The Killer Is Revealed
The season 1 finale of White Lines begins with a flashback of the past as we see Axel’s final moments, struck by the car in the middle of the night. Five hours earlier we see Axel at the party, blowing a whistle and telling everyone to follow him. He takes the 600+ strong crowd to a stage and speaks to the entire group, telling them that his Dad was the good guy and he’s decided to burn everything and start again anew. As he stands before a pyre of Christ’s Redeemer, he watches it burn before throwing his vinyl disks into the flames too. Boxer finds Oriol and rubs him down, cleaning off the blood and wiping down the camper van. Soon after, he rings the police who in turn ring Zoe and announce the bad news. While she wallows in grief, Oriol heads home and tells Andreu what he’s done. Meanwhile, Anna rings Zoe and invites her to the wedding. It’s here she breaks the news that her Father has died. At the same time, Marcus and Kika start to get closer, with the former deciding to give up the all-nighters and smoking to live a cleaner life. It’s here Kika admits to him that Anna slept with Axel in the past. As Marcus contemplates what to do next, the Romanian family arrive and grab him at the estate, demanding to know what happened to Yuri and Grigor. A frazzled Marcus mentions the water and how they were at the bottom of the ocean – conveniently forgetting that he himself helped Zoe bundle the body onto the boat to take away from there. After finding nothing, the Romanian family decide Marcus owes them 273,000 euros and ride away, telling him not to be a stranger. Boxer resigns from Andreu’s team, just in time for Zoe to arrive and run him over. He’s still alive though but a shocked Anna helps bundle Boxer into the boot. After tying him up at a remote location, Zoe blames Boxer for ruining her life and demands to know the truth, hitting him constantly with powerful jets of water. It turns out Axel signed over all of his properties to Oriol a week before he died and with the money made, decided to burn all of it on the bonfire we saw earlier in the episode. As Anna learns what he’s done, we cut back to that night as she watches the shreds of paper rain down from the sky. Dave arrives at the scene and tells Zoe he wasn’t the one who murdered Axel either. He also vouches for Oriol, going on to tell them all that he was the one person lost at the party, thanks in part to his tattoo. Dave decided to shoot him up with heroin and as the hit wore off, they both slept together. He didn’t say anything before because Andreu is obviously important on the island and he didn’t want his or Oriol’s reputation tarnished. Back in the past, we see Anna heading back and speaking to Axel, promising to tell Marcus what they’ve been doing and how they slept together. It turns out Anna was the one who killed Axel because she couldn’t bear to think about being away from Marcus. After drowning Axel, Marcus arrived to help dispose of the body. Anna snatched up the keys from a passed-out Oriol and the duo drove away. In the present, Marcus speaks to Anna at her wedding and she admits that she still loves him. As they talk, we cut back one more time and see Marcus hit Axel with the car when he stumbled out the boot still alive. Anna smacked him in the ribs with a spanner and then stabbed him in the neck, making her the official murderer. As we cut forward we see Anna reluctantly marrying George, Boxer driving off in his car and Zoe narrating about her journey up until this point. She tells us she feels cold about what happened but what really matters is the journey and how everyone should live their life full-on until you die. As Zoe spreads the ashes around for both Axel and her Father, her story seemingly comes to a close. We then cut to Marcus speaking to Andreu about his supply chain and advertising himself as the one who should be leading the entire group, which is where the episode and series ends. It’s hard to know where to start with White Lines. The music has been relatively good, as you’d expect from a show about the rave scene, but the inconsistent characters and big reveal at the end doesn’t feel very satisfying. It turns out Anna was the stone cold killer with Marcus along as the accomplice and partly responsible for what happened. While this does make sense, Anna deciding that she’s done this exclusively for Marcus and because she’s in love with him feels ill-fitting for her character. She was the one who seduced Axel in the first place and clearly she didn’t care enough about Marcus if she did that. If she’d also done this for the money (which we’ve seen she cares about given the big house and her kids talking about Anna pressuring Marcus into buying one they could barely afford) it may have made sense motive-wise but this feels like a bit of a flimsy cop-out. Zoe finally gets the closure she needed although it took her running down Boxer in a car park to learn the truth and her fractured family life back home, thanks to her affair with him, remains in tatters. There’s no closure to her family sub-plot and we’re left to contemplate what this means going forward. It also doesn’t help that she blames Boxer for ruining her life despite being the one to kiss back and tell her husband that kissing him felt like cheating on Boxer. The rest of the plots are also left open for a second season that may or may not come and given the polarizing thoughts around this one, it’ll be interesting to see how many people stick it out to the end. The Martinez/Calafat family feud feels half-baked and barely brought up except to inject some tension midway through, the Romanian angle just isn’t that interesting given Marcus isn’t a very easy character to empathise with, and the rest of the cast have little to play with either. It’s a shame too because there’s certainly potential here but unfortunately White Lines squanders that around the midway point and never looks like recovering. Despite some promising moments of drama, White Lines fails to live up to expectations.
