Cable Girls (Las Chicas del Cable), season 4, has comas and kidnappings and prison breaks and divorces and epic love stories and evil villains and the tightest bunch of friends you’ll ever find on television. There are a few spoilers in my review of this exciting season.
Let’s start right out reminding you who the chicas are using this fantastic image from Blanca Suárez on Instagram.
That’s Marga (Nadia de Santiago) hiding behind the tire. She used to be shy and naive but she’s waaayyy beyond that now. Toward the back are Oscar (Ana Polvorosa) and Carlota (Ana Fernández). Oscar used to be Sara, but prefers the male pronouns now. I’m going to stick with male pronouns for Oscar here, although at times he must still go around Madrid acting as Sara. In front of the left front tire is Lidia/Alba (Blanca Suárez), considered by most to be the star of this brilliant ensemble cast. On the far right is Ángeles (Maggie Civantos), now an entrepreneurial single lady with a daughter to support.
There are only a few new characters in season 4. Returning was Francisco (Yon González). Yeah, spoiler alert. He didn’t die at the end of season 3 like we thought. He spent the first half of season 4 in a coma. A whole year in a coma. When he finally woke up he only remembered one thing – Alba. You have to love a telenovela. Francisco spent one day regaining his muscle strength after a year in bed and then this happened:
At the time, Lidia was living with Carlos (Martiño Rivas) as they raised their daughter Eva together. The love triangle between Lidia, Francisco and Carlos never seems to get sorted out.
Doña Carmen (Concha Velasco) got out of prison about the same time Francisco woke up from his coma. She immediately started blackmailing her son Carlos and her daughter Elisa (Ángela Cremonte) in her efforts to kidnap baby Eva and take her to America where she intended to drain the baby’s blood to cure her own cancer. Doña Carmen is a monumental evil villain. One of the best on television, and there are some good ones to compete against.
We’re up to 1931 now, and divorce has become legalized.
Marga and Pablo (Nico Romero) are among the first in the country to get divorced. He wasn’t inclined to forget her little slip with his identical twin brother last season. Marga got a job in the accounting department – the first woman – so they had to work together. Awkward.
Also very modern in message, Carlota was running for mayor. And she was going to win. Until she got tossed in prison for the murder of her opponent. Which she obviously did not do.
Carlota’s platform was progressive. She was a female candidate, which was revolutionary in itself, but she promoted acceptance of homosexuality and other modern ideas. All the chicas showed advanced thinking. They embraced Oscar as male and used male pronouns for him.
I don’t know if the word transgender was in use at that time, but I do know from watching Transparent that many transgender individuals found their way to Berlin in the years before World War II. Oscar wasn’t alone.
The women became amateur sleuths to prove Carlota innocent of murder.
First the girls got Carlota freed, then they had to stage a prison break to get someone else out. Oh, the plot twists are delicious! The women had help from Ángeles’ lingering romance with Inspector Cuevas (Antonio Velázquez) in their illegal efforts to obtain justice.
When the very exciting prison break was all over, the women had to scatter in every direction because the police were after them. The final words of the season were a promise that they will all be brought back together by Ángeles’ daughter and the civil war. The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 and ended in 1939, so season 5 is going to jump ahead at least 5 years.
Season 4 did not disappoint. It was different enough to feel new. It was full of exciting action and emotional home run hits. Yet it contained the same characters we know and love from past seasons. It’s easy to see why this Spanish telenovela is such a hit in the U.S.
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Have you seen season 4 of Cable Girls (Las Chicas del Cable)? Was it as good as you expected?
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