The Sacrifice
Episode 5 of Mortel begins with Luisa and Victor kissing but are soon interrupted by Sofiane, who shows them a video of Modibo. Luisa explains that the man is not an initiated like his Grandma and is using the teens to speak to the spirits. A determined Sofiane then heads off to find the man with the mask, as he believes he’s his brother’s killer. Victor and Luisa are more reluctant though, which causes them to argue. Audrey looks through all the different drawings again and watches the video of the day Sofiane and Victor burst into her office. She sees their powers first-hand as they made her go to sleep and erased her memories. The next day, Audrey calls Victor and Sofiane into her office, revealing that she knows what they did to her and demands that they go inside Laurine’s head to find out what she wanted to tell her before she died. Victor does just this but all he sees is Laurine jumping out of the window over and over again. Unable to get him out of the vision, Sofiane jumps in too and brings him back. Meanwhile, Luisa asks her Grandma to teach her everything she knows as someone is using voodoo to hurt people and she wants to stop them. She refuses, claiming it is way too dangerous. Luisa however, decides to go against her advice and steals some of her voodoo materials anyway. Luisa’s Grandma seeks help from the Desandans, who tels her to contain Obe until they arrive. She speaks to a woman in church who explains that with the help of Luisa, she should be able to do it. Elizabeth replies that Luisa hasn’t completed her initiation yet so she asks her to help. However, she refuses as she explains that there are worse things coming. Meanwhile, Luisa performs a ritual to locate the house where the masked men took his victims which leads them to number 314 on the street. They head inside and find all the shoes belonging to the teens. After Obe materializes, claiming that the murderer is in the house, the masked man appears and hits Sofiane. When he wakes up, he finds himself hung on a tree with his feet in a bucket of blood. The masked man summons a spirit and possesses Sofiane, only the spirit turns out to be Obe who tells him that he has failed at his task, even after he killed someone. The masked man then decides to try again and pulls his knife. Obe begs him not to but just as he is about to stab Sofiane, Obe jumps out of Sofiane’s body and sacrifices himself instead, causing him to disappear in the flames. Luisa’s Grandma picks them up and berates them for what they’ve done. She tells them she’ll take care of Obe as he has been manipulating them all along. As he heads home, Sofiane finds a letter threatening the rest of his family. The next day, he tells Victor that he has won and he’ll now stop using his powers because of the threat to his family. Victor heads home and after receiving some advice from his step-dad, decides to throw a party to help build bridges with the people around him. However, we see during the party that things are still tense between the three teens. The party begins and we see elsewhere that Victor’s mum visits Audrey and they sleep together. After she leaves, Audrey decides to offer her help to Luisa’s Mum in catching Obe. While they perform a ritual using Audrey’s blood, we see Obe visiting Sofiane , but soon summoned by the Grandma as she carries on with the ritual. While Luisa and Victor sleep together, Victor has a flashback to his childhood where we see that he seemed to have been abused by a man. This prompts him to stop kissing Luisa and tells her to go home. As she does, she sees a strange red flash in her house while we see Obe speaking menacingly to her grandma. While the penultimate episode of Mortel brings us some tense scenes, it still doesn’t offer enough depth to make it a more engaging or thrilling supernatural drama. With just one episode left, a lot of questions are still unanswered and I’m left wondering if everything will be resolved in the final episode. It’s a shame too as Mortel does have a lot of potential but unfortunately fails to utilize it to its fullest.
