Summary
“Control Z” goes a semester back in time to expain the origins and motivations of the elusive hacker.
This recap of Control Z season 1, episode 7, “Control Z”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Check out our spoiler-free season review.
Flashbacks! Control Z episode 7 opens in the past, with Raul inviting Pablo, Isa, Nati, and Gerry around to his house to “study”. Once there, they unlock his father’s secret room of ill-gotten gains and take a bunch of pictures with the stuff. He catches them and throws them out, but Raul quickly starts getting blackmailed from a mysterious number, and whoever it is demands money in exchange for not releasing the pictures. He dumps the ransom in a trash can. We also get a glimpse of a much more unstable Sofi cutting her wrists in class.
On the school’s glass roof (there again!) Sofi and Raul talk; she explains how she feels tired, and that wouldn’t life be much better if everyone just stopped lying and living pretend lives? She’s got a point. Through the glass, Raul sees his ransom get picked up by Bruno. When Raul confronts him, though, he seems more interested in whether or not he can hack other people’s phones. Before you know it, Raul is all up in Sofi’s mobile business.
Sofi’s flashbacks about her father get some additional context here, as Raul snaps Sofia at the graveyard with her apparently dad father; after, we see the students discuss her having been sectioned after a breakdown. So, her dad faked his own death in a fire? I think that’s what we’re supposed to be getting from all this. Raul goes to see her in the psychiatric institution, but he’s thrown out before he can speak with her.
As the other students continue to speculate about what happened to Sofi and why, we see Raul become gradually more obsessed with her wellbeing, hanging around outside her house and frantically sketching in a notebook (there’s even a cameo appearance from the goggle-eyed drawing that led to the roof at Raul’s party.) This is obviously the genesis of the present-day hack, the formation of Raul’s crazy alter-ego. When Sofi returns to school, Raul asks how she is — quite genuinely, it seems. She’s less than reciprocal.
Control Z season 1, episode 7 shows Raul creating the @allyoursecrets account with Bruno, harvesting information on his own friends, and preparing to disseminate it. We return to that fateful presentation day when Isa’s secret was revealed with this additional context; we also see Raul key Javier’s car. Raul constantly defends Sofi to Bruno; he’s dangerously in love with her. We also see Raul confront Fernando, letting him know that he knows, which evidently persuaded him to leave. We see him blackmail Alex into letting Gerry out during the fight with Luis. We revisit the fight from his perspective, see him messaging Luis instructions on what to say. We return to Raul’s party and see him change into the mask to kidnap Sofi. Bruno puts it best: “Weird way to flirt with a girl, dude.” We also see Raul set up Javier and free Bruno at his apartment.
We finally catch back up to the present day, with Raul and Sofi in bed together. He tells her he’ll always be here. That’s one way of putting it.
