Season finales are hard, especially if they’re for a series as dense and chaotic as Alex de la Iglesia’s 30 Coins. I mean, how many plot threads do you tie off, how many do you leave open for another season and where do you leave the main characters in a show that, even at it’s most sedate, is impressively out of its fucking mind?
These are all important questions and unfortunately, Iglesia and his screenwriter, Jorge Guerricaechevarria don’t seem to be interested in answering any of them and instead, keeps turning up the weird instead of figuring out how they’re actually going to land this wild ride in a way that rings true to the tone while still being satisfying. It’s something of a bummer, as over the last seven episodes I’ve truly come to believe that 30 Coins is one of the best horror shows of the last decade that’s balanced its outlandish concepts and endless homages into something fiercely original – but in its stuffed finale, the only demon that seems to get vanquished is a sense of closure.
When we last left the put upon town of Pedraza, the demonic agents of the Cainites had descended on the place, unleashed a blinding fog and erected an impassable barrier that circled the town in an attempt to lure back the coin wielding Elena and longtime thorn in their side, Father Vergara. With Angel, the Cainite’s inhuman point man, disguised as a priest and already well on his way to crushing the collective will of the townsfolk, the last two players of the game finally arrived and armed themselves in order to promptly fuck around and find out.
Find out they do in the form of a huge, sickle-limbed demon with a lashing tentacle for a head and thousands of screaming souls broiling in its midsection, but after forcing the beast to retreat, our heroes find that vanquishing evil won’t be quite so easy as taking out an end of game boss.
Fifteen days pass with the barrier and the fog showing no sign of vanishing and the trio of Vergara, Elena and Paco have had to resort to guerrilla tactics, hiding out in the town while they wait for the right time to strike. However, Angel has already succeeded in sapping the will of everyone in town save Paco’s wife, Merche, whobseems to have given herself willingly to Angel’s plans. However, Paco can’t believe that she would turn to evil, even in the wake of their ugly separation and unwisely tries to win her over to their cause which proves to be the dumbest mistake he’s made in a long line of them.
After Elena is rendered comatose by a spell of that pesky witch and Merche delivers the final coin to Angel, things start to look extra bleak, but when the Cainities arrive in force to celebrate their victory and assemble all 30 coins, disaster seems right around the corner.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about 30 Coins’ first season is how well the creators manage to balance multiple plots and concepts in every single episode that lesser shows would crumble under the weight of, but the problem with this season finale is both Iglesia and Guerricaechevarria seem to be having so much fun spinning all those plates, they don’t want to stop, even when they should. As a result, despite the cinematic build up, matters don’t actually come to a head in a way that allows the show to draw a line through any of those piled up plot threads and continues to pick up pace when it should be pumping the breaks.
Maybe it’s me, but any show in this day and age of frequent cancellations that has the balls to refuse to round out their season with an actual ending makes me anxious; so you can imagine how nervous I got when the episode clears up absolutely nothing and starts leaving cliffhangers aplenty. Considering that the show got a season 2 means this isn’t as bad as it could have been, but on top of more dangling threads than a half-knitted scarf, the episode makes some baffling decisions with some of its characters.
While it initially wrong-foots us with a cheeky misdirection that sees a massive CGI demon erupt from the ground looking for a scrap that stretches our heroes as much as it strains the budget, the promised final battle goes from an out and out fire fight to days of sneaking around undercover. It’s a bit of a jarring switch but it’s nothing compared to some of the silly decisions the script suddenly dumps on us.
Yes, the lovesick, loved-up Paco is the sort of nice guy who would try and do right by his ex-wife, but the fact that he continues at it when its painfully obvious that approaching the bitter Merche during a situation this grave is tantamount to idiocy and only succeeds in turning us against the normaly sweet character, but worse yet, the episode then goes and does the inexcusable by side lining Elena (arguably the best character) to the end of the epidode and beyond with an enchanted pin delivered by, you guessed it, Merche. While this does prove to make the episode utterly unpredictable, it also makes it frustrating and disappointing in equal measure.
That’s not to say that the show has lost its old magic as it still delivers a bunch of original weird-ass stuff on a regular basis where Vergara, counteracting all the magic with some hocus pocus of his own, uses magic blood to possess a dove and then uses a complex winch and pulley systems to puppeteer the bird in flight like some audacious circus-style shit. Elsewhere, that troublesome witch shows her true colours when she sprouts spider legs out of her back when confronted by a vengeful Paco and Angel’s battle-ready form of having his skin turn snow white is a genuinely creepy image – of course, in true 30 Coins style it rarely makes a lick of sense, but that’s just par for the course by now.
Oddly, the villains fare far better with Macarena Gomez still relishing her gradual seduction into full evil as she revels in the complements for putting together a suitable do for the Cainite’s ascension and Cosimo Fusco continues to be charming and creepy in equal measure, but for a big bad, Cardinal Santoro ultimately proves to be something of a damp squib, seeing his dreams of conquest collapse with a simple rugby tackle that seemingly sacrifices Vergara as he scatters the titular coins.
By the time the end credits roll, we are left on disappointingly uncertain ground with Vergara seemingly dead, the coins scattered and spread among the greedy Cainites (of course Merche manages to snag one too) and Elena apparently bleeding to death whilst in an unnatural coma and the result of this is neither an ending that is worthy of everything that’s come before or tantalising enough to invoke feverishly longing for a second series to get its ass in gear. Overall, 30 Coins’ first season was money well spent, but here’s hoping it can regain that magic for a second go round because this “final battle” left me feeling flat broke.
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