It’s hard for a show like Rivers of Fate, which largely traffics in outright misery, to have anything even resembling a happy ending. But these things are all relative, as we know, and for several of the characters involved, especially Janalice and Mariangel, what happens in the finale is probably their best-case scenario. That’s welcome catharsis after three prior episodes spent watching these people suffer physically and emotionally, and you can tell that the intention was for the climax to feel like an earned reprieve.
It also isn’t an especially complicated conclusion. It isn’t about twists and turns and high drama, but instead about the tension of whether Mariangel will be able to rescue Janalice, which is really what the plot boils down to in essence. But there are a few decisions made after that worthy of some examination. So, let’s do that.
Mariangel Made Janalice Her Mission
Janalice has the worst luck of anyone ever. She begins the series being thoroughly humiliated by her boyfriend, who widely disseminates a video of her going down on him, leading her to be ostracised by her very religious parents, Lizete and Pedro, and eventually move to live with her aunt. From here, Janalice tried to avoid her aunt’s pedophile husband, Ramiro, by befriending Dionete, but this only led to Janalice being kidnapped by a gang of river pirates led by Ze Elidio.
One of the pirates, Prea, creepily fell in love with Janalice and decided to free her from captivity, which really isn’t as romantic as it sounds, which is saying something given it doesn’t sound romantic at all. But it is an important part of the story and its ending, so it’s worth mentioning.
Also worth mentioning is Mariangel, whose husband and son were murdered by Prea’s gang. So, she’s on a revenge mission, but after hearing about Janalice, it dovetails with a planned rescue mission, which predictably erupts into complete chaos.
Everybody Is Confused
The word of the day is “confusion”. The idea defines everything about Rivers of Fate’s finale, which hinges on a viper’s nest of crossed wires and misunderstood motives. In the most essential terms, Prea and Mariangel are both trying to rescue Janalice. The latter’s revenge mission should technically be over, since she has already killed Gigante, who was the real killer of her family (and also wanted to kill Prea because he blamed him for the death of his brother, who was killed in Mariangel’s pursuit of Prea), but she was determined to reunite Janalice with her family at all cost.
For help in this endeavour, Mariangel turns to Cristobal, an old guerrilla buddy, and cooks up a scheme to rescue her from the auction by posing Cristobal as a buyer to get Janalice in position for a rescue effort. Naturally, it all goes completely wrong, thanks in large part to chance and a larger part to Prea, who had turned up to romantically rescue his beau.
As a result of all this, Janalice incapacitates Cristobal – not knowing who he is and what his intentions are – and flees with Prea, and Prea and Philippe shoot and kill each other. Again, I’m not sure this would constitute a happy ending in most shows, but it does in Rivers of Fate.
Found Family
And that’s not the only good news. Remember, Mariangel’s intention here has always been to reunite Janalice with her family, but the audience knows that isn’t an ideal climax since her family is absolutely awful. So the big moment of the Rivers of Fate finale is that Janalice decides not to return to her mother and father at all, and instead remains with Mariangel.
This seems like the right call to me. Her parents abandoned her for very flimsy reasons, after all, and it was Mariangel who was willing to go to the ends of the earth to rescue her, not them. It also makes sense that Mariangel, after everything she has been through, could do with the companionship. It’s a win-win situation.
If Netflix were really adamant about it, you could probably wring a second season out of Janalice and Mariangel’s subsequent misadventures on the lam, but I don’t see a great deal of point. Despite being based on a novel, this isn’t a very literary-feeling show, but this is the kind of ending that books do well, since they don’t have to bait out certain key user metrics to get a sequel greenlit. Preserving this climax and allowing it to actually be a climax strikes me as a pretty good idea – one of the better ones, in truth, that Rivers of Fate has.
