Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
It’s officially cuffing season in Rome.
Wait…what?
Sara and Lele rekindling their romance (again) wasn’t difficult to see coming. For all their arguing and backstabbing, the down-on-her-luck power player and her boy toy have always seemed to care about one another, and people seek dubious comfort during troubled times. Aureliano and Isabel getting serious was even easier to predict; their estrangement didn’t even last an entire episode. At any rate, with both Lele and Aureliano booted out of their family homes, some shacking up was inevitable.
But the Countess and Samurai? That’s a hook-up of a different color. Granted, this liaison, while undoubtedly dangerous, isn’t romantic in nature like the other ones—politics makes for strange bedfellows, but not that strange—yet even still. Samurai is the same lord of the Italian underworld who cost the Countess her company, her fortune (some of it, anyway), and her husband. The Countess is the Roman Richelieu who’s been backing Sara’s moves against Samurai all the way, as part of a plan of revenge years in the making. Indeed, vengeance was hers in this very episode, as Sara and her young partners in crime successfully forced the Vatican to sell the land to their company rather than Samurai’s. Now you’re telling us that Suburra: Blood on Rome’s answer to the Queen of Thorns invited its Gus Fring analogue over to her place for the express purpose of selling Sara out? What gives?
Unless I’m missing something, we have no way of answering that question yet. “Last Customer,” the show’s seventh episode, offers no more indication of why the Countess would turn on her catspaw than any other installment has. In fact it marks a significant slowdown in the heretofore breakneck speed of the story. A calm before the storm? Perhaps. Whatever the case, it’s more about consolidating the status quo than shaking things up. The brief Countess/Samurai meeting is the most surprising thing in the episode by a considerable margin.
That’s not to say that it’s boring. Come on, this is Suburra—it doesn’t do boring. The success of Sara, Spadino, Aureliano, and Lele’s play for the Vatican’s Ostia land may just be the last step in the long road that got us here, but its realization is entertaining enough, centering on a scheme to hush up the truth about poor Monsignor Theodosiou’s suicide, and all the extracurricular activities that led up to it, in exchange for the commission’s cooperation. It’s got the spirit of a caper throughout, from the horrified reaction of Sara’s square husband when he hears about her plan to blackmail the Vatican into giving her what she wants—“They’ve ruled the world for centuries, and you want to con them?”—to the novel way in which Lele and company convince the coroner to comply with the cover-up—after he sexually assaults Sara when she offers a bribe, they switch tactics and force him at gunpoint to climb into Theodosiou’s compartment in the morgue along with the corpse.
And the Sinti aren’t sitting out the evening’s entertainment entirely, either. Look at the beautiful blues, greens, and golds of this shot, just after Manfredi, increasingly unsubtle in his displays of impatience and anger with his ne’er-do-well baby brother, tells Spadino “I’ll kill you whenever I like.”
Or consider the jump scare the show throws at us when Spadino’s unhappily wedded wife Angelica makes a drug delivery in disputed territory that he himself blew off. You’re so struck by what a supreme badass she looks like when she unexpectedly gets off that bike…
…that the drive-by shooting perpetrated by Adami goons that arrives hot on its heels catches you just as off guard as her.
The Adamis, too, have some strong moments. I love this shot of the siblings, Livia and Aureliano, gazing out at the ocean as they talk through their estrangement.
Aureliano even gets to do one of his favorite things and murder a man in a white-hot rage, in this case Isabel’s abusive quasi-pimp, who beat her for bailing on a gig with an important client. Speaking of which, look how this shot of her, in which her face is obscured by the reflection of the city she’s come to hate, communicates her plight. The effortlessness with which Suburra dashes off images like this one of Isabel waiting for the man is impressive, episode after episode.
So is the whole show, and now that we’ve reached that moment of equilibrium before the plunge I expect it to get even more so. Bring it on!
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.
