Summary
The ending of Time Flies makes a few bold choices, providing a satisfying climax to an unconventional Netflix series.
Netflix’s unconventional Argentine crime caper Time Flies has a better ending than most Netflix shows. This doesn’t make a lacking show much better, but it definitely helps to sugar the pill. Having largely eschewed the structure and tone of a typical Latin American streaming release, Episode 6 is content to conclude in a lightly ambiguous way, resolving the main plot but making sure the audience understands that the lives of ex-cons Ines and Manca still aren’t going to be easy.
Our heroines – though the word is doing a lot of heavy lifting – run a fumigation business, bouncing around in a Mystery Machine-style truck between often wealthy clients whose lives, as ex-cons, they could never really hope to live. The plot is kick-started when one of those clients, Susana Bonar, makes Ines an offer she can’t refuse – to secure a rare poison that she almost certainly intends to kill someone with. Since Manca is ill and requires expensive treatment, Ines is compelled, but it quickly becomes apparent that Bonar has a connection to Ines’s pre-prison past.
Driven to Murder
Before her incarceration, Ines was a relatively well-to-do housewife married to a very wealthy man named Ernesto. But Ernesto was not-so-secretly cheating on Ines with a woman named Charo, and everyone, including Ines, seemed to be well aware of this fact. Eventually, the embarrassment got too much, and after catching Ernesto in the act, Ines recklessly ran down his mistress and served 15 years in prison for murder.
Now free and struggling to make ends meet, let alone to afford a doctor who can check out the lump in Manca’s breast, Ines is immediately compelled by Bonar’s offer of a sizeable cash payment to procure a lethal, exclusive toxin. Manca doesn’t like the idea, but Ines is determined, and this is before it becomes clear that Bonar has some leverage over her. Before long, she’s stuck trying to acquire the poison from shady sources while Manca digs into what Bonar is really up to.
Manca discovers that Bonar got their business information through Lilliana Villanueva, the sister of Ernesto’s late mistress, and it also becomes clear that Bonar has a connection to Ines’s estranged adult daughter, Lali, and her young daughter, Guille.
Bonar’s Revenge
The connections to Ines’s past with the Villanuevas turn out to be red herrings. Bonar is indeed looking for revenge, but not on behalf of anyone else. Instead, her reasoning is deeply personal and more than a little delusional. In truth, she’s not targeting Bonar at all, but instead her daughter, Lali.
The reasoning behind this is a little convoluted. Bonar was once a mother herself to a little girl named Tamara, who eventually transitioned. Now the mother of Timo, a trans boy, Bonar unravelled, unable to accept her child’s gender identity. She attempted to forcibly push quintessentially feminine things on Timo, forcing him to turn to a high-school counsellor for the acceptance and support he needed. That counsellor was Lali, also the mother of Timo’s friend, Guille.
Timo’s story took a tragic turn when he was killed at a house party for the usual bigoted reasons. As ever, Bonar refused to accept the situation, insisting the dead body she was called to identify wasn’t really her child. She has been living in denial ever since, while also simultaneously blaming Lali for the loss of her child. Her goal is to poison Guille to force Lali into experiencing the same kind of loss that she did.
Ines Saves the Day
Despite being on the back foot, with help from Manca, Ines is able to figure out what happened to Timo and how it connects to Lali and Guille. The penny drops in time to reveal that Bonar has lured the pair of them to a “party” where she feeds Guille a poisoned smoothie, intending to take her life in front of Lali.
She almost manages it, too. Luckily, Ines breaks in, and the security system summons the authorities, who are able to take Guille away and ultimately save her life. But Ines can’t get away from the fact that she was, on some level, complicit in this. She procured the poison for Bonar and committed a number of offences to do so. She had squared her knowledge of what the poison would be used for with her own conscience. She broke the law.
Ines’s efforts to save Guille don’t magically repair her relationship with Lali either, though she does speak for her in court. In the end, though, Ines finds herself back in prison for six months. People can definitely change, but sometimes it takes a few attempts.
Loose Ends
If nothing else, the money that Bonar gave Ines paid for Manca’s surgery, which was successful in removing the cancer. In potentially condemning someone to death, Ines saved her friend. And then she managed to save Guille, too. It was probably the best-case outcome in a situation that could have gone badly wrong in myriad different ways.
The novel part of the ending of Time Flies is that these experiences don’t exactly set Ines and Manca on the straight and narrow. Instead, once Ines is released from her second stint in prison, the two of them steal back the cash they paid for Manca’s treatment and go on a beach vacation. Manca is cancer-free, and they’re both literally free – at least for now – but they’re still faced with a lot of the same problems they had when the show started.
As I said, people can change. It can just sometimes take a few attempts.
