Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.
At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.
Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community […] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”
The Red Dress from the Damage Repair Interview has finally arrived!
(just pretty screencaps and scattered musings).
The Red Dress is there - and yes, a significant time after the jarring Fina Farewell press bits - and it's spectacular (thanks Costuming) and, it does signfy a new phase for Marta, as expected, but ugh, why does it have to be a gift from Pelayo, and why is is tied to being Mrs. Gobernador Civíl, with her poise intact at all hours? (grumble)
Dramaturgically, my guess is that the writing room plays anti-suspense Hitchcock with us while Costuming is in on it, distracting us and also slapping us around a little.
Hitchcock's suspense formula was that the audience knows more than the character. (which has been true throughout Marta and FIna falling in love, and it has been true throughout their relationship when it comes come to the public eye: the audience, along with Marta and Fina, knew their secret; and it is true when it comes to Fina's departure where the audience knows that Pelayo is culpable, and Marta does not) What is happening now is an 180 on that: an anti-suspense of sorts.
Because Marta - whom we've followed down to the bottom of every glass, and with whom we've crumpled to every floor - left for Madrid cajoled, desolate and adrift. And returns perfectly poised and functioning, and the audience does not know why.
Now the character knows more than the audience (or doesn't she?) and we are left guessing. And that is a smart move on the part of the Writing Room.
One, because it makes for engaging drama. Two, because the offscreen cut resolves Marta's downward spiral as a reset that wouldn't have been credible onscreen (we have indeed been at the bottom of every glass and on every floor and not even MB could have acted getting up from that across the span of a week). And three, Marta's opaqueness gives the Writing Room more options going forward (@roadien60 has mentioned this, too, in pondering whether a return of Brunet was up in the air at the time of drawing this up): they can sideline Marta as perfectly functioning family/factory support for the time being (=Marta pretends or has simply shut down), they can match that attitude to someone new (=Marta indeed pulled herself out of the 9th circle of hell by her hair and sheer determination), they can triumphantly return her to Fina (=Marta played pretend all along).
For the time being, Marta is opaque and the audience is left guessing. And I personally am grinding my teeth at the "watch me stand devotedly in second row and be exactly the model wife and daughter society expect me to be while I also look like I don't mind" setting played out. But this setting has gaps: Marta gets meta lines, and she gets to talk to confidantes that hint at this role being just a role, while we guess what is underneath, and whether there is anything left, and whether Marta herself is even aware of it.
But the Writing Room wouldn't be the Writing Room if it didn't twist the knife a little more: they are playing up the companionship and intimacy between Marta and Pelayo that the audience knows to be untrue because Pelayo removed Fina from the picture and Marta wouldn't be laughing at his jokes if she knew.
Still, with all the teeth-grinding: those meta lines, when they appear, are great. And so is Belmonte's playing up Marta's opaqueness. The audience has always known Marta, and now it doesn't.
Knife Twist 1:
When Marta and Pelayo first return from Madrid (and when Marta matches better with the curtains behind her than with her husband, just saying), the first exchange they have is about having bought music together.
Anyone remember Fina saying that happiness is spending time with Marta on the sofa listening to the radio?
Yes, ouch. Sharing music means sharing tastes and passions. It's something intimate. (more grumbling from a Mafin perspective).
And Marta is poised and smiling, but the only one who's really happy with Marta in this return scene is not Marta herself, but Damián. He gets to say "you're the same!" so often that the audience realizes that it likely isn't true, especially when Marta's answer is evasive: she would not be a soul in pain any longer, she tells him "if you were worried about that".
It has been made very clear that Damián cares more about seeing Marta happy than about Marta being happy, and not being a soul in pain any longer has two answers: either you've overcome the pain, or you have overcome your soul.
And we can guess, as Marta's lines sound artful and learned, but we cannot look past her shutters. And into that space of doubt come the lines about women only being there to serve and obey and be invisible, about fulfilling roles, about not having freedom to choose (hello, show tagline!) and never enjoying the same agency as men.
Costuming, Camera and Directing also play in that in-between-space that Marta's opaqueness offers to the drama side of things.
Take, for instance, Marta mirroring Andrés when Begoña announces her engagement to Gabriel: they are standing in parallel position, the heartbreak of one matching the heartbreak of the other - or doesn't it? Aren't they equally lost and abandoned and aware of it?
"The people we love make their own decisions," Marta tells Andrés one episode later: she has bought into Pelayo's "Fina-abandoned-you" narrative because the only way to treat that open wound that wouldn't close was to rip out or to seal away the limb in question. But is she really moving on?
Marta gets some moments of processing with her confidantes, and they are small glimpses past that opaqueness, without resolving the question of where Marta stands now: she actively seeks out Carmen to speak to her, and she acts as a mirror to Andrés who voices his heartbreak over "the love of his life" marrying another, and what purpose does his life even have now. Marta tells him to move on: they have both been abandoned. (but, we can guess again, what has she ripped out, and what does she repress?)
The conversation with Carmen, in turn, happens at the end of a business talk on Pasión Oculta (which has been situated as a metaphor for Marta's relationship with Fina even though I still maintain that it should have been named Mi Mujer then) which Marta attended in The First Kiss Dress, bringing the memory of Fina yet a bit closer (thanks for ripping out my heart AGAIN, Costuming) while she admits that she keeps the pain buried inside and will never forget Fina. (and of course the Writing Room won't give her a line about "never stop loving her" because then the guessing game would be over).
The moments where the shutters go up, are amplified by the family drama plot where "Marta worrying about her family and stepping up to the plate at the company, being the person everyone can rely one once more" is not a role to guess at, but one familiar to the audience.
Also Marta gets to look fabulous in her red dress under a Tuscany Sunset light filter, framed by a lot of monochromatic dudes.
(Easy to get distracted from the analysis over this. Instead of stacking thought crates like on the right my brain may combust like the debris on the left.)
But what the entire explosion plots sets into motion is SdL at its feminist best: women of all ages and classes and in all kinds of situations (and also at odds with each other as @newsfromthegutter has pointed out for María) keeping things and each other afloat.
So it seems the opaqueness that Marta maintains - she left heartbroken and returned functioning - is contained to romance. In terms of keeping her family together and worrying about Andrés, she is familiar.
But there is one more space that might be in-between, and - again! - the audience (I would say "we", but I am careful with assuming. This is, after all, only what I am writing down) is left guessing, and that is the romance-adjacent space of Pelayo, and of Damián, who both interfere with Marta's love life in pushing her deeper into her role of Mrs. Gobernador Civíl, with the continued nagging about grandchildren.
(another hurtful moment: when Marta returns and speaks of maintaining the memories of lost love while opening herself to life again, Damián's reply is not "you could find a new girlfriend but please make her upper-class this time", but "how about that kid within your lavender marriage at last?")
Also hurtful: the casual intimacy between Marta and Pelayo on display.
And that is -_ I would wager - the Writing Room and Costuming slapping us around on purpose. And with purpose, because why lean into this companionable trust which viewers *know* to be built of false assumptions (Marta thinks Pelayo is her friend. He is not.) if not for momentum for a swing into the other direction?
Another knife twist: It is one thing (although it is a teeth-griding thing already) that Marta instinctively reaches out to Pelayo next to her and also lets him touch her in comfort when news about the explosion breaks: looking for comfort in a moment of fear. (still should have been Fina damnit) It is another thing to have Marta smile dotingly at Pelayo, and to accept how he places his hand on her knee. Is that now their level of comfort? That kind of gesture that Fina could not have allowed herself and themselves, not even in comfort, in front of others?
OUCH.
But this scene - the one directoly following the offstage Installation as Governor -has the most telling meta sequence so far: Marta aka The Gaslit One turning towards Pelayo, complimenting him for his practiced speech, that despite knowing he was reciting something memorized, he would have managed, for moments, to move her, as if he meant those words, as if they were coming from his heart for the first time.
And Pelayo's answer? That "we politicians" are good with pretending.
Dun-dun.
Meta breadcrumbs!
Yet another knife twist: Pelayo getting to button up Marta's blouse. Worse still: Marta asking him to do it. Turning her back to him. (Marta, he still has a dagger hidden away with which one person has already been stabbed. Just saying)
Now Marta could and should have come downstairs fully dressed. So, again, why set up this intimacy if not to make us gasp and build up something that will make the eventual reveal of what Pelayo has done all the more staggering? Not just the villain in her bedroom, but the villain who had his hands on her skin while he made sure that Fina does not?
Then again. This outfit. Severe but and utterly appealing.
Costuming, a word on security: does your workplace have fire extinguishers and a defibrillator? Because it should.
That bowtie approximation and that narrow tunic gap and the shoulder tailoring and the white shirt vibes and also the narrow horizontal lines of being caged behind tight bars? Genius. Also rien ne va plus.
No, really, this is just a bonus screenshot because I couldn't help myself.
Also in terms of adjusting/undoing kind-of-bowties, it's about time Fina turned the table on Marta there. If she returned.
Something else here, and that's Camera/Lighting, and it leads back to that first return scene quoted above where Marta's jacket aligned her more with the curtains than with the man next to her:
See how here Pelayo's cool muted blue ties him to the left side of the room with the shadows, while Marta's offwhite belongs to the other half on the light right?
Dun-dun.
This meta commentary teases are fun to detect. And we still don't know what is going on inside of Marta in terms of Fina and heartbreak and perhaps they had to write and perform it this openly because there was still no clarity about next season't personal (with or without Brunet): is Marta only performing the perfect companion or does she indeed find solace in the companionship with Pelayo? How deep will the betrayal run? What will she find out, and when?
If Fina doesn't return, there could a long period of Marta being focused on Andrés and herself being the love-lost twins at heart, dedicating themselves to family and eventually discovering Pelayo's dagger.
If Fina is slated to return - and I keep turning this in my head with @madronash - then the Writing Room will try to draw maximum drama from it. So probably obstacles in between them first. (Marta with another woman propositioning her, or on a rebound (again: opaque, which might be the only way to move that plot arc past the Mafin Fam)? Fina assuming Marta to be with another woman? Guilt and insecurity on both sides? Misunderstandings!) But then - does Marta already know? Is Pelayo already gone?
Is Marta in peril and will a Fina who does not trust her have to work with her against that danger? Will they both find out together and have to figure out a way to unseat Pelayo whose power networks have just grown exponentially - he could probably throw Fina in jail at blink in his new position, no proper trial needed.
The women on this show will figure something out. And they will look fabulous while they do so. (Costuming... meet me at the bar. I just want to talk)
[screenshots all thanks to mafinupdates on dailymotion; eps 417, 418, 421]
Watching Marta slip back into her role as wife and daughter is painful but necessary. It’s not enough for her to understand that she should have prioritized herself long ago. She needs to put her words into practice. This means she must go into the belly of the beast and do battle. After all, how can she establish boundaries if she refuses to participate in her life? She can’t. I understand some viewers are frustrated to see her back in the cage. We hate it for her. That said, Marta brought the key into the cage with her - her voice. She’s been more vocal about her discomfort in the last few weeks than she has been in the entirety of the show. Every opportunity she gets, she reminds Pelayo and Damian that she is performing, and the performance stops the moment she comes home. This might seem like too small a change for some, especially given the agonizing circumstances, but there’s light if you’re willing to look for it. She won’t be silent.
Also, I appreciate that the writers have drawn a clear parallel between Pelayo and Damian regarding Marta’s performance. They love to critique her. I can hear them now. “10 out of 10, darling. You made me look like a great husband.” “10 out of 10, daughter. You made me look like a great father.” I have been waiting for Marta to understand Damian is toxic for what feels like an eternity. Pelayo is clearly the greater threat and villain (for now), but that doesn’t mean Damian is a saint. I’ve grown weary of his two-faced nature, wherein he only supports Marta when he realizes she won’t capitulate to his demands. Then, the very moment he thinks he might regain some control over who she is, he throws all earned goodwill into the trash to undermine her. The label of “narcissist” might be overused because of global politics, but it absolutely applies to Damian. This man only cares about his reputation and how his family is perceived by others. He is not interested in his children's happiness.
So, it’s smart to linger on Pelayo’s and Damian's shared celebration of Marta’s return to “normalcy” because the parallel should serve as a wake-up call once she sees through the manipulations. That’s right, Marta, Daddy dearest is as self-serving as Pelayo. Neither of these men has ever had your best interest at heart, and they have more in common than preferring to see you subservient. Just look at the way Pelayo behaves. He pretends to be one of Marta’s best friends all while scheming to destroy what she loves. And what has Damian been doing to Marta all along? The same thing. What is Damian obsessed with? His image. What is Pelayo obsessed with? His image. What is Damian’s pride and joy? His business. What is Pelayo’s pride and joy? His business. Who was Damian willing to screw over for business? Gervasio. Who is Pelayo willing to screw over for business? Marta. What do Gervasio and Marta have in common? They’re both gay. Pelayo and Damian are cut from the same filthy piece of cloth, and I’ll not be satisfied until Marta sees it too.
On another note, I wish Mafindom would cut Marta some slack when it comes to playing her role in this farce. She can’t fight two wars at once. She’s already dealing with the fallout of Fina’s departure, and Pelayo’s/Damian’s constant whining about her disposition just makes her a target for more insults and emotional devastation. Does anyone really want to see Marta sitting on the floor picking up Fina’s things again? To listen to Pelayo tell her that Fina is awful because she left Marta? If Marta performs her role, even begrudgingly, then she gives herself the space to process Fina’s departure and make revelations. This is why Pelayo has been hovering over her every moment. He’s trying to ensure she doesn’t put pieces together. Ironically, he doesn’t understand that if Marta is performing for him, it also means she’s lying to him. So, don’t let Marta fool you into thinking she’s been duped. She’s taking the path of least resistance while she figures out how she wants to tackle her current situation. Like it or not, Marta’s in a holding pattern until she has more information. She has little reason to inject chaos into her life until she knows where Fina is and why.
The path to victory for women, unfortunately, is rarely a straight line because we lack brute strength. Marta can’t just throw a table and get Fina back. Remember when Begona tried to prove Jesus was abusive to the Civil Guard? The strength of women will never be physical, and so we must exercise restraint and use our brains. Do I like that this is the way things are? Absolutely not. But out of all the women on this show, Marta is easily the most intellectual. So, take Marta’s lead. Trust in the process. Steel yourself for the coming weeks of drama, wait for the clues to present themselves, expect plans to be hatched, and prepare for Marta’s unbridled wrath. A satisfying victory over the patriarchy is worth the wait.
Earlier today, clairedsfield posted a gifset that tracks Marta’s current trajectory of queer grief: indirect letters, too many drinks, secret diary entries. No one and no space to talk about her pain fully and openly; having it belittled by people around her until she breaks down in the office, desperately sobbing and drunk.
(And then I had some thoughts.)
While this story arc drives us, collectively, over to the de la Reina liquor cart on a level of narrative because it hurts to see Marta suffer; and while it makes us repeatedly extol the prowess of Marta Belmonte on a level of performance (which sends us right back to the liquor cart again because she is staggeringly good in how she puts her skin out there for this story and this character), there is also a bigger picture of queer representation at play for which both the performer and the show overall deserve recognition.
Because while Marta de la Reina is currently traveling down a bleak arc of despair, it bears repeating that it is queer despair, and that it is taken seriously as that. Marta, at the moment, cannot even function because she’s so heartbroken, and it’s not just a break-up portrayal like any other (it’s a soap. People fall in and out of love and beds all the time).
Other than other characters, Marta cannot talk openly about her loss – sure, one of her employees disappeared, but she cannot state openly that said employee was, to her, her wife – and there is no queer community and no queer representation around Marta to echo her pain. So it matters that this processing can only happen in hiding: in secretly written pages of a diary, on the bottom of a bottle and then another bottle, and in hushed conversations (if at all) in spaces that are never quite Marta’s own (not even her bedroom) – and that is not far-fetched as an analogy for queers in conservative environments today.
Yet the audience gets to witness this grief, and Marta’s struggle to find space and forms for it, and that matters (to quote Marta: ¡esto es importante!). And it is different from showing gays – of all genders – as miserable because they are gay, or because deviants deserve to suffer and die and must do so to earn their humanity.
That was, for a long time, the only narrative we, as queers, had in media. But what Marta is going through right now is very much not that.
Of course it is revolutionary to show queer joy. (Still. Sadly.) But it is also revolutionary to show queer pain. Not as atonement or as a spectacle, but as a right to depth and a full life that is allowed to grieve and go on. And up until the very late 20th century, media did not afford our pain that kind of space. We weren’t given a language for it, and struggled to build one, against that invisibility and that relegation to the side lines (and look at how spaces are taken away again at the moment, from Florida to Hungary and others).
In the early 1990s, when AIDS tore through (mainly) the gay male community, there was a staggering loss of life. But that loss was doubled in how mainstream and its media made so little space for it, and for grieving it. And if it did, in cinema or mainstream TV, then gays were noble, elegiac, and tragically dying to Callas running in the background. (remember when “Philadelphia” came out and how it had to be told through the eyes of the straight ally? That was in 1994.)
The gays of the 1990s were not breaking down messily in their office over a bottle of scotch and then walking unsteadily into a work meeting with their voice too loud, embarrassing everyone else in the room. And getting this now, on the daytime small screen, says a lot about space gained across the past thirty years (it also says a lot about the care with which this show is run when it comes to queerness).
But still there is a specificity, and an added invisibility, when it comes to the intersection of queerness and being a woman: because traditionally, in media representation, women don’t desire. They merely are desired (male gaze and all that).
There is a media history of transgressive women having to die at the end of their stories (or, often, at the end of someone else’s stories, to which they are merely the foil) to be accepted into a pantheon of respectability. And if a woman character’s transgressiveness is queerness, there was a rule about either dying grotesquely as a villain, or – if it was a sympathetic figure – about dying beautifully on the threshold to heteronormativity for moral acceptance into its fold, as the final apotheosis.
But that has changed. And at the moment, we are here to witness one instance of such change.
Marta de la Reina is a very sympathetic figure. And she is queer. And she is allowed to grieve her loss on afternoon TV, messily and unapologetically. And that is an incredible win.
(We need to take a brief detour into Dafne’s past to make a point here. Sorry.)
In the early 1990s, in the middle of AIDS, I was desperately trying to stave off the realization that I was queer.
We’d just barely gotten off the WHO list of pathologies and there was no one to talk to, no one who could have been trusted with that kind of a secret that was still marked by so much shame. I remember, most of all, the crippling loneliness of that situation. There wasn’t much media representation back then. If the library had books, you had to check them out under the distrustful gaze of the librarian (if you dared). There was no internet.
There were a few movies I managed to catch, secretly, in late-night reruns on TV, while still living with my parents (who would then threaten to throw me out over coming out) – movies that had lesbians! And those lesbians, few as there were, were beautiful, tragic figures whose love was doomed and who gained moral acceptance only by dying for their desire, and because of their desire.
I remember: the first was Girls in Uniform, with the teenage girl in love with her teacher; it ends with the lesbian’s broken body at the bottom of the staircase from which she has flung herself. Then there was The Children’s Hour. Shirley MacLaine pining after Audrey Hepburn, and that last image of MacLaine: faceless, available only through the horrified gaze of Hepburn as the straight woman, while the audience only gets to see, on the floor, the shadow of the lesbian dangling from the ceiling beam, hung by her own hand.
Those two movies were old. But then it was 1993 (the year Brunet was born, to put this into a perspective) and a smaller French film came out: „Le cahier volé“ [The Stolen Diary] – a girl between two siblings wooing her, a boy and a girl. The girl chooses the other girl (and how incredulous was I at seeing that!), but the diary gets stolen; shame; the threat of separation. And, again, the image of a lesbian – little more than my own age – hung, by her own hand. Killed by her own desire.
That was the panorama, and it did something to the way I could imagine my own desire for women and its rightfulness. I doubted it for a long time, and there are many places on this planet where that is still no different today.
But today, there’s at least internet and cellphones (and Tumblr). And if I were young Dafne today, I might see a desperate Marta de la Reina who is grappling with the loss of Fina. Who is spiraling downwards, day after day. A Marta who drinks, and slacks off at her job, and has lost much of her will to live, but who doesn’t have to hang herself any longer to make herself sympathetic to an audience, or to mollify a heteronormative society about her queer desire.
If anything, the show – and it bears repeating that this is, incredibly, a telenovela de sobremesa – makes space for queer desire, not just in happy fulfillment, but also in ugly, desperate grief. And that matters perhaps even more.
Marta gets space to suffer through the loss of Fina, and that matters so much in terms of visibility and queer rights. Because with the way it is written and performed, it is, for once, not suffering that has to be paid as a price for loving another woman. It is, for once, not dying tragically (and prettily) as an entrance ticket to social acceptance – which is still the position of the Catholic church: “you can be gay as long as you don’t act on it, but you also should feel dutifully ashamed of it.”
It is, for once, not suffering beautifully so that a heteronormative majority can get off on our pain, as something exotic at a distance. No. This time, there’s ugly sobbing and the second-hand embarrassment at Marta walking into the store unsteady on her feet, with her voice just that telltale bit too loud. It's real, and it’s raw, and it’s unapologetic. The show, at no point, makes the viewer think that Marta has no right to her grief, or that she would deserve it as a punishment for being gay.
Which brings me to the performance of Belmonte, which is fearless. It gives the representation of queer female desire a dignity that is not about being pretty (within the confines of a pretty pastel daily soap, but still) or amenable to heteronormativity. And with “dignity” I don’t mean “appearing dignified” because Marta de la Reina is very much not that kind of dignified at the moment, even though that poise is central to her character. But what is also central to the character of Marta de la Reina is her queerness, and her being in love as a queer person. And, again, it means so much how this is shown as outweighing Marta’s attention to poise.
When I say that this performance gives a dignity to our community and to our loving (and we probably cannot thank Belmonte enough for that), I mean that it is claiming the right to queer struggle. The right of not having to die beautifully to atone for being queer.
This performance is carving out a visibility for queerness not as a consumable struggle (even as much of it is also so very pretty. It’s still a soap), but as lives lived that should be recognized as such. To not die quietly but live messily. To not be the shadow dangling from a rope, but to be ugly sobbing, in an American shot, at the center of her own story, for weeks on end.
And while I of course want Marta to walk off into the sunset with Fina eventually, this central arc of being queer and miserable (but not ‘miserable because of being queer’) and of being alive (and still queer) to tell the tale may hold even more significance in terms of queer representation, and queer survival.
