*Episode premise spoilers.*
It’s penultimate episode time! This is a big one, which I always appreciate. Major stuff going down here.
Andrea is angry and scared. She hates that their house is being sold in the divorce, and she does not want to talk to a therapist as a prelude to her parents’ custody hearing. After storming away from her lunch shouting, “I hate you, Dad! I want a divorce from you too!”, she decides to run away. Soon, it’s all hands on deck with the adults. Julia and Ruy, both frantic and upset, are forced to work together to try and find her, with Fausto doing what he can to help.
Before we get into the big stuff, I love this little scene at the beginning of Idalia showing the house to a couple—it’s evident she doesn’t want to leave, but while her sabotage of a potential sale is at first kept to subtle remarks, it quickly balloons into, “At night, a child ghost appears. Poor thing, they say he drowned in the water tank. We sprinkled holy water, but it won’t go away.”
Andrea is a pretty smart and resourceful kid, and even in the midst of dealing with some big emotions that make her act recklessly, she still has enough presence of mind to concoct of relatively decent runaway plan. She definitely makes it hard for her parents to find her, and she thinks to bring snacks. Still, she puts herself in a very ill-advised position here.
Ruy, to his credit, steps up in this episode. For once, he doesn’t make excuses for selfish or distracted behavior and instead just springs right into action. He’s not thinking all that clearly—at first, he just asks people on the street if they’ve seen a little girl, before it occurs to him to pull up a picture of Andrea on his phone—but he’s not trying to deflect or argue about why it’s not really his fault. He just tries to make it better, and when Julia comes in hot, ready to blame him for what’s happened, he just takes it.
It’s a crucible moment for both of them—the sort of high-stress, high-stakes situation that can either make them pull together or break any remaining positive emotions they have toward one another. And I like that, while of course there’s a lot of focus on how Julia and Ruy are dealing with this crisis, they’re not alone in it. Idalia is on the case, ready to do anything from checking Andrea’s room to confirm whether she changed out of her school uniform to clarifying details about Andrea’s distinguishing features when Ruy and Julia report her missing. And Fausto, who’s dating Julia but still likes Ruy despite everything that’s gone down, just wants to support all of them; he calls in family connections to get the police to listen to them, and he’s there for Julia no matter what she needs.
Strong episode overall. Season finale next week!
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