Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In White Lines Episode 4, it’s a bad day to be a dad. Andreu, the patriarch of the powerful Calafat family, chews out his son for deafening a man, gets kicked out of the family business by his wife, and gets t-boned by a truck in an assassination attempt. Zoe Walker’s father shows up in Ibiza to take her home to her family, but winds up getting blown off by his daughter when she learns he was the reason her slain brother Axel went to Ibiza in the first place. Honestly, Marcus, the hapless DJ/dealer who got his leg broken by the (now dead) Romanian drug dealers he owed money to, is coming out on top just by virtue of making cool robot noises to entertain his worried daughters. Dad of the year is a pretty low bar to clear around here.
Although judging from the vibe between Oriol and his mother Conchita, mother of the year may be wide open, too.
This is a plot-dense episode, and some of the show’s storytelling decisions are a bit baffling to me, I must admit. Take the big fight Boxer and Zoe have when he chews her out for being ungrateful for his help. (At this point she’s unaware that his “help” included a double homicide.) We see Boxer blow up at her and kick her out, we see her bump into Kika and Kika’s fuckbuddy Sissy on the way out, we see her dance, we see her bring up the fight—and then we get a flashback to the fight that adds a few sentences and a few household items thrown in anger but is otherwise much the same. In other words, there wasn’t some secret about the fight that was withheld, there’s no big revelation in the flashback to events that happened just minutes prior; the flashback just kind of happens, and that’s that. If you squint at it hard enough you can maybe see the show making a point about selective recollection of events—the whole series does revolve around a murder the details surrounding which no one present can remember—but since the initial view and the revisit show basically the same thing, I’m not sure that explanation washes.
Other aspects of the storytelling, however, cruise along at a comfortable speed on a pretty straight track. In a series of brief and efficient scenes spread across the episode, we see Oriol confess to his mom Conchita the crime of deafening the rival Martínez family’s failson Cristóbal in order to force him to admit to killing Axel; we see a furious Andreu, who found out on his own, confront Oriol; we see Oriol flee to the compound of Axel’s friend-turned-guru Dave, who doses him using a psychoactive toad…
…we see his bad trip, in which he begs a vision of Axel to tell him who killed him (Oriol suspects himself, which is interesting) and which ends with Axel departing with Conchita, whom he was apparently fucking; we see Conchita beg Pepe Martínez to hold off on retaliation, the same way she held off when a member of his family caused an accident that left her sister with brain damage years ago; we see her force Andreu out of the family business, a fate he accepts when she expected and even wanted him to fight back; we see Pepe promise his failson that he won’t let anyone view them as mediocre anymore; we see the Martínez’s goons crash a truck into Andreu’s car. In nice, streamlined fashion, we learn all about the family dynamics, the past history, and the current state of play. It’s well done.
In the end, Zoe blows off her father after learning from Kika that he kicked Axel out of the house, then allowed Zoe to believe he’d left on his own. She has a panic attack when Boxer admits he murdered the Romanians whom Zoe’s been so worried about. She lets him calm her down, but then peaces out of his apartment the moment he turns his back.
What’s her next step? I’m as unclear on this as her dad is. Much is made in this episode about Zoe being a stick in the mud, saying “no” to new experiences when she should say “yes,” et cetera. Actor Laura Haddock adds a lot of emotional urgency this dynamic, to her credit. But Zoe is investigating the unsolved murder of her own brother here, you know? Everyone telling her to (literally and figuratively) let her hair down and live a little while she’s hunting for a killer…they seem weird and frivolous, or at the very least like they’re not taking Axel’s death seriously. Which, to be fair, some of them aren’t! And at least one of the people we’ve met so far is likely the culprit, which would explain that mystery person or persons’ desire to see Zoe loosen up instead of staying on her chosen path.
The rest of us are left rooting for her to solve the murder without getting offed in the process, a prospect with which she seems blithely unconcerned. Doesn’t she worry that the killer is still out there, is probably someone she knows, is aware she’s investigating the crime, and probably doesn’t want the truth to come out, no matter the cost?
READ NEXT: ‘White Lines’ on Netflix Episode 5 Review: Dance and Drink and Screw
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
