Somehow, after 10 episodes, basically everyone is still a suspect.
Netflix's latest murder mystery is Who Killed Sara? and it really lives up to its genre, because I watched the whole thing and I do NOT know what is going on.
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To be clear: The show has done a great job of explaining every plot point, but the mystery is getting more and more complicated, and Season 1 ended on a huge cliffhanger.
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It should be clear to you at this point, but read no further unless you want to have the entire show spoiled. Seriously.
Lucky for us, Season 2 is right around the corner (May 19, to be exact). Here are some questions I really, really hope get answered:
1. Why are César and Mariana so awful?
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César runs a human trafficking ring, horrifically mistreats his kids, and slept with his teenage son's girlfriend (and that same son's wife 18 years later). His wife Mariana emotionally and sexually abused Elroy for many, many years. It's been a long time since I've seen two such despicable people on TV, so I just wonder if there's some backstory to how they got that way.
2. Why is Mariana so loyal to César?
He's cheated on her and gotten other women pregnant at least twice, mistreats her oldest son Rodolfo, and has practically disowned her other son Chema for being gay. And yet, whenever she's confronted with another terrible thing that he's done (like the human trafficking), she defends him and says that nothing is more sacred than family. I don't understand it.
3. How did the Lazcano kids not turn out as awful as their parents?
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Rodolfo, Chema, and Elisa all seem like fairly decent — if not somewhat traumatized — people, which makes me think they were all raised by someone else who was a good influence on them. It certainly wasn't their parents, who, as I've already stated, are truly horrible people.
4. Why was Alex released from prison after only serving 18 years of his 30-year sentence?
I assume it was good behavior, but the show never stated the reason explicitly. He's also not shown to be on any kind of parole.
5. How does Alex know how to manage an entire spy operation from his house?
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We get a lot of flashbacks to the 18 years he spent in prison, and through them we learn that one of his cellmates gave him the surveillance equipment because he also hates César Lazcano. But that doesn't explain how Alex has all the hacking and spying skills we see him display throughout the show.
6. Exactly how old were the characters on the day of the boat ride?
We get the sense that they were all in their late teens or early twenties, but we also know that Elisa was literally a toddler on the day of the incident. Since Rodolfo, Chema, and Alex don't look that much older than Elisa in the present-day scenes, it's a little confusing.
7. What's the age difference between Alex and Elisa?
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They are both adults when they meet and start their relationship, but Alex must be anywhere between 15 to 20 years older than her.
8. Why does Mariana wear that torture device on her leg?
It seems like she does it whenever she commits a crime or does something horrible as a way of punishing herself. But when did she start doing it? And if she really feels guilty, why doesn't she simply stop committing atrocities? She certainly has a lot to be sorry for.
9. Did Mariana adopt Elroy?
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Elroy clearly had a very troubled life, from murdering his parents when he could barely talk to coming under the care/employment of Mariana Lazcano. But how and when did he officially become her assistant? How was she allowed to bring him home from the orphanage? And when did he become her sort-of lover?
10. How did Elroy get away with the murder of both his parents as a child?
He was a tiny child when he committed both crimes (this show is dark, y'all), and we saw him living in a church orphanage when Mariana met him, but as far as we could see, he never received the therapy and supervision he clearly needed.
11. Mariana totally killed Elroy, right?
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After he was shot in the casino, Elroy gave Elisa some compromising information about César, which Mariana witnessed. The next time we saw him, he was flatlining while Mariana smirked from the corner of his hospital room. The doctors were trying to revive him, but it doesn't look like Elroy is gonna make it.
12. Why does César react the same way when he finds out that Sofía and Sara are pregnant?
Turns out, César has a bad habit of getting his son Rodolfo's romantic partners pregnant, and then trying to keep the whole thing a secret. If he's so concerned about his image, why not have affairs with women who aren't his in-laws? If he does it on purpose because he hates Rodolfo (would not surprise me), then why does he want to keep it a secret?
13. What was on Chema's home videos that he burned all of the tapes?
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We know he had some NSFW videos of Alex that he recorded without consent, which isn't cool. But Alex was very understanding when Chema came out to him, and after so many years, he probably wouldn't hold a grudge, especially if the videos contained important evidence. It seems like there's something else on those videos that Chema wanted to keep hidden.
14. Why was Clara spying on Lorenzo in the shower, and why was she spying on him and Chema having sex?
I have a feeling that Chema and Lorenzo are going to regret asking her to be their surrogate, since she clearly has an ulterior motive.
15. What the hell happened to Nicardo?
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We saw him with the group in the flashback scenes, and like Chema, he always had a video camera. However, he was apparently dead by the time Alex got out of jail 18 years later. Since I don't trust anything on this show, I fully expect him to show up alive at some point.
16. Does Elisa have any other repressed memories from her childhood?
When she was a little girl, Elisa witnessed a woman being tortured in the basem*nt of her dad's casino but repressed the memory until she was an adult. When she did finally remember, it helped her figure out that her dad was running a human trafficking ring. If she remembers anything else important, it might help her and Alex figure out what happened to Sara.
17. Why did Diana the Huntress/Marifer not give Alex all the information she had at once?
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At the end of the last episode, we found out that Marifer was Diana Cazadora all along, which was cool! But it doesn't explain why she was teasing out bits of information throughout the season instead of just telling Alex everything she knew from the beginning.
18. How does Marifer know so much about the case anyway?
We know that she's a lawyer, but she sure had a lot of helpful information.
19. What happened between Sara and Marifer that made them fall out?
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The last conversation they had was apparently not pleasant, since Marifer was distraught about something and Sara blew her off to go on a trip with Rodolfo. Whatever it was, it made Marifer spend 18 years gathering the information she passes along to Alex.
20. Why was Alex convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years in jail?
The Lazcanos forced him to take the blame for Sara's accident, but Alex ended up being convicted of murder — the judge thought he cut the strings on the parachute because he wanted to kill Rodolfo for getting his sister pregnant. But where was the evidence for that? Even if the investigation proved that someone tampered with the parachute, there wasn't anything that proved it was Alex.
21. Is it possible that César actually cared about Sara, in his own twisted way?
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César and Elisa have an explosive confrontation in the season finale, in which he swears he had nothing to do with Sara's fall and actually manages to look sincere. When Elisa leaves, he looks emotional. This could just be because his favorite child wants nothing to do with him, or he might be emotional because Sara's death truly makes him sad.
22. How did Sara die?
Sara was alive when the ropes on the parachute broke, and she was alive when she fell in the water. She was unconscious and bleeding on the way to the hospital, but the fact that they were taking her to the hospital to begin with tells us that she didn't die on impact. We saw the doctor tell Alex that she died at the hospital, but Alex never saw her body.
23. Did César kill Sara on a completely separate occasion?
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After his confrontation with Elisa in the season finale, César seemingly remembers an encounter he had with Sara in the past, in which someone was strangling her and César was pointing a gun in her direction. We hear the gun go off, but we don't actually see César shoot her. Did he shoot Sara? Did he shoot the person who was strangling her?? WHAT COULD THIS MEAN????
24. If not César, then who killed Sara?
This one might seem obvious, but I screamed at my TV when the last episode ended and we still didn't know. The most obvious suspects are César and Mariana Lazcano, who both had reasons for wanting Sara out of the way and had the means to kill her. However, if you really think about it, we haven't eliminated any suspects besides Rodolfo, Elisa, and Alex.
25. Whose body did Alex dig up in his backyard?
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After finding a secret diary in Sara's room, Alex learned two things: 1) Sara had some mental health troubles that he hadn't been aware of and 2) There was a body buried in his backyard. When he dug it up, he found a skull with a bullet hole in the forehead. Could this be Sara's body? It would certainly fit with César's memory.
26. Finally, is Sara even dead?!
Netflix / Courtesy Everett Collection
As far as we know, Alex never saw his sister's body, and she clearly had a lot more going on than he knew about. With all the inconsistencies surrounding her death, I'm starting to think it's possible she never died. Plus, every single time we see her gravestone, you can't clearly see the year of her death. That could mean nothing, or it could be the show's way of hinting that it never happened. I know, I know, it's a wild theory, but this show has made me paranoid.
