Sigh. Carolina.
Caro, Caro, Caro.
You and your friends are being watched and having your rooms searched and objects seized by someone with at least assault on their minds. Your friends come to the (wise) conclusion that the questions you all have been asking and the answers you all have been seeking aren't worth dying for. So what do you, Caro, do? Do you support their decision? Or shame them as cowards for prioritizing their well-being? If you chose the latter, then you are definitely Caro. 🙄
Also, the way she lights up when Marcos makes it clear he will continue to investigate, as though he were doing so for truth, justice and bravery when he explicitly states he's only interested in pursuing any of it because he and his sister have no choice about living at the school, so he can't afford to ignore danger. Literally the only one with a relatively reasonable reason to continue and still, the best course of action is to tell an adult and hope for the best. But then we wouldn't have a show, so I guess, thank you, Caro???
Not a Caro fan but I suppose if she wasn’t nosy and hot and Ivan and Marcos weren’t panting for that hotness and therefore trying to satisfy her nosiness, we’d not have a show. Teen hormones move the world indeed! :P
She really is not a likeable character in the first season, is she?
Looking at it this time, I even read Marcos initial interest in her aside from "oh, pretty girl" as tepid at best - mostly because he was distracted by being a pseudo orphan, locating his missing parents and being mother/father/brother to his little sister - until Ivan made it clear he was jealous and hella nervous having Marcos share any face time with Caro. After all of Ivan's antagonism, I think that had the effect of putting her more squarely in Marco's sights. Then once he got to kissing her, well, someone remembered they were still a teenager with a tive hormones and no sense and the rest is 7 awesome seasons of history 😁
Like, I remembered she annoyed the living fuck out of me but I forgot how much she annoyed the living fuck out of me, you know?
All of her grand insistence that consistently led them all into trouble and danger and her utterly incomprehension when any of them wanted to stop was frustrating.
Hahaha yeah, she is very self-absorbed in s1; less so in s2 but she was unbearable in s1. I always wondered how much it was sheltered lack of knowledge of the world and consequences.
Marcos and Carol’s love story really did fall flat throughout - their chemistry was so-so and the narrative was not there to compensate for it; luckily the writers I think realized it fairly quickly and switched to other ships and other character dynamics. I am glad they did, watching Marcos-Caro-Ivan triangle for 7 seasons would have been unbearable.
Also, I do think that after the end of the show and with all the horrors they lived through and all the reveals about secrets and families, they are all going to have insane but understandable trust issues their whole lives; I think it would be hard for any of the survivors to trust any outsiders (sort of like survivors of cults or other similar scenarios.) Ivan and Julia have each other and they both lived through all this insanity, but Marcos who ends the show single, will probably find it hard to find someone to truly open up to romantically who could also get it and him.
🎶 Coming out of the dark...🎶
Most of the older kids from rich families were sent to that place because they were either high key or low key maladjusted, no way are they suitably functional members of the larger society. They better thank the gods for all that mommy/daddy money! Although I'm not sure how much Ivan will have once the government is through raiding Noiret's finances and honestly, he and Maria deserve to be incandescently wealthy for all the shit these people put them through. They were true outsiders without a lick of connection to all the orphanage craziness, mad scientists and Nazi ancestry until one of them decided to buy/steal a baby.
Ivan and Julia can and will break up a thousand times but will always flow back to each other because they just get one another. Indo think they'll be that couple that everyone from the outside will wonder how's that working? But survive Laguna Negra with not just your soul intact but refined, with a lover willing to buoy you or sacrifice for you, make you smile even when they feel like crying, can cry with you as well as love you wholeheartedly and you'll be Julivan. Still one of the gold standards.
Re: the triangle that was mercifully short: this is not my first rewatch and I still wonder where the fault lies. Was Caro's characterization poorly executed by the writers? Was AdA's acting not up to par or didn't match the specific Nancy Drew energy enough to be charming? Let's be honest, the Marcos acting was hardly burning up the acting sheets, so really how much damage could 'meh' acting do? Was Caro just doomed to fail because no one wanted a princess heroine? The only fact I know is Yon Gonzalez feasted and the show was all the better for it. The show was very good at making surefooted changes in direction and how to use their ever expanding cast, that helped a lot. As you pointed out, they toned down Caro in S2 and even tried to open her story up by expounding upon her having a Peter Pan mother, etc. Actually, it makes her and Marcos make even more sense on paper as two kids forced to be not just grown ups but parental but that so-so chemistry really hamstrung them. Chemistry is so peculiar - she's beautiful and he's a near literal old school Abercrombie and Fitch model, how they were unable to scrape together a scintilla of real chemistry blows my mind.
I hope Ivan and Maria get to keep Noiret’s money. They deserve it!
At least some parents finally woke up when the school was turned into a literal plague spot! Though I was grimly amused that even when the school had mines the freaking plague and the military there, Julia’s mother didn’t bother to show up.
Like we were chatting - I feel genuinely horrible for Marcos, who by the end of it has got to have insane trust issues - his existence is result of Nazis trying to control his mom, his sister is his mother’s clone, his father is a murderous abusive Nazi, his happy childhood is a lie, his first love died, he got seduced by a teacher who turned out to be a member of an evil org in addition needing to go to jail for statutory, and the last gal he was considering liking was a psycho Nazi spy. He is NEVER going to trust another human being outside of his small core of friends who survived with him and his mom and his uncle. Honestly, it’s good he had Paula to protect or I think he may have cracked.
And yeah, Julia and Ivan are in it for the long haul with a lot of drama every day but they both feed off it. Clearly nobody will ever get either of them the way the other does or love them the way the other does and just - I get ridiculously mushy thinking of them. Tho I hope they never ever have children. Also, if I were inclined to be a pessimist, I’d think their lifespans are kinda shortened if for no other reason (tho plague and experimental meds aren’t a great help) than the bit where Ivan took her into a room full of radiation with no protective gear because it was either that or she’d die. (Out of everything he ever did for the love of her, that will always be the most insane thing to me, even more so than giving her the last of the medicine so she’d get to live a day longer even tho it meant he’d die. Because he was literally going into that on her word that a ghost told her tho he can’t see any of it himself and it sounds bona fide nuts; and it wasn’t even a work of a moment but deliberate hours of trying to get there. God, they were insane!)
I need Maria and Hector to marry so Maria has someone to eventually replace the awesome Fermin and Ivan and Marcos can become literal bros.
The thing with the original love triangle - it’s part chemistry part writing. I don’t think Caro had chemistry with either of her leading men or really anyone. But the character was not too interesting either tbh (except for her last season.) Points to the makers seeing what works and what doesn’t and modifying accordingly (by the end, it was pretty much The Ivan Show and I am not complaining.) Also yes on using their large cast - by the end it was a huge cast but integrated and I could easily keep track of all of them.
Ivan and Julia do go on to have a daughter named Carolina. They make a cameo in the new amazon prime show el internado las cumbres. They’re on a talk show promoting a book they wrote about their experience at the school.
