I know what you’re thinking – everyone dies, right? Well, no, as it happens. The ending of La Palma subverts expectations in that sense, with Episode 4, “Safe Spot”, providing the closest thing to an upbeat conclusion you can reasonably expect in a show about a tsunami smashing the Canary Islands to bits.
To be fair there are some casualties, but there’s more contrivance than anything else, so through several strokes of luck – some that I’m not sure are entirely plausible, and others that annoy me personally – the bulk of the main cast makes it out alive. One supposes the underlying point is how their experiences might have changed them, especially with so much character drama shuffled to the forefront pre-calamity. There’s a deliberate juxtaposition between immovable Mother Nature’s destructive, indifferent power and the fragility of human relationships, but it probably deserved a better – or at least longer – show to unpack that.
The Gist Of It
In case this hasn’t been made obvious, La Palma is about a tsunami battering the Canary Islands, and the show’s ending finally reveals that disaster’s horrifying fullness and the fates of several characters caught up in its swell.
Of particular note are Marie and her brother, Erik, Jennifer and her husband, Fredrik, their children Sara and Tobias, and Jennifer’s brother, Jens. It’s the latter who provides the only thing resembling a plan – classified information about a potential safe zone that is being deliberately withheld for hand-wavey political reasons. But circumstances conspire to keep everyone apart for a while, splitting the attention of the finale between multiple concurrent subplots.
Let’s break them down.
One Hell Of A First Date
Thanks to a bit of a mix-up, Sara spends most of the finale on a plane with Charlie, separated from her family. When she dipped off the flight to give Charlie Fredrik’s wristband, Jennifer got off and took Tobias with her to look for Sara. Before you knew it, Sara and Charlie were aboard, while Jennifer and Tobias were stranded. Oops.
I’d be lying if I said I cared for this subplot a great deal. It’s all very doomed teenage romance for me, and both girls take what seems to be their impending demise better than you’d imagine any teenage girl would (I have a couple of my own – they’re not known for being reasonable.)
Of course, things turn out to be more or less okay. Sara wakes up after the disaster to find half of the plane dead or dying, including Charlie, who is unresponsive having apparently drowned, despite there being no water anywhere inside the plane that I could see (so, the compartment flooded, drowned her specifically, and then drained again?). Luckily, Sara and the air hostess perform CPR and Charlie gurgles up some seawater.
After her near-death experience, hopefully, Charlie starts to get on a little better with her parents. Sara is taken to reunite with hers on a helicopter.
A still from La Palma | Image via Netflix
Jens Saves The Day
I was fully on board with Jens. He’s the only official in this show who seems to have a working sense of moral responsibility, and he’s absolutely, unequivocally right to leak the location of the safe spot in Tenerife where the waves will converge and smash each other out of existence, leaving the nearby shore (relatively) untouched. I don’t have any relevant expertise to dispute this, though I’m admittedly skeptical about whether it would play out in quite the way it does, but from a moral perspective, he’s the hero in my eyes.
Since he gets the coordinates out visually, it takes some deciphering to figure out what they pertain to. The image goes from Charlie to Sara, to Jennifer, and then it’s Tobias who figures out what they are and points to the location on a map. Now, here’s a nitpick: Tobias’s obvious neurodivergence is a plot point, but I always bristle a bit when it manifests as mathematical aptitude. My daughter is autistic and trust me, this kind of thing doesn’t always equate to plot-convenient deductions.
Anyway, Jens is validated in what he did. He learns later that not only did he save his sister’s life but those of several hundreds of people who made it to the safe zone. Norway’s foreign relations don’t suffer after all.
The Turtles Were Right
The ending of La Palma finds Fredrik and Marie – in a suspense sequence that they absolutely would not have survived in reality, but whatever – making it to the safe zone, where Jennifer and Tobias eventually turn up. Erik, however, doesn’t make it; he’s shot dead by the criminal he had freed earlier. His parting words are “The turtles knew.” Knew what?
There’s a bit of ambiguity here but it’s pretty easy to figure out. A late voiceover explains how turtles are older than dinosaurs, and a species doesn’t get that far without knowing how to sense danger and get out of Dodge when the time is right. You might have noticed the symbolic value of turtles earlier when Tobias saw them all swimming away.
In case you haven’t put two and two together, the point is that the turtles are swimming away already, folks. Mother Nature doesn’t give a hoot about us; she’s uncompromising and unfussy, and our own impact on the environment will have repercussions that, spoiler alert, will be catastrophic and unavoidable. Will you follow the turtles?
I’m pretty sure that’s what it’s saying, anyway.
