While I’ve been singing the praises of many aspects of 30 Coins, Alex de la Iglesia’s viciously blasphemous horror show, one aspect I haven’t gone over is its desire to not stay in one place for too long. While other shows about towns plagued by odd and supernatural goings on rarely strayed beyond the borders of Twin Peaks, Sunnydale or wherever it happens to be set, the marked members of Pedraza seemingly couldn’t wait to get the hell out of dodge after the first couple of episodes. While Padre Vergara high tailed it to Rome in order to gain the ear of the Pope (with disastrous results), the similarly cursed Elena would have already fled to Paris if a simulacrim of her missing (actually dead) husband hadn’t showed up to get his hands on the last missing coin of Judas’ original payment. Christ, even the put upon Paco wants to drop his mayoral duties and leave, much to his wife’s obvious displeasure. So, as we get to 30 Coins’ sixth episode, we find the cast scattered like never before, but can it keep that all-important momentum as we hurtle toward the end?
A month has passed after Vergara escaped the clutches of Cardinal Santoro and the Cainites, we find that in order to avoid detection, he’s taken “refuge” in the war torn shell of Aleppo, Syria and he spends his days traversing the burning husks of cars and bringing God to the wounded. After realising that a call from Elena is actually Santoro using his unholy hocus pocus to duplicate her voice, he attempts to try and communicate with the heroic vet through his dreams, a trick that’s worked before to varying degrees of success. However, connecting with Elena in a dreamlike store that takes the form of an endless, Kubrickian maze, she ignores his pleas, having thrown the vital coin into the local dam and leaving for Paris to spend her days having sex with the hunky Roque and not worry about demonic forces.
Meanwhile, poor abandoned Paco is realising that his life, job and marriage aren’t what they want to be as he’s sick of being the man holding a town together made up of drunks, gossips and nags. Packing his things, he finally leaves an incensed Merche only for yet another headache to roll into town in the form of two criminologists who are looking into all the the messed up crap that’s been rocking Pedraza over the last six months. Their first order of business? Looking into the covered up reports of Jesús firing his gun around town when the double of Elena’s husband rolled into town.
They say bad luck comes in threes, and so while Vergara finds himself captured and imprisoned by Syrian soldiers while Elena discovers that the coin she got rid of has now found it’s way back to her in the most convoluted way possible. It won’t be long before the Cainites make another violent bid to reclaim it, but who will be caught in the cross fire?
After the wild, careening, maniacal nature of the previous episode, it seems that the world of 30 Coins is taking something of a breather after an installment filled with fleshy blob monsters, a tour of the villain’s lair and evil doubles. As a result, we find our main trio of characters pretty much finished with the worlds of monsters, haunted mirrors and ungodly secret societies and it gives proceedings the general feel of a – well, I don’t want to say filler episode, but the series certainly feels like it’s in a transitional period before the satanic fireworks start off again.
Of all the three plot threads, Paco’s is most basic as he’s finally found the courage to start voicing his long gestating concerns over how his life has gone. Obviously, dagger-eyed wife Merche takes it horribly, especially when he describes them as more like business partners than husband an wife – but even though he leaves her oppressive thrall, Pedraza still has all that supernatural shit to work through with the arrival of a pair of investigators would frankly thinks that the reports of local cop Lagunas stinks more than shit stew – after all a shift from three reports in five years to twenty five in the last six months isn’t something to be sneezed at. However, not only does this rile up the village idiot Antonio once again who claims someone important is coming, but it closes off the Jesús plot line as he blows his brains out due to the stress.
Also treading water before the overarching story tightens up like a spasming sphincter muscle is the Vergara story that sees the grizzled priest retreating to the hell on earth that is a Syrian war zone. While there’s fertile material of having a Christian priest finding that his faith is decidedly unwelcome in this violent, uncompromising world. However, while I’ve admired the fact that 30 Coins isn’t afraid to mix things up and send its characters outside the confines of Pedraza, this side story feels like one ot too many for a show that usually excels by refusing to sit still. In an addition to that, haven’t we just had an episode that saw Vergara locked in a dungeon – so to go straight into another one, even set in another country, feels like the show is finally running slightly on empty.
However, flying in to rescue things at the last minute – as she often does – is Elena’s Paris based plot, that not only adds yet more layers to a truly intriguing heroine, but also ties into those pre-credits scenes dotted throughout that saw indestructible men murder and maim their way through jails of bullets in order to get their mitts on the other coins. After the unwitting Roque reveals that he found a coin much like the one she lost within a fish in a Japanese restaurant, Elena recoils with palpable horror (it’s even more of a shock when you realise that Elena thought Roque might have been proposing) and her new life of Parisian restaurants and sweaty sex sessions is about to all come crashing down when the Cainites zombie-up another random member of the public with that funky necklace that gives you the ability to withstand immense and bloody punishment at the cost of your very mind. After the Cainites’ unleash their latest civilian attack dog on the couple, Roque eats a bullet when he was hoping to eat a meal and Elena finds herself with the coin back in her possession.
However, the most significant twist lurks until the very end when the complaints of the people of Pedraza about their troublesome priest means they’ve finally got the replacement they’ve demanding. But as an ecstatic Alberto celebrates, we see that the priest who has seemingly strode out of the desert is hauntingly familiar. It is none other than Angel, the chained, demonic being who Santoro sold his soul to years ago while Vergara watched.
While not 30 Coins’ greatest hour, it still manages to shift the action and characters to where they all need to be (a still captive Vergara notwithstanding) in order to gear things up for an apocalypse-in-waiting.
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