by the same robbers. You’d have to upgrade him to a uniformed robber, or you’d have to exclude him altogether. Exclusion is smarter, since you would have one less robber to track down and communicate with.
This retcon sucks even harder because Manila does jack shit the whole show. All he does is stand up and say "i have to go to the bathroom", using that time to complain that he doesn’t have a gun. When he gets a gun, he does nothing with it. The character is completely pointless; if you cut him entirely the show only benefits.
So why is Manila here, aside for padding? Well, Manila is transgender. That’s it.
Manila is "Juanito"; a man who decides to become a woman. He spends most of his runtime preaching trans disinformation to the crew. A notable scene with Denver shows Denver asking why Juanito became trans, when it happened, what it means, etc. It’s a recitation twitter-level beliefs, talking down at anyone who even questions the dogma. At one point Manila says "I was always a woman", which i laughed out loud at. The homeless guys who claim to be Jesus would say they were always jesus. Someone who claims to be reincarnated is claiming to have "always been" that person. Feeling strongly about it doesn’t make something any less crazy; quite the opposite. Anyone can lie about their age, but a teen saying "I’ve always felt like i was over 21" to buy alcohol doesn’t mean they are. An individual has the biggest incentive to lie and fool others about themselves, it’s why we ask others about someone’s background instead of taking their word for it.
But, look, I don’t want to have to re-litigate all the junk science involved in this debate. Why did I include that paragraph debunking it? Because the show saw fit to push it through anyway. If they spend ten minutes spreading lies, I’m willing to spend ten minutes to correct the record.
The character bothers me because it’s clearly a 2019 addition to gain diversity points. It alienates a sizable part of the audience who doesn’t subscribe to that faith, and does disservice to the first seasons by retcon-inserting a useless character.
This habit of retconning happens a lot in the third and fourth seasons. Dead characters are constantly coming back in flashbacks and way too many scenes predating the original heist are introduced. It doesn’t always conflict with the "actual events" of the original show, but it’s always out-of-place and seems more like the present spitting on the accomplishments of the past.
Nairobi and health
At one point, Nairobi is shot in the chest, collapsing a lung. She’s shown to have gone pale, her heart is fading, she’s straight up dying. The show plays it like she’s dying, most of an episode is dedicated to it. But she doesn’t. Then a few episodes later she does die, shot in the head by Gandia. Not for any serviceable purpose, but just because he wanted to do it (we’ll get to individual cruelty later).
Look it’s not like someone can’t survive a gunshot wound, but these characters aren’t very well medically trained. They took a few days of trauma and anatomy, and they’re all more like student EMT’s at best. Yet they’re out there doing surgery, cutting parts of lungs, administering anaestheia, and overall conducting a whole operating room in the middle of a heist. The show constantly shows the old TV trope of "take out the bullet/shrapnel and the person is all better", and it never lands. Nairobi surviving the shot isn’t believable, and doesn’t service the plot in any meaningful way.
If she died to the sniper, that would be a strong move by the government, a new piece in the PR battle between robbers and authority. It would have neat implications, it’d be more meat to chew on. But instead it’s a non-event. Realistically, what did Nairobi being shot actually do? Nothing, they fixed her and she was fine. So why do it, aside from fillter?
Palermo has a similar situation with his eye. In the first hour of the heist a shootout between dedicated bodyguards and the crew erupts, and Palermo is blinded by shattered glass (we’ll get back to firing squads in a bit). He refuses Tokyo using tweezers to remove the shard, noting that eye surgery is always done with lasers because it’s so precise and delicate. He needs a real doctor, not some street punk.
Let’s leave aside that this ‘needs a real doctor not a street punk’ thing applies even moreso to Nairobi, who was fucking dying.
The show dramatizes the conflict over his blindness, but in the next episode Helsinki casually puts on magnifying goggles and removes the glass, Palermo is more or less healed. It isn’t an issue for the rest of the show.
Again, what the fuck is this
If you needed a surgeon, why is Helsinki able to do it? Why was it done so casually?
Firing Squads
Throughout the show characters shoot at other characters. Assault teams burst in and have minutes-long firefights with the robbers, and Gandia and his men have a shootout with the crew that starts with both sides facing off pointing guns at each other. Every few episodes there’s a firefight, and nobody gets hurt from it.
When i say "firefight" i mean that characters are dumping lead downrange, and it’s hitting shields or armor or cover (even cover that isn’t cover; like a rack full of cardboard boxes). Nobody ever reloads, everyone is a stormtrooper, and generally none of it has any real weight. The first time makes you doubt, by the third you’re bored.
There’s a few laughable moments where a character raises a gun, and the foley guy puts in the sound of a round being chambered, even though the character is holding a revolver (or otherwise did not visibly move the slide).
Individual Cruelty
The third and fourth seasons have a lot of moments and characters which act in a way that no human being would act. Gandia is probably the biggest offender, being shown to be a complete psychopath who just wants to cause a bloodbath. That’s not an inherently bad character to have, and he’s supposed to be a villain, but instead of being part of his character (which it was never shown to be), it gets written to be his entire character in the fourth season. He venemously calls Nairobi "mutt" (she looks very Persian), and this is supposed to increase how unlikeable he is. But instead it comes off as ignorant writing. That’s not how actual racism presents itself.
There’s uncountable numbers of this kind of thing happening; Palermo calling women names, Arturo roofie-ing and molesting a woman - there’s just a ton of things that characters wouldn’t do, or which don’t happen in reality, which are done for shock value.
How it must have been written
At this point you’ve got a pretty good idea what the show is doing (if anyone ever actually reads this). It has bad writing. I can almost guarantee that it came about because the show wasn’t written before it was being made. If you write a coherent story, you scan back and forth to insert characters, events, motivations, and objectives that lead from one to the next. A good story is one where there’s no fluff, good pacing, and all the events connect to form a neat narrative of people navigating situations imposed by other people.
This show, like most shows by the time they hit a third season, was probably written on the fly. Nairobi is shot by a sniper! But they save her! But she’s shot by Gandia! Why? Because the end wasn’t written by the time they started the beginning. If it was, no competent writer would’ve included both wounds. A firefight that should kill at least half the characters breaks out mid-season, but inexplicably nobody even gets a scratch because all the actors have contracts for the whole season. A trans character is retconned even though none of his flashbacks or purpose make any sense, purely because the writers adhere to a form of sexual Lysenkoism. Drama about what happens to a baby is dropped and the child never mentioned again.
There’s a meme about the last few seasons of Game Of Thrones, darkly making fun of the showrunners responding to an interview question with "we kinda forgot". It’s a good shorthand for when the show has gone on so long without pre-planned material that the writers can’t even remember the plotlines they established in the first place. It applies here, in a smaller way.
Wikipedia
This is definitely the most I’ve written about a show I didn’t even like. But it has been so heavily promoted by Netflix, and its Wikipedia article has dizzying bullshit to explain, like;
While heist films are usually told with a rational male Anglo-centric focus, the series reframes the heist story by giving it a strong Spanish identity and telling it from a female perspective through Tokyo.[...] Emotional dynamics like the passion and impulsivity of friendship and love offset the perfect strategic crime for increased tension
Whoever wrote this seems to be saying that a coherent story and believable series of events is an "Anglo" phenomenon. I guarantee you that was written by a white Westerner.
At one point my fiancee and i played a game called "can you name a character with no romantic relationships?" Which was funny to us mostly because the show seems chiefly concerned with people nonsensically falling in love with each other. There’s enough love triangles to render a scene from the original Quake, and a half dozen characters have more than two active relationships.
Even worse, there’s a quote from one of the writers;
"[Money Heist had] no promotion or anything. Netflix put it in that pile of series that it has, which is like the sock drawer that you never look in and from which only the algorithm can rescue you, and we didn't think it was a big deal."
—Writer Javier Gómez Santander, September 2019
I don’t know the business decisions behind it, I suspect he doesn’t either. But I can absolutely tell you that there was extensive Netflix promotion of this; it hit virtually everyone’s front page when the first season was released globally (I know because I watched a few episodes when that happened, before losing interest). The only reason we saw it was because a friend of my fiancee recommended it; she has dramatically different viewing habits than I do, yet we both got it recommended front-page when it came out. So don’t give this bullshit.
That was long
Look this devolved at the end to "i want to fit in this bullshit because it bothers me", but ultimately this show aggravated me more than I expected. Anytime I force myself to sit through a show to the end, despite it being painfully clear that it will not improve, I resent it quite a lot, and want to bitch to as many people as possible about it. This whole tirade has been an exercise in doing that without bending the ear of those around me.
So don’t watch Money Heist, i guess.
