Summary
A long-held truce is broken, and fathers make decisions for their children in White Lines Episode 4.
This recap of White Lines season 1, episode 4, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Check out our spoiler-free season review.
So, it turns out Oriol strapping Cristobal to a wall of speakers and deafening him wasn’t just a cruel move, but also a stupid one. In so doing he has broken a family truce that has withstood for 20 years — perhaps not entirely coincidentally the amount of time that has elapsed since Axel Collins’ death. Pepe Martinez believes in an eye for an eye, but the decision of whether he plans to gouge out Oriol’s or Andreu’s isn’t immediately clear. Perhaps both, though Oriol quite literally seeks protection in the bosom of his mother, Conchita, and perhaps the less said about their relationship the better.
Zoe, on the other hand, starts White Lines Episode 4 in the best position she’s been in for a while. After confessing to the police, they can’t hold her in custody, and Marcus and his children are being protected. This gives Zoe plenty of time to go through Axel’s autopsy report. She doesn’t want Boxer to read it since he’s head of security for a family that might have had something to do with her brother’s death, and by the same logic, they can’t be on the same team, which Boxer doesn’t take well. He gets believably menacing here, which is much easier for him to do since we saw how casually he killed and disposed of two men, and throws Zoe out of his place.
Zoe runs into Kika on her way out of the club and asks her some more questions about Axel. Kika says that her parents couldn’t stand that he loved her, which hardly narrows down the suspects. Such a thing would only be a minor problem for the Calafats given what they’ve got on these days — Andreu goes ballistic at Oriol for breaking the truce as if to underscore the point.
Kika convinces Zoe to get sloshed and turn up a bit, but they’re interrupted by the news that Boxer hasn’t come down. We return briefly to their argument, to Boxer smashing the place up after Zoe tells him that she’s confessed to the police. She goes up to see him and they reconcile. He offers her the bed and takes the couch, and mentions that he thinks he knows why there were peacock feathers in Axel’s lungs, which was revealed in his autopsy report. It means he was killed at his lavish birthday party, which was attended by peacocks, among other things. And one of those attendees must have killed him.
Conchita, meanwhile, goes to see Pepe and tells him that Andreu forced Oriol to go after Cristobal. It’s essentially a death sentence, as we’ll see. But before that, we’re treated to a nice day out at the beach, as Zoe joins Kika and Sissy for some sunbathing and paddling and visions of her brother’s mummified face. Yikes. Still, we get some needed characterization here. Zoe questions Kika about how she and Axel met, and she recounts having first seen him flirting with her mother and fondling Mozart. She turns the same question back on Zoe, about Mike, and we learn that he worked at the psychiatric facility where she wound up after trying to commit suicide by throwing herself out of a window. She has been with him for sixteen years, which Kika and Sissy think is prudish. Zoe staves off those accusations by revealing how she took ecstasy and attended illegal raves at 15. She lived faster and harder than was advisable and paid for it by not being emotionally mature enough to deal with Axel’s loss. The conversation is interrupted by Zoe’s father, who has arrived in Ibiza.
White Lines Episode 4 checks in briefly on Marcus, who confesses his situation to Anna. She offers to come and stay with him for a couple of weeks while George is away with work — a promising development, and I hope they work it out, since I can’t help but feel that the scene with George earlier in the season was only included to make us wish Marcus and Anna back together. Time will tell, obviously, but that seems to be the direction we’re heading in.
Oriol, meanwhile, goes to see David, since he’s in major need of a cleansing trip. David can provide one so life-altering that Oriol needs to sign a waiver absolving David of responsibility for it, but he’s so eager to get off his bonce that he agrees. After waking up with frogs all over his face, Oriol’s visions lead him to Axel. He asks him who killed him, but Axel won’t say. He’s with Conchita, almost tauntingly, which kind of confirms what Cristobal said in the previous episode. Oriol even asks if he was the one to do it since he can’t remember. From the audience’s point of view, nothing is any clearer.
Andreu receives a summons to test his suitability to run the company. He confronts Conchita about this and says he is retiring and leaving everything to her — she has won. It doesn’t bode well for either of them, really. Zoe’s father also arrives, not in the best of moods, and as though his meddling wasn’t enough, Kika reveals to Zoe that Axel went to Ibiza in the first place because his dad kicked him out. A flashback confirms this and paints Zoe’s father as a particularly nasty piece of work; when she asks him to leave, you can’t help but be on her side.
A call from the police informing her that they have found the traffickers’ ship gets Zoe panicking, and she goes to see Boxer, believing the Romanians are coming for them. He reveals that he killed them, which causes Zoe to have a minor breakdown. He helps her through it with marijuana and lays her down to sleep, but when he returns to the room, she’s gone. In this episode’s conversations with Joanna, they discussed Zoe claiming to want white lines around her life, but Joanna believes she’s going to cross red lines in trying to live the life she always wanted to. Perhaps that’s exactly what she’s doing now.
White Lines Season 1, Episode 4 has a last-minute note of tragedy, as Andreu is T-boned by a truck after having been suspiciously stopped on the highway.
