Summary
“Public Enemy” sees all the secrets come to light at the highly anticipated NONA — with fatal consequences.
This recap of Control Z season 1, episode 8, “Public Enemy”, contains spoilers for the Control Z ending. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Check out our spoiler-free season review.
And here we are, folks — the end of the road. It has been a bumpy ride, and it isn’t quite over yet. Control Z episode 8, the season finale, begins with Sofi and Raul telling Quintanella that Javier was the hacker, using the buried video of his teammate’s death as proof. Quintanilla expels him, though after we learn that Raul was blackmailing him over his affair with Susanna.
All this means that the NONA is back on — which of course means many more developments are due. Raul, for instance, gets his father arrested. Jordi loads Nati up with drugs for the NONA, and after tonight she should have recouped all the money she owes him. We’ll see about that. Gerry, meanwhile, is still guiltily hanging around the hospital; he confesses to Martha that while he loves women he also likes watching men sometimes, and it’s easily his best moment of the season.
Maria, with an admirable sense of timing, tells Pablo that she’s pregnant during the NONA — the NONA that Rosita might have borrowed money to fund. Pablo doesn’t take the news well, obviously. In the way it’s filmed, the NONA very much resembles Raul’s house party in its fascination for drugged-up neon debauchery, but every teen drama needs a couple of big party scenes, I guess. On the subject of great timing, Sofi tells Raul that if Javier is the hacker she wants to be with him. That must sting.
At the hospital, just as Gerry is starting to bond with Martha, Luis goes into cardiac arrest. Gerry looks on helplessly as we see scenes of him fondling a gun and drinking as Pablo tries to reconcile with Isa. The rejection forces Pablo to expose Maria as the honey bunny, but Isa, having put up with enough, doesn’t really care at this point. Luis tragically dies.
Raul confronts Sofi about her feelings for Javier; she insists her feelings for him are stronger, and that he did all this just to get closer to her. Raul, much stupider than he looks, admits he’s the hacker — of course, she already knew, and just wanted him to admit it. Sofi gets smug about putting all the extremely obvious clues together, and we see snippets of how she did so. (Dude literally just left the mask under the bed she was sleeping in. Moron.) Raul’s justification is that everyone’s better off now. Everyone has stopped lying. Nobody has secrets. This is, according to him, exactly what she wanted.
As it turns out, Javier is filming Raul’s confession. He wanted everyone’s secrets to come out, after all, so seeing his own broadcast throughout the NONA should be right up his street. On the roof, Raul and Javier fight. Meanwhile, Gerry, now armed and dangerous, gets a message that Raul is the hacker. Raul staggers downstairs, having been whooped by Javier, and is greeted by a chorus of disgust. On the screen, everyone’s secrets are indeed revealed. The NONA fittingly erupts into chaos with each new revelation.
Outside the NONA, Gerry confronts Raul. He holds the gun under his own chin, trying to make Raul explain what he did, but Javier tries to wrestle the gun away from him and ends up getting shot for his trouble. The camera rises away from him as the students surround his presumably dead body. A tragic ending, then, but very much an ending, which is more than you can say for a lot of Netflix shows.
