There’s a lot of fire in City of Shadows. Flames form a recurring motif; for revenge, for rebirth, for all kinds of the usual ideas that tend to underpin these very serious European crime shows that Netflix is so partial to. Fire also features strongly in the ending, which is perhaps just as well, since Episode 6 has a phoenix-like rebirth quality to it for several of the characters, not to mention an additional pang of poignancy given the very real fate of co-lead Veronica Echegui, who sadly passed away this year.
But this is primarily a crime show, which means the finale mostly comes down to whether Milo and Rebeca can prevent vengeful sibling pyromaniacs Hector and Helena from making a fiery statement during the Pope’s consecration of the Sagrada Familia. Hector and Helena have a pretty justified point to prove, but that point has taken on a personal contour for Milo, given the involvement of Judge Susana, one of his few true confidantes following the death of his nephew and his suspension from the force. So, everything’s to play for.
Who Are the Killers and What Are Their Motives?
Hector and Helena chose their victims carefully. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say their victims were chosen for them. As children, they were orphaned. After the death of their mother, their father turned to substance abuse to cope. Pinto, the construction CEO who would become their first public execution, demolished the house that was the only thing keeping him alive. For that, he earned his fate in their eyes.
Similarly, after the orphaned siblings were sent to La Ferradura, Helena was abused by Torrens, the president of the Torrens Foundation, who became their next exhibit. But none of this happened immediately. Helena and Hector were left to fester, and if the same cycles hadn’t repeated, they might have left things alone. But the greed continued. The developments persisted. Ordinary working people were displaced; those who were suffering were crushed under the heel of their oppressors.
Hector and Helena’s entire MO is built around the symbolism of their own torments. The claustrophobic basements where Hector was locked for days on end, deprived of food and water. The fire being an outgrowth of Hector’s pyromania and the cleaning power of the flames to destroy and renew. The intention to associate the work of Catalan architect and designer Antoni Gaudí with their public violence, in the same manner that the same work had become an escape for Helena in times of torment.
Revenge Is Hollow
Despite all the allusions to religious imagery, Gothic architecture, and secret societies, City of Shadows is fundamentally a story about class, and secondarily one of revenge. But the lesson of revenge stories is always that it isn’t worth it, something embodied by the show’s ending. Only by achieving some measure of vengeance do Helena and Hector, though especially the former, really reckon with the idea that not only can they never truly defeat the enemy of capitalism, but they won’t feel much better for the effort.
Hector’s plan to burn the ministers is simply interrupted, but since he had already reconciled himself to a fiery death by self-immolation, he set himself alight rather than surrender. He survived that, technically, but does anyone really survive setting themselves on fire? Helena also takes her own life, driven to it at least in part by glimpsing once again the Gaudí painting that held so much sad significance to her, but before she committed, she at least hinted enough to save Susana from suffocation in the Montjuic Cemetery mausoleum, where most of Hector and Helena’s family were interred.
This isn’t so much an attempt at redemption as an acknowledgement of the pointlessness of it all. Susana was involved in the fates of Helena and Hector, but not in the same way that Pinto and Torrens were. She was the hand of an ambivalent system, but her placement in the family mausoleum probably speaks to something deeply held and confounding in Helena’s core. Once upon a time, her own enterprising relatives could have been the Pintos and Torrens of their era. It’s all cyclical. Ultimately, she can’t claim to be all that different from the people she targeted and killed. And how would she live with that?
Institutional Corruption
Helena and Hector are products of a vast and unfeeling system of corruption, one in which the wealthy and powerful rise to the top on account of their connections and bottomless pockets. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the shielding of Torrens’ paedophilia by Bastos, who was taking a kickback from the foundation to obscure Torrens’ predilection for children.
This makes Bastos as complicit as anyone in what happened to Helena, and the presumably countless other, less high-profile victims who were also abused in Torrens’ care. Bastos’s eagerness to catch the killers in the present day is flecked with irony, given how if he hadn’t consistently turned the other cheek in the first place, those killers would never have been created.
The ending of City of Shadows promises some kind of disciplinary action for Bastos, which doesn’t seem like an appropriate punishment. But it’s a start, at least.
Healing Is Possible
As well as in the idea of fire, the concepts of healing and rebirth are also explored through cyclical patterns of behaviour, and finally being brave enough to escape those cycles. You saw this a bit in the link between the mausoleum and Helena and Hector’s anti-capitalist crusade, but you see it most tellingly in Milo’s relationship with his brother, Hugo.
Milo and Hugo’s father had been a paranoid schizophrenic, and Hugo inherited the same condition. This condition led, in one way or another, to the death of his son, Marc, who took the pills he was prescribed, either because he was suffering from the same affliction or was tired of seeing his father do the same. Hugo has consistently blamed Milo ever since and found himself trapped in a loop of delusions.
At the end of City of Shadows, Milo finally commits to having Hugo admitted to a mental health facility. It isn’t entirely clear whether, at this stage in his life, he’s even capable of being “healed”, but it’s a meaningful step nonetheless, since it finds Milo finally taking responsibility for his brother and beginning to move forward from the grief and guilt of Marc’s death.
