Summary
Old alliances crumble, secrets are revealed, and the body count mounts in the penultimate episode of The Longest Night.
This recap of The Longest Night season 1, episode 5 contains spoilers.
This penultimate episode doesn’t waste much time in revealing how Cherokee — and indeed the prison doctor — know Sara, the woman who was working with Ruso who Willy and Elisa captured and brought back to the group. She’s a former inmate, a genius mathlete who killed her parents but was nonetheless released. She’s obviously being strongarmed into using her expertise to break Simon out, but the backstory is thin on the ground in the early going.
The Longest Night season 1, episode 5 recap
But there’s presumably more that has gone on behind the scenes than we know about. Manuela, at Emma’s urging, tells Cherokee something in private, and he subsequently holds the prison doctor at gunpoint and hauls him away for a private chat, taking Manuela and Sara with him. When he sits the good doctor down, Manuela reveals that he sexually assaulted her multiple times in exchange for finagling her work release. Elisa is listening through the door and pushes Manuela to reveal the presence of Emma. Somewhat confusingly, Cherokee is shocked to learn that Manuela has an identity disorder, which you’d think would have been relatively obvious.
Cherokee sits Manuela down and essentially interrogates her about Emma, and about whether or not her claims about Espada are true. He eventually believes her, returns to point a gun at Espada and gets the doctor to confess. The confession is obviously coerced, but Cherokee allows everyone to believe that he kills Espada, with only him and the audience knowing that the doctor remains alive.
Elsewhere, the mind games really begin in earnest in this chapter. A captive Ruso begins to manipulate Bastos into helping him since one of his fellow guards ratted him out for abusing the inmates and Ruso can make the case against him go away. And we also have Simon and Hugo trying to convince Montes to not hand the former over. The serial killer is still smugly tight-lipped about what, exactly, he has to share, but you can feel the gang’s morale beginning to fluctuate too, especially when Sara’s tablet is unlocked and she’s revealed to be a possible turncoat. It’s looking more and more likely that, despite Ruso and Sara being in captivity, the officers outside will simply clean house rather than run the risk of Simon being able to meet with the judge in the morning.
Montes, despite everything, doubles down on her desire to hand Simon over, and after a shootout with Hugo and a near-miss with Simon himself, drags him to the roof with plans of lowering him down to the men outside. Outside, Hugo arrives and, in a pretty major twist, shoves Montes off the roof, presumably to her death. With a half-hour time limit remaining until Simon needs to call in and ensure Laura survives, some obvious tension and mystery between Laura’s captors, and Bastos being successfully manipulated into toeing the line by Ruso, it seems there like there is everything to play for heading into the finale.
You can stream The Longest Night season 1, episode 5 exclusively on Netflix.
