While I’ve greatly been enjoying the second season of 30 Coins thus far, despite all the snarling hell demons, skittering spider babies and tentacle-headed beasties, there’s been something noticably missing from the first three episodes and that’s the central, core group of Elena, Paco and Father Vergara.
While Vergara doesn’t seem to be getting anything more than a glorified cameo per-episode any time soon due to his extended vacation in Hell, Paco and Elena have been somewhat sidelined due to various comas, hysterical clinginess and a truly alarming pregnancy.
However, with the delightfully titled The Black Book Of The Mad Arab, we find the pair once again settling back into their much-missed former roles, as they stick their probing noses deep into yet another pile of Satanic shit as if they’d never been away.
Apparently giving birth to a spider monster does wonders for the motivation.
Before we address said spider baby, we should probably start with the diligent souls who have been trying to chip away at the endless conspiracies and the team of Haruka, Salcedo, Antonio and Laguna are trying to break into RNUK who have been torturing the citizens of Pedraza with injections and VR in order to narrow down the whereabouts of on of the missing Judas coins. Allowing himself to be admitted as a patient/prisoner Laguna reports to his cronies from within, but he may be too late as the location of that coin may have just been determined.
Elsewhere, Merche solidifies her new union with Christian Barbrow who reveals that he wishes to merge her six coins with his ten in order to carry out his armageddon-baiting plan and to celebrate the fact that he has already recovered her kidnapped, adopted child, she happily murders Lagrange, thus taking another piece off the board.
However, the main thrust of the epidode finally goes to Elena and Paco, who, after a wobbly start after her traumatic birth of inhuman, spider-limbed blob of evil, discovers that there actually was a method to this madness when it’s revealed that Vergara, under Hell’s orders, snuck out of the netherworld via a mirror portal and crammed the creature down her throat while she was still in that freaky coma. The reason? Inside the spider creature is a key that had to be smuggled out of Hell and apparently that was the only way it could have been done.
The key leads to a certain warehouse that eventually leads them to a specific book, one that will hopefully aid them in the battles to come, but even after avoiding some absurdly complicated booby traps and a town full of possessed people, Vergara worries about the toll this tome will have on Elena’s sanity.
While the clutch of supporting characters have done a sterling job thus far filling in for the indisposed leads, the full return of Elena and Paco to (mostly) full strength as they get stuck into yet another fucked up mystery like they continuously did back in season one. To be fair, it’s a fucking weird and convoluted mystery to welcome them back into action, even by 30 Coins standards, but despite being as chaotic as Gary Busey trying to direct traffic, its sheer randomness proves to be heady fun.
At first, you worry that Elena has lost track of reality as we rejoin her mourning the lost of her weird child, but soon we hit upon the darkly amusing fact that she still doesn’t know that her baby was arachnid in species. When she finally learns this, her response is pretty much what you’d expect, but what makes the scene truly work is that director Alex de la Iglesia is obviously having great fun ripping off the dissection scene from Alien as numerous experts have been called in to poke and prod this fucked up insect in the name of science while dropping numerous, dryly humorous comments. Matters get even more insane when it turns out the fucking thing isn’t dead (did you really think Iglesia wouldn’t pass up such an obvious cheap shot?) and Paco stomps the fucker dead thus revealing the key. While the dissection of the spider has absolutely nothing to do with the larger story, it’s a perfect example of how 30 Coins continuously finds itself getting distracted with the little details and yet never feels like it’s gotten off track. There’s a spider dissection scene in place because a) Iglesia obviously wants to riff off of Ridley Scott’s extraterrestrial classic and b) we want them to chat about this thing because it’s so fucking gnarly and that’s the wondrous thing about the show in a nut shell – it stops to examine the weird.
However, later in the episode, Iglesia’s attention swings from Alien to Raiders Of The Lost Ark as Elena and Paco’s search to find what the key unlocks violently lurches into adventure territory as they negotiate a booby trapped warehouse to locate the titular book. Setting up the geography of the warehouse and even letting the score cheekily cross over into John Williams’ backyard, it sets up some of the most convoluted death traps seen in quite a while. Eschewing rolling boulders or trap doors, Iglesia has mechanised, Del Toro-style machines rumble after our heroes that either wave surfboard sized blades at them or spit blinding sparks. It proves to be a perfect metaphor for the gleefully schizophrenic nature of the show and while I could understand fans of more traditional plots being confused by such vast shifts in tone, I’ve personally always cherished it. If nothing else, it’s great to see Elena up and about and Paco dialing back on that simpering, overprotective mania that’s plagued him this season.
Elsewhere, the rest of the characters sort of go through the motions with Antonio and Haruka still bonding around that bloody wind turbine, Laguna infiltrating the RNUK and Merche displaying another show of power by flipping Barbrow’s jet upside down mid-flight and launching Lagrange out of a restaurant window like a screaming cannonball – but this is mostly the Pacoband Elena show and it’s more better for it.
Issues? Still no scene chewing villainy from Giamatti despite the fact that he must have at least seventeen coins by the end of the episode and Vergara is still stuck in the bench in Hell while we patiently wait for his arc to start in earnest. But with the conspiracy getting ever tighter, the return of two of the show’s major players covers a multitude of sins. Literally.
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