And they are layering it on thick: Mafin dialog with Fina having bought muffins (no, really) as a gift for Marta, from Marta’s “favorite pastry shop”; Fina gesturing with a muffin intentionally on display, before remembering suizos – not as a product, but as process: do you remember how we made suizos?
Everyone here remembers the Toledo Suizo Dough Massacre, Fina. In detail. Including the bit where no suizos ever materialized out of that scene.
But the winking at the fandom is even wider: with Fina making happy little sounds while eating a piece of muffin and commenting how good it is (yes, Mafin has its moments), and then Marta gets to say that she misses cooking with Fina (all right, Writing Room, who giggled at writing this dialog?) and when Fina comments that her new kitchen is almost ready for use, Marta says she cannot wait to inaugurate that kitchen.
And that is not just a wink at the fandom, but also a gear change for Marta, who has become so careful around Fina, over Fina’s constant distancing, with initiating any kind of flirting, always trying to gauge the possible reaction first. Here, she’s the one to launch the suggestive comment, and Fina seems at ease with it, which is another interesting gear shift.
But from the top: Editing puts this scene after two full minutes of Begoña missing Luz, talking about how they could trust each other with anything, how happy she was to have Luz with her, how she notices her absence again already, “you don’t know how much”. (Lapausa’s credit in the title sequence and Luz are gone, and Begoña is left without her wife for good. Damn it.)
After this, Marta and Fina: also with a history of trust and marriage, and with a new secret between them. It’s another coffee date, but it doesn’t feel as sad or as cold. Fina’s dove-blue trenchcoat and Marta’s red coat deliver another on the show’s trademark red/blue combinations, with Fina sporting yet another turtleneck. Striped! The last time either of them got as close to a sailor shirt was the striped top Marta wore in the 370s.
Fina, with her couch cushion fort established as a place to retreat to when she needs it, seems finally in a position where she can be a little less defensive. She listens to Marta’s woes about having had to be the one to pass on the news of Brossard’s death to his wife (another marriage interrupted…) and voices support; she even asks about the company on her own and it’s Marta who changes the topic.
Fina has had another job interview and another rejection because what they were looking for was “a man”. And Fina may have changed a lot, but there is that same twist around her mouth as in Season 1 (remember “sí, padre, un hombre” at Isidro way back when?) when she has to say “un hombre” and it sounds like “Burn down the patriarchy!” and I love it.
Marta doesn’t offer money or contacts, only encouragement. Fina gets a line that she hopes to find a job soon (setup for needing to take on a job at the factory even if she doesn’t like it, to pay her rent and to be integrated back into one of the central sets?), and then we get to “I got you muffins at your favorite patisserie.” *guffaw at the Writing Room*
And they get two minutes of being cute, undercut by Marta remembering the call by Bianca she is keeping to herself – of course just when Fina seems to try to let her walls down just a little bit.
And Marta overwhelms those walls for a minute when she has also brought a gift: a poem anthology by Rosa Chacel, which is a feminist and deep-bonds-between-women choice (the una múscia oscura sonnet to María Zambrano? Uh-hum), even if not a very probable one: Chacel was fighting on the Republican side in the Civil War and was in exile in South America in 1960, and the only anthology Chacel did publish to that date was her 1936 collection, with two more volumes appearing only after her return in Spain in the 1970s, so her works would have been hard to come by. But who knows what booksellers Marta de la Reina has access to? (@wirepaladin theorizing she might have found a volume smuggled out to France during her time in Nice!)
But who cares about that next to Marta’s reasoning of “I read these in your absence, and it hurt not to be able to share all this beauty”? And her suggestion to read them together, now? Marta, the lesbiana intensa that you are.
The mention of her absence has an impact on Fina (Brunet and the small details again, and if this was Directing, it's incredible that they make space for that on a schedule that tight):
And now the lesbians will probably buy up all the Chacel poem anthologies (she did write more novels than poems) at the used bookstores around the globe… The striking thing about her poetry, for me, or rather the most moving one, are the poems she wrote in dedication among the exile community (like the one to Zambrano): always trying to preserve memories and the bonds of a time and community lost and torn apart by the war and then the dictatorship, like photos to call up and preserve earlier times shared.
Fina seems touched and a little overwhelmed; there’s the wall again (look at the detail work in keeping the smile a little banked here)---
---but then she takes a breath and stays in the moment, calls Marta “Mi amor” and it sounds uncalculated.
They get a happy little cadenza over it (Marta’s exhale at 00:34:38, how is MB so good with that kind of thing) but when Fina lowers her guard enough to tell Marta she loves her near, that Marta is good for her (and they get one of the show’s central love motives with it, 00:34:44), Marta flashes back to the phone call she hasn’t passed on, and then suggests they eat those muffins. (pushing away Chacracore Barbie in favor of Mafin? There won’t be protest heard in this fandom corner!)
So. Muffins. And remembering suizos, and making them together. And Marta’s little “Mhm” over this smile:
And a chewing Fina declaring the muffins “Delicious!” – well, at least the Writing Room is lighting meta torches again, but also Fina, within the narrative, seems, tentatively, ready to reach out, feeling a little safer?
(oh God, how bad is the next week going to be if we are handed a buoy of this size, in these neon colors? - There is one earlier moment in this episode when Marta tells Valentina she knows about break-ups. Better hold onto that sugar high while it lasts!)
