Summary
It’s leaden with exposition, but The Innocent episode 4 builds to a big reveal that changes everything we’ve seen thus far.
This recap of The Innocent episode 4 contains spoilers.
As ever, The Innocent episode 4 opens with narration that is pretty dense with important information. It’s from Ibai’s perspective this time, and winds back years, back to Marbella, when he first met Gallardo while working for Aníbal. We also learn what Maria and Kimmy supposedly did — killed a fellow hooker by the name of Candance, and it was her body we saw being dumped out of the boat since part of the job was getting rid of people who threatened Aníbal. But why would Maria have had that flashback right before she died?
Anyway, Ibai is recollecting all this while masturbating in his hotel room right before Mat’s arrival at the end of the previous episode. When Mat arrives, Ibai blindsides him with a taser and then stoves him in with brass knuckles until Olivia intervenes. He locks her in the bedroom, but Zoe starts braying on the door. Ibai calls someone, trying to get instructions from Gallardo, so he mustn’t have killed him. Either way, he flees and Mat gives chase, while Zoe frees Olivia and they both escape themselves, running into the wounded Mat outside.
Lorena, meanwhile, follows Gallardo’s corpse from the scene — where he apparently picked up a prostitute who shot him, which is the official story — to the morgue, where a receipt from the Hyatt points her to the room he had booked into with Olivia and Ibai. Teo and his associate are watching her and immediately obtain a warrant to tap her phone so they know what she’s up to. Thus, they overhear Lorena call Elvira, Gallardo’s widow, and tell her that she doesn’t believe the official story. She’s making a target of herself.
Outside the Hyatt, Zoe is arrested for threatening hotel staff with a firearm, and Olivia rides with Mat in the ambulance — they pass Lorena as she arrives. She’s given the names of Mat, Zoe, and Olivia, but obviously can’t piece the story together for now. While Lorena goes over the scene, Olivia throws off the cops questioning Mat by claiming she was having an affair with a man whose name she didn’t know, and Mat was there because he found out about it. She also gets a message telling her to meet someone in Marbella, which incidentally seems to be where Gallardo took police files home from the station and hid them in a locked desk drawer that Lorena tasks Elvira with getting the key for. Teo and his associate, Bruno, are listening in on all this. Looks like we’re going to Marbella.
Before that, though, Ibai is found dead in an underpass, shot through the hand and the face. Lorena calls the cops who were sent to question Mat, but they’ve already left his side. She instructs them to find him as he tries to get some information out of Olivia. She insists it’s “a long story” and she “doesn’t know where to start”, but she says that Ibai and Gallardo must have taken the videos of her when she was sleeping. As soon as Gallardo and Ibai’s deaths make the news, she insists they leave, just as the cops are closing in on them. They’re able to escape in a laundry trolley.
Meanwhile, Lorena interviews Zoe, laying out all of the evidence and connections she has accumulated thus far — it doesn’t paint Mat in a favorable light, to say the least, but it’s obvious Zoe wasn’t complicit in anything beyond what Lorena already knows about. Crespo also confirms that Gallardo was killed with his own gun, by someone he knew well enough to let inside his car, and Ibai was killed with the same weapon. There’s a partial print on the trigger but it’s so damaged that it’ll be a “miracle” if they can reconstruct it. Teo and Bruno (Oriol Vila) arrive to extend Lorena the “professional courtesy” of telling her to stop looking into the death of Sister Maria, but she’s not having that and is pretty up-front about having put plenty of the pieces together already.
It’s time for a hefty exposition dump in The Innocent episode 4, as Teo gives Lorena a run-down of the backstory in all this. We obviously already knew about Maria’s background as Aníbal’s girlfriend at the brothel. Ibai was the bouncer there. Again, this is all very Sky Rojo, with Aníbal meticulously auditioning talent and keeping the girls’ passports locked away so they couldn’t leave. Aníbal had also recently started a new side business that guaranteed complete anonymity to those who participated. All their faces were covered and they were identifiable only by numbers, but Aníbal kept records of their true identities. This operation he entrusted to his “crown jewels” — Lavanda, who didn’t last long, went missing, and was replaced by Cassandra, one of the brothel’s new girls. Kimmy was another, and she not only lasted until the end but gave the SCU the most information when the case blew up. Candance Russo was the final jewel, and it was her murder that exposed the operation. The operation, by the way, was anonymous orgies with girls guaranteed to be underage — Candance, Kimmy, and Cassandra supervised them. Participants — most of whom were influential men who could destabilize the country if word ever got out — paid a heavy fee to participate and then were blackmailed by Aníbal after the fact. At the time, Teo was working undercover to bring the ring down from the inside and offered Emma a deal in order to flip her, but at this point, so he says, things got confusing.
The following is just speculation, but Teo assumes that Emma told Aníbal about the deal, and the two of them planned to do a runner with the cash. Candance found out, and Aníbal killed her, an act that was witnessed by Cassandra, who disappeared that night but was never heard from again. Aníbal and Emma disappeared too, with the tapes proving who was involved. Gallardo was the officer investigating the case, and Kimmy revealed the existence of the tapes. Now, Teo believes they’re in Emma’s safety deposit box, but it requires two keys to open it, and Teo suspects that Aníbal has the other. Lorena gives them Mat’s name and briefly explains his connection just as an officer arrives to tell her they have a warrant to search him and Olivia’s home.
Mat and Olivia hide out at Mara’s place, which is empty (Olivia keeps coughing and spluttering for some reason that I’m sure will become important), while Lorena investigates their house. She also gets a call from Elvira telling her that Gallardo’s locked drawer contained Candance’s autopsy report, of which she sends over pictures. When Lorena tells Teo about this, he says there’s somebody that could help them, someone named Mr. Otis Friedman (Frank Feys), whose house is like a weird sex museum. He explains that Candance had AIS, androgen insensitivity syndrome. She had XY chromosomes — she was partially a man. She had a vagina but couldn’t menstruate or have children, which would have made her extremely coveted by a brothel’s clientele, for obvious reasons. Otis describes Candance’s unique talents, and an “unforgettable act” she had with Kimmy. While he digs around for a photo of this act, Mat pushes Olivia to tell him what she knows about Sister Maria, since she knows she was the one who called her from Mara’s landline. It becomes pretty obvious where this is going, but The Innocent episode 4 rightly treats it as a big reveal anyway. When Lorena sees the photograph of the act, of Kimmy and Candance without their masks, she realizes straight away that Candance is Olivia Costa.
