The Mess You Leave Behind episode 8 recap – the ending explained

This recap of The Mess You Leave Behind episode 8 contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.

Check out our spoiler-free season review.

Despite a brief opener set in the past showing Iago begging Viruca to let him inside, the annoyingly same-titled finale of The Mess You Leave Behind at least has the decency to not drag out Raquel’s suspicions of Mauro. She wakes up in his bed, notices the bite marks on his arm, and is on him immediately, leading to a pretty meaty explanatory information dump that I’ll paraphrase here.

So, yes, Mauro was in Raquel’s house looking for Viruca’s phone, and yes, he killed the dog to defend himself – the scumbag! – but he’s adamant he didn’t kill Viruca. See, he and his wife had a grift going, playing up their marital strife to try and ensnare Tomas, hopefully accumulating enough damning evidence of wrongdoing to blackmail him into being generous with his dough. Mauro was so desperate to find Viruca’s phone because he believes such evidence is on there, but Raquel tells him that after her thorough examination it doesn’t seem to be.

Of course, we know the evidence is out there since we see Iago showing it to Tomas, though when Raquel later meets with him and offers to help him, he tells her no-one can. That may be true with the justice system being what it is, and everyone in town being so willingly blind to obvious illegality, and the fact that both Raquel and Viruca in separate timelines decide against going to the police, but nevertheless Raquel hands Viruca’s phone over to Concha at the bar for safekeeping.

In the meantime, Raquel puts a couple of rather convenient details together and uses her ingenuity to use the unknown number in Viruca’s phone as GPS coordinates which lead her to a hidden hard drive. She takes the offending item home, but before she can have a look at what’s on it, Gabriel arrives with bad news – German has tried to commit suicide in his cell! Raquel hurries into the car, and Gabriel promptly locks the doors, explaining how she can’t see what’s on that drive and he is doing this to protect her, to give her a way out. The same thing, we see, happened to Viruca, only she was bundled into Tomas’s car, creating an obvious culprit connection between them. Gabriel, of all people! I don’t even think I’ve had cause to mention him in the recaps until now.

Anyway, Gabriel takes Raquel to Tomas and Iago, and she’s tied to a chair to be drugged, her death made to look like suicide – again, exactly what happened to Viruca. She’s bundled into the trunk of a car and taken out into the woods, where despite the drugs and the trauma she’s able to break free through sheer force of will. A chase ensues, and Gabriel and Tomas pursue Raquel while Iago drives the car into a tree. In a very fortunate coincidence, Raquel runs into a couple of people in the woods carrying shotguns, and they use them to shoo Gabriel and Tomas away until Raquel collapses.

That’s… well, that’s kind of it, really. Paramedics arrive to take Raquel and Iago away. Tomas and Gabriel are arrested. Three days later, Raquel awakens with Tere and German, and we learn that Iago confessed to what was on the hard drive – proof that, since a child, Iago has been prostituted out to various men. That’s quite an out of nowhere development, all things considered, and I’m not sure it really works in the context of everything that has happened until this point. I certainly didn’t predict it, and in retrospect, there was a decent amount of set-up for it, but still – I’m not keen.

In other good news, Roi is fine. Predictably it was Iago who beat him, but slightly less predictably it was German who took him to the hospital and dumped him there. Raquel and Mauro don’t manage to patch things up, and it seems like she and German don’t stay together either. The final scene of the season occurs six months later, with Raquel having quit teaching to become a writer, and German calling to tell her how pleased she is with what she’s doing. He misses her, but he’s starting to get used to it. A happy ending of a kind, then. I guess I’d just have preferred a better one.

Thanks for reading our recap of The Mess You Leave Behind episode 8.