Midnight at the Pera Palace – Season 2 Episode 5 Recap & Review

Changing The World

Episode 5 of Midnight at the Pera Palace season 2 starts with Esra returning to the Pera Palace, rattled after finding the letter. She pulls away from Halit, and questions him about the sigil. He avoids the questioning, calling her crazy and heading back to his office. He immediately makes a call to Mumtaz, which Ahmet happens to overhear while he’s doing his work at the mansion.

Halit shows and decides to be part of Mumtaz’s circle after all. The current state of things, it looks like Halit is his right hand man. 

Meanwhile, Meliha shows to see Esra while she’s crying in the bath, and reveals that there’s a new letter for her. She apologizes for giving her a hard time and hands over the letter. Within this are instructions to repeal the Turkish Civil Code 743. She  needs to publish the letter in the newspaper, otherwise another woman is going to die. Esra realizes, with horror, that Halit could be the one behind all of this.

Ahmet feeds back what he’s learned to Esra, who encourages him to go to the police. He does just this, but when the Inspector learns of his name and the secret organisation he’s waffling on about, of course, he doesn’t believe him. To be fair, it is an outlandish story, and it only sees his credibility shot to pieces further.

Ahmet believes Ms Halime may be able to help and shows up at her place. There’s a letter from Halime written in the same handwriting we’ve seen before, and it appears that the baby she’s looking for is none other than Esra herself.

However, Lili is not in the apartment. Now, as for Halime herself, Ahmet and Esra meet with her, showing the bits of evidence they’ve collected over time. He questions her about Mumtaz’s involvement in this but she claims not to know. She looks close to opening up but she’s rattled and very clearly nervous.

It would appear that Halime’s baby could actually be Esra, and she shows off the photo she has. Apparently, Halime cheated on Mumtaz and ended up pregnant. When he found out, Mumtaz took Esra away. Lili did everything to find her but she’s learned that Esra is in a diferent time period and knows that the hotel is enchanted. Of course, all of this resonates with Esra, who promises that she’ll try and help find her daughter and save Lili.

Elsewhere, Halit approaches Mumtaz in a warehouse and holds him up at gunpoint. Apparently they’re not friends and certainly not working together. Halit leaves him tied up in the warehouse and takes off. Esra and Ahmet are hot in pursuit though and follow his car later on when he returns to the warehouse once more.

Ahmet and Esra cross paths with Halit, and Esra apologizes for getting her wires crossed. Halit brings up what he did, including killing the man responsible for planting the bomb. Given he was going to kill Leyla, he tried to save her life.

Meanwhile, the ransom demands in the letter are met and the news spreads like wildfire that men and women shouldn’t be equal. This was obviously Mumtaz’s ploy all along but he has a master plan too. He wants to leave his mark on the world and for people to say Mumtaz did great things.

Esra isn’t sure what their next move should be and contemplates whether they really should go ahead with the Garden Bar plan after all. Given it all began with an earthquake, perhaps this could spark the portal back into working again. It should have been demolished in ’39 and doing this could be like banging an old TV when it doesn’t work; it could give the portal just the kick needed to allow them to time travel again.

At the Garden Bar, Ahmet speaks to Halit and hopes that he’ll fulfil his obligation that in his time, there’s a son he needs to see to. It’s a brief moment, but it seems to hint they have a bigger connection than we first thought. Anyway, the explosion goes ahead and as the time hits midnight, Ahmet and Esra appear to have jumped. Only… they’ve gone forward to 1979. And even worse, Mumtaz is now president.

The Episode Review

So we finally get answers around Halit’s involvement here and it appears this was all a red herring and Mumtaz is the real crook. It’s a nice little twist and the ending certainly hints that he’s going to play a much bigger role in the story going forward. It’s clear that he’s rewritten history in his image, so it’ll be up to Esra and Ahmet to jump back and stop him.

The time travel rules in this one are a little hard and fast, and do throw up numerous issues with continuity if you stop to think about it. However, Midnight at the Pera Palace sidesteps that by focusing instead on the romance and drama. 

Either way though, the ending hints that the next few episodes are really going to kick this one into high gear.