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Suburra: Blood On Rome

What goes up…

…must come down.

Teased in the cold open and delivered in the climax, the suicide of Monsignor Theodosiou in Suburra: Blood on Rome’s sixth episode (“Garlic, Oil, and Chili Pepper”) is a body blow to the schemes of every faction on the show. Samurai, Livia, Sara, Cinaglia, the Aureliano/Spadino/Lele triumvirate, and the mafia backers lurking behind it all — all of them factored the presence of this one dude on the Vatican’s real-estate commission into their calculations. I’m sure the ensuing scramble will be a hoot and a half to watch. But that’s mostly because the death of “Friar Fuck,” as the Aureliano-Spadino comedy team dubbed him, made me realize how much of a maguffin the entire Ostia land-deal plot really is. You’re not watching Suburra to find out who comes out on top of this particular dirty deal; let’s face it, the show only gives you rooting interest in the young guns, and while you probably hope neither Sara nor Cinaglia get killed for their troubles, they’re not the ones you want on the throne in the end. Rather, you’re watching Suburra just to watch it — to see three incredibly handsome dudes try to pull one over on the world in a series of striking shot compositions across the length and breadth of the Eternal City.

In that sense the undisputed highlight of this episode is Aureliano and Spadino’s mudbath. That’s not a sentence I expected to write when I started covering this show, but now it seems perfectly logical, right? After striking a deal with Sara to muscle in on her company’s share of the land deal in exchange for taking Samurai out of the picture for her, the Adami and Anacleti outcasts take a road trip to the secluded abbey outside Rome where Theodosiou is staying in order to force his hand. This involves a lot of singing in the car on the way there…

…and dancing around afterwards…

…and even some pasta, because hey, that’s Italian!

Most importantly for the purposes of people who want the most awesome possible things to happen in any given show, they take a break from their stakeout so that Aureliano can take Spadino on an excursion to a secret geothermal mud mineral bath thing out in the middle of nowhere that only he knows about. The entire episode showcases actor Giacomo Ferrara at his most magnetic and enjoyable — it’s fascinating to watch how at ease he is with basically every single thing in the world except his family — but here he shifts from madcap energy to awkward, adolescent shyness. When his Spadino watches Alessandro Borghi’s Aureliano strip for the dip, or when Aureliano insists that they smear mud on each other’s back to get the full cleansing effect of the place, my heart just wanted to burst for this poor guy, even as I giggled at the gulf between Aureliano’s obliviousness and Spadino’s discomfort.

It’s actually a good episode for couples, whether they’re newly minted, exes, or never-will-bes. At the Anacleti compound, Manfredi seems to be psyching himself up for a run at Angelica, his baby brother Spadino’s neglected wife. Mama Anacleti is having none of it, and it’s hard to imagine Angelica being pleased with the lupine boss of the Sinti crime family in the place of her younger and handsomer husband. Even so, there’s a weird but undeniable erotic charge when Angelica catches Manfredi spying on her as she tries on lingerie she bought with money he gave her. She covers up, and he quickly turns and tries to act like it didn’t happen, but she then faces the mirror and looks at herself with newfound confidence. It can be nice to be desired, no matter who’s doing the desiring.

I sort of wonder if that’s what’s going on with Livia and Quirino, the Adami family financial advisor who helped her wrest power from her brother and with whom she’s now in a romantic relationship. His interest in her and her good fortune really does seem like more than just gold-digging, which is how Aureliano characterizes it. Still, as affectionate as they get during pillow talk, she does tend to treat him like a subordinate when the shit hits the fan, or when her bro is around. But he provides comfort, which everyone involved in the saga could use.

I’m sure Livia would have the same skepticism about Aureliano’s relationship with Isabel, a person who literally has sex for money, that he does about hers with Quirino. But she hasn’t seen the two of them together. “Do you feel good with her?” Spadino asks his friend when he expresses concerns that the relationship won’t work because of both her profession and (though he’s immediately embarrassed to have said it) her race. “Yes, she makes me feel good.” For Spadino, who can’t imagine a change to his present circumstances in which such a feeling would be possible, that ought to be enough. Isabel, too, has a hard time seeing why Aureliano is keeping her at arm’s length, though on the bright side for her, at least she gets to stand and fume about it in front of a window at night in one of the loveliest shots of the episode.

The last major power couple (discounting Cinaglia and his ex-wife, whose mildly corrupt husband he’s encouraging Samurai to blackmail) is Lele and Sara. The two rekindled their affair last episode, only for him to reveal his role in Aureliano and Spadino’s blackmail plan during what she thought was going to be a date. (She winds up with a gun to her head, at least for a while.) The torrent of invective she spews at him afterwards would make a truck driver blush, and he deserves it. But as we’ve seen, and as he points out, Sara is just as much of a user and a taker as he is; it’s not long before she overcomes her outrage and hires him and his buddies to murder a mob boss, after all. It’s not a use or be used world for any of these folks. It’s both.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.