9x01 Las triquiñuelas del mal [Evil's little tricks]

At the precinct, Paco does the introductory speech, talking about illusions. He is dressed up as Father Christmas, it’s Christmas eve, and is talking to kids, taking their letters. In off, he says that illusion is what you build up after you have lost everything. He has a very powerful line “Life is gonna have to be much more of a motherfucker to bring me down”. Curtis gets a phone call – a woman has blood leaking in her house.

Intro bit.

Genoa, 24th December 2009

Comment: Ew, ew, ew!! Pepa licking an old man!

Mafia man: [In Italian] Mario, I can’t give you the harbour. I told you that if you help me, I help you, but if you think that I’m gonna be taken for a ride, you’re badly mistaken. What sort of respect should I expect from my sons if I leave a random foreigner take something that one day might be theirs? It’ll be like that, just like that. Whenever you want.

Darkness in a room. The newbies are doing a practice. At the lab, Dr. Asshole Decker is throwing away Silvia’s stuff [BLASPHEMY!!!!]. DL walks livid at what he sees. Decker says “What happened to Doctor Castro? Did she died buried by an avalanche of papers when she opened her closet?” [DOUBLE BLASPHEMY!!!]. DL is about to kill him but only says that “Doctor Castro died of a bullet wound on her wedding day”. Then DL fires him.  Haha! Reyes walks in and says no one is getting fired. The newbies find blonde newbie lying on the floor. Moron newbie tries to do CPR on her and ends up snogging her... Povedilla ain’t happy! Pove is completely un-Pove, really strict with them. Take that!

Paco et al go to the flat to investigate the leaking blood. Rita asks Paco if he knows where Pepa is, but he doesn’t. And then we’re back to Genoa, where Pepa is ew ew ew on top of the mafia man, topless.  She has pussy red nail polish.  She dips her pussy red painted finger into one of the champagne glasses on the side table.  Apparently, pussy red nail polish is also a good laxative.

Mafia man: My stomach... [runs for the toilet] Excuse me...

While Mafia man is doing #2, Pepa goes through his mobile. In the meantime, she gets a call from Paco.

Answer machine: This is Pepa Miranda’s voicemail. Leave your message.

Paco: Pepa, it’s me, your brother... I just wanted to know how you doing. It’s been six months without h... But that’s not what I wanted to say. If you’re around, I’d like you to come home for dinner. A kiss, sister, and merry Christmas!

The guy is back... But needs to run to the toilet again. He throws a bunch of 500 euro notes and goes.

Mafia man: I’m sorry.

Paco et al enter the flat and find a dead guy with his heart in one hand, his head nailed to the throne, bird bones all around, blood, candles... Really creepy scene.  Aitor walks into the precinct and starts flirting over the phone with Reyes. He goes to meet her. DL is spying from outside pondering the changes she's implementing. Povedilla tells him that their authority is decreasing. DL tells him to be more strict with the newbies. Aitor tells Reyes he is not going to take a leave from work, even if he has been doing far too many shifts, and keeps flirting with her. DL walks in and they argue big time. Reyes is strong but she’s under far too much pressure.  At the crime scene, Deker is describing the details – heart being ripped off, hypothalamus eaten, blah blah.  The newbies are at the locker room talking amongst themselves. Dani and Lis have slept together, but she doesn’t want a relationship with him. I think it’s far too much info for me.

Paco invites Mariano to Christmas Eve dinner, but he refuses. They argue. Mariano tells Paco how he betrayed him when he went to negotiate with the mafia, because Paco stayed inside per Salgado's order. Mariano challenges Paco: whoever solves the case gets to stay in San Antonio, and the other should leave.

Povedilla walks into the changing room and scolds Dani for taking Quique’s locker. Dani is too cocky and challenges Pove, but he orders him to count all the bullets in the shooting gallery that night. Good move, jackass!

Pepa is sitting in a car somewhere in Italy. She phones someone.

Aitor: Pepa!

Pepa: Hi Aitor, I’m glad to hear your voice. Where are you?

Aitor: Where else could I be? In San Antonio... Is Christmas Eve, huh?

Pepa: That’s true. Merry Christmas.

Aitor: Merry Christmas. Where are you?

Pepa: Let’s see, Aitor. I need you to go to the precinct and get me an arsenal list, an automatic rifle, two Beretta [Italian gun] and 20 pistol magazines. I also need 300 g of C4 and a Rooney detonator.

Aitor: What the fuck are you asking me, Pepa?

Pepa: You rent a car and drive to the border, cross La Jonquera, from there you take the motorway until Nice and when you get to Italy and pass by San Remo, you’re going to find a small town called Garessio. At 120 – 140 km/h, I estimate you will be here tomorrow morning, so I will be waiting for you at Piazza Farnese for breakfast.

Aitor: See, Pepa, listen to me, listen, I’m not going, you hear me? I’m not fucking going to La Jonquera or round the corner. Why don’t you call your brother, and ask him that favour? And in the meantime you tell him you’re alive.

Pepa: Because I can only ask this to you. This is a favour from a fucking crazy boy to a fucking crazy girl. I’m really looking forward to seeing you, ciao.

At Paco’s, Paco tells DL to dress up so they can have Christmas dinner. DL is really bitter. At the lab, Mariano walks in to spend Christmas Eve with Deker and the victim's cadaver. Aitor steals Pepa's arsenal request and calls Reyes to cancel dinner. Rita is at Confecciones Puri. Pepa is having pasta in her car. Dani is counting the bullets. Then the newbies enter the shooting gallery and offer him a Christmas Eve picnic. Povedilla enters Confecciones Puri and tells Rita he was feeling lonely. She says she’s just watching TV. Curtis opens the door of the van.

Curtis: Is it here the party of the homeless?

Rita: Now we’re all here, the whole crib.

Curtis: Rosendo doesn’t know it’s Christmas. And this year the redhead fag [referring to Quique affectionately] failed me, I needed some background singers to sing Christmas carols. To us [they toast] and to those who aren’t here.

Deker is slicing the cadaver and finds an egg inside. Huh? Lis is getting some presents and decorations from the precinct when she runs to hide in the elevator and finds Aitor – and they flirt. Blugh blugh.  DL, Salgado and Paco are having Christmas dinner. DL is still very bitter. He gets a call from Mariano and tells him to fuck off. Salgado proposes to help them with the investigation, but DL jokes bitterly about the CNI handing out ID cards instead of doing proper intelligence duties.

Paco: Well, come on, let’s toast. It’s Christmas after all. And then we open the presents, okay?

DL: Fuck’s sake, Paco. Let it go, so many damn toasts. Enough is enough! Do you see any of my daughters here? My granddaughter? Your sister? Or Montoya cutting the turrón...? Can you see him? No, right?

Paco: What are you trying to say? That tonight you’re feeling lonelier than any other fucking night of the year? Is that it? Because I’ve lost exactly the same people as you. The same. And I am here, trying to smile for Christmas, and do you know why? Because it’s much more difficult to live happily than to live bitterly.

DL: My daughter died in my arms on her wedding day. Excuse me, but I think I have the right to live bitterly for a bit, no?

Paco: You have never tried to be a happy man. Never.

[Knock on door]

Curtis: Hey, Don Lorenzo, we were just outside having a toast in memory of the absent, and we thought “What the hell!? Let’s toast with the present ones!”

Povedilla: And we brought you that anisette you like.

Rita: And we thought that maybe that way the night goes by faster for everyone. What do you think? What do you say? You join us?

DL: Oh, I don’t know, we're rather bummed out here, right Paco? Come on, keep up the spirits, let’s have a drink, come on in. Come in. Let’s have a drink.

Curtis: Merry Christmas!

Everyone: Merry Christmas!

DL: Let’s see, Paco. Cut the turrón! And serve that Fray Angelico cool, as it has to be! And who is this cute guy? What does he drink?

Curtis: Like its owner, Anís del Mono.

DL: The truth is you do resemble each other, I’m sorry.

Paco: I only have soft turrón.

Deker goes to the dummy dolls room and projects the painting on the ceiling. Reyes walks in and asks him about it. Apparently, the killer put them all there with blood. In the meantime, the creature from the egg has disappeared.  Legendary LHDP vintage moment with all the oldies singing a Christmas carol (Adeste Fidelis).  Mariano is outside looking in. They’re about to take a group photo when Paco has an epiphany abou the crime scene  – a guy who’s not a cop was there taking pictures. Dinner is over and they’ll be working in 3 hours. The old patrol gets to the precinct and sees Deker and Reyes trying to work on the case. I think DL will never finish his long list of insults towards Deker.

Aitor finds badass Pepa on the square.

Aitor: I’d never been to Italy before, you know? It’s nice, isn’t it? How are you?

Pepa: Better now. Italy reminds me of a poem they made me learn at school.

Aitor: Really? Which one?

Pepa: Hum?

Aitor: What poem?

Pepa: It was a smiling garden,

It was a still crystal fountain,

It was, lying at the edge, an immaculate rose of a rosebush.

Aitor: Meh, I can only remember “Ten cannons on each side...”

Pepa: A hundred, there were a hundred cannons.

Aitor: Pepa, can you tell me what the hell are we doing here reciting poetry?

Pepa: I know where El Gordo is.

At the briefing room, everyone’s sitting at the table and they’re given assignments regarding the creepy case. He burned the victims heart, put an egg up his colon, got bones of birds hanging from the ceiling! Mariano is in the toilet when a tiny white snake shows up, so he brings it to DL. When they have all left, DL and Reyes ask each other what’s the key to the case. They both write it in post-it notes and pass them to each other. They agree: the position of the victim.

In the shooting gallery, Dani [blugh!] and Lis [double blugh!] wake up next to each other. Goth girl argues “If you guys had sex and it went well, why can’t you go on doing it?”. Goyo walks in and alerts them that the whole staff is on duty. The newbies appear as if nothing’s wrong and Dani presents the bullet count. They all get some homework.

Aitor: How the fuck did you get all these documents? Pepa, all of them, don’t know if you can see it, are marked as classified by the Anti-Mafia Prosecutor.

Pepa: I know.

Aitor: You know.

Pepa: That was not the hard part. I delayed handing the Bravante report to the judge. Plus I got hold of Bolucci’s mobile phone. In it, I found messages in which he was going to meet Isabella Giardelli, I followed...

Aitor: Listen to me! I don’t want you to tell me anything else, you got it? I don’t want to be involved in this, this is fucking madness!

Pepa: Aitor, Aitor, please don’t go.

Aitor: Why did you call me? Why did you make me get the fucking arsenal and you don’t tell any of this to the Carabinieri? What for, Pepa?

Pepa: So you can help me arrest El Gordo. Aitor, we have to arrest El Gordo and take him to Spain.

At the precinct, it’s working-your-wee-socks-off time.

Pepa: This is Italy, don’t you understand? If El Gordo goes to court here, he’ll be back in the streets in two days, don’t you get it? Please.

Aitor: Who is Isabella Giardelli?

Pepa: She is the person Bolucci phoned more times in the last four months. I tracked her down, and she turned out to be an adorable 75-year-old, apparently not related to him. No criminal record. With nothing better to do than going from her house to the market, and from the market to her house. Then I thought about the pizzini. They’re handwritten pieces of paper that the mafia members use to communicate with each other when they’re in hiding. No phones, no Internet. The pizzini go from hand to hand until they reach their destination. A man walks from his house and passes the paper to a barber or a peasant or an adorable lady who’s out at the market... and that’s how Isabella took me to El Gordo. He’s 40 km from here.

So off they go.

The victim was a total altruist, the hypothalamus is the region of the brain where the soul is located and they have videos of two ATM machines to find the photographer. DL sees the newbies and is not happy. Povedilla asks to talk to him.

Povedilla: Why are you doing this to me, Don Lorenzo? Why are you making me insult, harass and treat those boys badly? Don Lorenzo, we’re not like that. We’re very welcoming people.

DL: Do you know why I’m doing this? Because I want elite agents. People who stick to the rules no matter what. I don’t want a gang of pilgrims who would go out covering themselves with 16^th century shields in the middle of crossed fire. I don’t want any heroes. I don’t want idiots who would hide the fact that they’ve been shot three times in the stomach. That’s why I’m doing that. Because if someone with some brains would have teach them some rules and some common sense, they’d be alive today. The back-up took 6 minutes to get there. There was no need for shields. And we could have saved Montoya’s life if one hour earlier we had covered his wounds.

Povedilla: You’re being really unfair, Don Lorenzo. I was up there, you remember? And up there we didn’t know who, when... not even if any back-up was going to come. Do you know why Montoya didn’t say anything about his wounds? You know why he stood and covered a window? Because he thought we were all going to die.

DL: Because he was an idiot!! I don’t want to have four dead on my desk again, just because some morons think that crossed fire is a child’s game. Only one person should have died that day. My daughter. So I’m not only asking you to train them, I’m asking you to teach them how to save their lives in these situations. Only us who have survived that hell are capable of teaching it.

Deker and gothic girl are looking at the blood stains – she’s intelligent enough to give him the idea to solve it.  Back in Italy, Aitor and Pepa reach the house where El Gordo might be.

Aitor: There’s no one here, Pepa. Dunno, he might have left, that’s it.

Pepa: No, he’s right there, all alone. Watched over by a peasant, a farmer and a shepherd. But he’s there.

At the precinct, they’re all working still. Lis takes some books to Reyes’s office and sees that she’s got Aitor’s file on her desk. This is when we find out that Lis and Reyes are daughter and mother. Curtis, Rita and Paco find the address of the creepy photographer. Mariano finds the address of the guy who bought the snake egg. Reyes finds the painting associated with the position of the victim.  Pepa and Aitor are getting ready to go all Rambo.

Pepa: Let’s go. Once we get in, we only have 6 minutes until the entire mafia shows up.

Aitor: That’s long enough for me. We get him and we get the hell out of here, I want to be home early so I can open some presents, eh, Pepa? Pepa! All right?

Pepa: Let’s go.

Deker, DL and Reyes are in the briefing room, solving the enigma. The victim’s position represented “charity”. The blood stains represent a constellation, the egg is “the son”. This is a bit too ridiculous. In Italy, Now, in a rush, Pepa and Aitor blow up the door where El Gordo is hiding and Paco, Curtis and Rita find the creepy photographer in his house, who turns out to be a priest telling them that evil is coming to earth. How sweet.  Aitor and Pepa got into the house,

Aitor: Freeze, Police Force!

Aitor: That’s it, that’s it, let’s go!

Pepa: Do not move!

Aitor: Pepa, you get him and we go, that OK?

El Gordo: I was waiting for you.

And then we get tons of Silvia flashbacks and Pepa crying and blood and 104 crap and Pepa is just about to explode and... Well, she shoots El Gordo in the forehead. And she runs away.

Aitor: Pepa, Pepa, come here, fuck! Pepa!! What the fuck did you just do, you motherfucker? You killed a dude, you hear me? You executed him, Pepa. Come here, come here. I stole those weapons, you have made me the responsible of a manslaughter, you motherfucker! You screwed my life, you hear me? You killed him in cold blood. Pepa!!

Pepa kicks Aitor’s ass, btw. And cries bitterly in despair.

Pepa: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Aitor... I’m sorry... He killed her... He killed her right in front of me... I know... I know this doesn’t solve anything, but I couldn’t live with it.

Aitor: Calm down, Pepa, calm down. We gotta go, Pepa.

The new soundtrack is sung by the new band. The newbies are all in a bar. Deker leaves the briefing room saying that the murderer still has 6 other victims to go. DL looks at him puzzled. Deker argues that they don’t have a list of “virtuous men”, so the only thing they can do is wait for the next crime.

Pepa and Aitor get the hell out of the Italian countryside as two countrymen are approaching the crime scene. Mariano gets to the scene of the crime and is blinded by white lights. And that’s the episode over.

Next week!

Pepa back in San Antonio! And also saying “I’ll blow up your brains if you make another move” to some random man. Oh yeah, the badass is back in town!

Piper's Commentary:
Pepa had a mission, and that's to avenge Silvia's death.  Okay, I can buy that. But killing El Gordo? After the depth of love she gave to and received from Silvia?  That, I don't buy.  Love is life-giving.  I will share a personal story to illustrate my point: before my mother died, I was one daredevil who flipped life in its face all the time.  But after my mother died, I changed. Life became more precious.  Suicide was no longer an option.  That is the paradox of love and death.  So I do not buy the premise of Pepa killing someone for Silvia, because she knew in her heart that Silvia would not like that.  I know I don't talk much about love, not because I don't believe in it, but because words fail me.  When someone loves you for a long, long time, you don't easily forget what that love meant.  You don't go around killing people.


Pepa loved and was loved.  She would have risen beyond the anger. But this is LHDP, and this is version 66.6. If God is Love, then evil is the absence of Love. 

Partial list of episode rip-offs:

Various horror films

La Femme Nikita
House / Crossing Jordan