Sandra, who is a police assistant, should not come into contact with any dead body at a crime scene. It’s not her job. She is dedicated to writing traffic tickets in a quiet town in Cantabria, even though this exasperates Tello (Karra Elejalde), her father, who had been an important Civil Guard agent. He believes he is wasting her intelligence and her photographic memory.
But, when Sandra enters an isolated cabin in the Pasiego Miera valley, she finds the body of Juliana, an old woman who had theoretically been buried seven years ago. Who is, then, on Juliana’s tombstone? The case seems to date back to the same period in which Castro (Joel Bosqued), the father of his son, was imprisoned for a drug trafficking crime for which he is about to finish his sentence.
Cantabria, one more character.
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It is understandable the existence of Second death. As demonstrated by the critical and popular success of Iron and Rapa, the thriller works wonderfully on the platform. Subscribers want murders. In this sense, the creation of Agustín Martínez (one of the members behind the pseudonym Carmen Mola) understands the objective. What could you ask of a rural thriller? First of all, a sense of the place in which it is set as a distinctive element and from which to feed.
Here Cantabria shines, both for the beauty of the landscapes and for how useful certain remote homes are, the rural character, the local idiosyncrasy and for the dynamics established between the characters. This allows suspects, acquaintances, key witnesses and investigators to know each other and be related in one way or another with a minimum of plausibility (something that precisely last week I reproached Ericfrom Netflix, which treats Manhattan as if it were Setcases).
The central axis of ‘Second Death’ is the two of them and the scars that do not heal.
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Cantabria is even part of the conflict between father and daughter: he reproaches her for returning there to be a mother with a job that is not up to her skills. There is a reading by the author of the series in this open wound: the defense of societies beyond large cities like Madrid and the most basic capitalist and elitist mentality, which associates a job position with the validation of the individual.
Martínez, even being faithful to a well-worn genre, finds ways to mislead the viewer while maintaining coherence in the narration of the mystery: watching the first two episodes does not imply imagining how the next ones will develop, quite the opposite. However, this does not prevent the viewer from wondering at some points if the story lurches and notice how the signs of suspects and witnesses are progressively added to secondary ones.
Joel Bosqued is Castro, who has just finished serving time for drug trafficking.
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But the tandem formed by Amorós and Elejalde is so solid that even photographic memory is not perceived as an opportunistic tool but as a valid metaphor for the distance that separates these characters: she cannot forget any detail of her life and he, in Instead, he begins to suffer from senile dementia (and has some resentment towards his daughter precisely because of her ability).
