How Fina’s outfit is color-coded to match the painting next to her: a ship thrown onto the shore while sunny life bustles on around it. Lost, adrift, without control over her own path?
And this is mirrored in the painting above Marta's head. It's another ship lying on shore, its dark outline matching her dark robe: another standstill. Robbed of the wind and the knowledge of a clear path ahead she thought she had regained after Pelayo’s gaslighting?
This tentative reunion is but step one; the gaslighting will continue to reverberate: again, Marta voices her fear that their relationship wasn’t singular, that Fina loved someone else just as much, that Fina planned a future with someone else.
Digna frames Marta’s hesitancy and insecurity as hurt pride, but Fina has lied, and and Fina has managed to be happy with someone else (or so it seems, and the Haunted Flutes comment on it at 00:17:15 (Mafin Drive Cut)), and that is upending their entire relationship to Marta (Pelayo’s Ominous Woodwinds at 00:16:39) --- even if Digna, older, knows that what counts in the long run is the chance to be together regardless, but neither Marta nor Fina can know that yet.
Digna’s observation as well as Marta’s affirmation that she loves Fina get the Falling Chords Love Motif with the with the little ping (00:17:46), and the final frame of Marta gets the second part of Love Motif – the fifth drop and rise – on piano (00:18:28).
Marta is clear on her feelings: the scene is set in her room (with this very culinary shot that serves as a way into her interior through sound), with a throughline sound carpet of a Bolero (this one, a 2018 ambiance take) as a highly emotional, passionate genre, and Marta gets to make romantic declarations: she doesn’t want Fina to smile lovestruck at someone else, hold hands in a coat pocket with someone else, imagine a future with someone else; she wants a life with Fina.
Fina… doesn’t want to be at odds with Marta, and she has made a conscious choice to stay (and broken up with Bianca once Bianca was thousands of miles away), but she is still keeping a careful distance: intent on making up with Marta, but without making herself too vulnerable.
Also without making clear declarations on her Argentina chacracore idyll life being over for her heart. It’s not lies, but it is careful, intentional omissions, and that makes them hurtful.
And I think it is a very intentional choice by Directing to keep things reserved here: Marta and Fina may kiss, but they still have distance to cover and a lot of trust to rebuild.
When Marta anguishes over Fina having felt the same for someone else as she has for Marta, Fina’s answer is “There is no one like you.” It decidedly isn’t “I loved her less than I love you.”
When Marta says, heartbroken, “I thought I was singular (única) to you", Fina's answer is not "You are", but "I was also uneasy with you having had another relationship."
Those two things are not the same, and these two are not on the same page yet. Fina keeps holding back. And Marta’s final, “No, I do love you more, believe me,” is not just cute. It’s where they are at, at this moment, because Fina wants to be there, and she made a choice, but she is not there yet with her heart, at least not out in the open.
And if the testing way Fina looks at Marta in the end (great detail by Brunet/Directing) is any indication, then this is just Curve #1 of the rollercoaster, I would assume. As it should be, since there is still so much to work through for both of them.
There is still a lot more buried underneath Fina’s time in Argentina (which Writing Room would not make use of that?), and the first skeleton will be Bianca trying to reestablish ties that have not been as neatly cut for Fina yet.
This is not the reconciliation. This is just a first step, with still too much unsaid, and it looks like the next little rupture over Marta’s jealousy and Fina guarding her relationship with Bianca to herself is already knocking on the door.
I hope that they will not wipe Fina's trauma away, but continue to explore it. Otherwise, the week of being utterly cagey next to Marta, to now suddenly being able to communicate with her and trust her again because one lie has exploded in her face, would be a hell of a shortcut (even if an understandable one for a daily soap).
It is fantastic nuance work how the Writing Room and Directing keep them both relatable, and readable to the audience, but not to each other. Marta is fighting her own trauma of being abandoned and being deemed insufficient by romantic partners, and now the one person who has always been the proof to the contrary has both left her and lied to her; Fina needs to work through what she calls "cowardishness", but what is actually a trauma response of wanting a safe place and automatically trying to appease anyone who might offer it, without looking at what she herself might want or feel first.
But I still think Mafin is set up for a full “I love(d) no one like I love you” arc. With how the Writing Room is leaving these blanks now, they are teasing exactly that narrative again: with the reunion in #561, and now with this slow "Fina lived a different life under different conditions, but now she has to consciously choose Marta all over again like she did on instinct in the hallway" tale.
Let’s go check on those dahlias, Digna, your daughters will need a while longer to sort out their marriage.
