Summary
The hacker’s actions already have near-fatal consequences in “Idiots”, as tensions boil over into violence.
This recap of Control Z season 1, episode 3, “Idiots “, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Check out our spoiler-free season review.
Sofi, perhaps understandably, doesn’t like the idea that her mother is getting married to the school principal. But her mother seemingly quite likes the idea of her being with Javier, whom she meets in the parking lot (his car has been keyed) and immediately invites over to study. Bet the lad thinks he’s cracked it.
Here’s who hasn’t cracked it: Pablo. He’s still begging Isa for forgiveness but she doesn’t want to know. Good on her. He also continues to creepily stare at her around the school, so not good on him. Not good on Gerry, either, who continues to be utterly insufferable, attempting to steal Alex’s phone, but he’s immediately shut down by Javier. A typical bully.
Control Z episode 3 continues the thread of Sofi going back and forth with the hacker, but her phone is quickly confiscated. Nati, meanwhile, is selling all her designer phone cases to try and recoup some of the NONA money, although of course she pretends it’s for an eye-opening trip to Japan. She also attempts to tap Raul, now sporting a tasteful black eye, for a loan, but he’s having none of it.
Sofi’s investigation, then, has to proceed without the mobile phone — probably a good thing. She visits Luis’s mother Martha at home, but he isn’t there, which is probably just as well since Gerry and his goons are trying to hunt him down. Javier is in hot pursuit. Sofi finds Luis out with his dog and asks him why he pretended to be the hacker. We know why obviously — he was just trying to be left alone. She gives him the sage wisdom that they’ll all back down once they know he isn’t afraid, which would be true if Luis could actually defend himself. We see he can’t in Control Z season 1, episode 3, as Gerry and his titular idiots pull up and chase him down the street. Luis cradling his dog and sprinting is played for laughs more than anything, but he’s able to get away when Javier plows his Audi directly into a wall.
Sofi finds this hilarious — she even spooks Javier’s dad when he calls and asks her if he’d like her to get she and her dad tickets to a football game. “He’s dead.” Awkward. It probably bodes well for these two’s relationship that they’ve both kind of met each other’s parents already.
Perhaps Sofi doesn’t have as much to laugh about as it seems, though. On multiple occasions, Control Z episode 3 cuts back to a conversation she’s having with a man in a bar, and he’s pretty upfront that if whatever the hacker is threatening to expose gets out, he’ll go to prison. She promises she’s going to find the guy before any information is disseminated, but this is the first confirmation we’ve had that Sofi really does have something serious to hide.
The hacker’s next plot is a clever one: A Facebook group ostensibly created by Luis claims that he’s going to beat up Gerry. As a preventative measure the latter is put into isolation. While this is going on Sofi retrieves her phone from Lulu, who apparently has deductive powers of her own, since she figures out that Sofi not tying one of her shoes or brushing her hair means she’s in love with someone? I mean, whatever. If you say so.
As the crowds gather to see the fight, Alex inexplicably lets Gerry out of isolation so he can confront Luis, who has arrived, quite clearly reading from an insulting script prepared for him by the hacker. It all kicks off in rather embarrassing shaky-cam fashion. Nati accidentally punches Raul, someone else hits Quintanilla, and so on, and so forth. Eventually Gerry gets his hands on Luis and starts to beat him up pretty bad. Sofi — while pocketing his phone — tries to help him with Javier, but their escape attempt is thwarted. Gerry, landing a clean uppercut on Luis as he flees, lays him flat; as he lands, the back of head cracks against the curb. He ends up in a coma.
Sofi uses Luis’s comatose thumb to unlock his phone, on which she finds an explanatory video confessing that he never hacked anyone. He just didn’t know what he could do. She’s going to put it where everyone can see it, so they know it wasn’t him.
When Raul returns home at the end of the episode, he finds his parents gone, leaving nothing but a note and some scattered clothes behind. In the safe, he finds bricks of cash. “Idiots” ends with Sofi visiting her older dominoes friends, and discovering that her interlocutor throughout the episode has gone away for a while. She gets a message from the hacker asking if she’s ready to meet.
