1992 – Season 1 Episode 1 Recap & Review

Remember Curro?

Episode 1 of 1992 begins with an explosion rocking the streets of Spain. A security guard rushes to the scene, where he finds the entire building ablaze. Instead of calling for reinforcements, he heads inside and finds his employer Alvaro inside, dead. He grabs the girl, Amparo, who’s miraculously still alive, and brings her to the station.

The entire incident causes our officer to be in a state of shock. This is 40 year old Ricardo Zurita. Or Richi, as he likes to be called. He actually supervises a network of other security guards who patrol for robberies. He clearly has a drinking problem and as for Amparo, she happens to be Ricardo’s wife.

Amparo doesn’t recognize Richi at the funeral though, while flashbacks show a little more context over what took place there. It turns out Amparo was actually outside the building, and she got caught in the explosion. However, in a state of shock she head inside to find Alvaro. Looking over his dead body, she seemed to have collapsed from smoke inhalation.

Suspiciously, he’s not the only one who was killed. It turns out the explosion also killed Roberto Valcarcel, a successful entrepreneur and head of the country’s largest retail enterprise. This is what’s making the news but Amparo decides to confide in Richi. He used to work in homicide and she doesn’t think this was as simple as the police are making it out to be.

A charred body holding a toy from the Expo, completely unscathed, seems to hint at murder not relating to the explosion. She believes this was orchestrated and the explosion used to cover up evidence. This gets Richi thinking, and he ends up doing some research, all whilst drinking himself into a stupor again. That’s not a smart move, given he’s called in for a shift by one of his colleagues, Virgil.

Richi realizes there’s definitely something to this story and starts digging deeper. After an evening with Amparo, discussing what’s been happening, Richi rings Manchado and believes he has something.

After taking the memory card from the camera at the crime scene, he heads to the station, intent on looking over the police report. There’s no traces of an accelerant being used, but there was a black stain in the office which is suspicious. The police also have no evidence of the toy Curro either.

Richi is down in the dumps at this dead-end and decides he can’t proceed any further with this. He apologizes to Amparo but for now, she’s on her own. However, what they’re all unaware of is that this is just the first of many planned killings. The killer, whom we see interspersed across the episode, shows up at an office building, completely covered and not arousing any suspicions from anyone.

He gets changed into a hazmat suit and heads up to the executive suite. With a flamethrower in hand, he burns the executive while he’s in the bath and leaves him a charred mess. The killer slips away, just as an escort shows up at the suite. However, when she sees the body, she rushes out.

At the crime scene, Manchado sees the charred body inside the bath and in his hand is a Curro, just like at the first crime scene. This is enough for Richi to get a call and the puzzle pieces start to slot together. The executive’s name is Domingo Granjero, and he once worked with Valcarel at the 1992 Expo. In a picture of them together, it appears the killer is taking out each of the Expo officials, one by one.

The Episode Review

1992 gets off to a pretty predictable start, with a simple but cliched premise and some really bad CGI to boot. While graphics aren’t the bee-line to story quality, it certainly doesn’t do this one any favours. In fact, I’d argue that the CGI here looks like it was done in the 90’s. Hey, I guess that’s an homage to 1992 as well?

Richi is a typical ex-cop protagonist, and it’s clear this case is going to help him turn his life around and stop drinking. It’s all very predictable stuff and right now, the real draw of this one stems from the cat and mouse chase. Hopefully things pick up and there are some extra twists and turns along the way to help this one stand out.