The Innocent – Season 1 Episode 4 Recap & Review

El Paraiso

Episode 4 of The Innocent marks the halfway point of this enthralling crime drama with some big revelations – starting with more details surrounding Ibai Saez.

His narration starts us off, as we get a brief glimpse at his personal life. He’s simply another grunt; a cog in the wheel of shadowy Anibal’s operations. It turns out he too is connected to the strip club, having escaped from the mundanity of working as a bodyguard for the city councilman.

He has a history of being inside prison and he’s been hired help for Anibal for quite some time now. All of this builds up to the hotel room incident, where Olivia happens to be asleep in bed.

A knock at the hotel room door brings Mat inside. Only, Ibai tasers him before beating the boy to the ground with brass knuckles. The blood spatter on the floor that we saw last episode belongs to Mat.

When Olivia finds out, and Zoe pounds on the door, Ibai is stuck in the middle of all this and unsure how to react. He phones his contact and asks them for instructions. Eventually he slips out the back with the bag full of Olivia’s money. The noose starts to tighten around Ibai’s neck though. The police figure out the car belongs to him and begin closing in on his location.

Meanwhile, Zoe and Olivia both scramble down the stairs outside where they find Mat stumbling about from afar.

With Lorena leading the charge, the SCU agents start exhibiting suspicions over the officer. In fact, they even follow in their car and bug Lorena’s phone. Lorena arrives at the hotel and learns Mat got involved in a fight with someone inside the room. As they confirm Olivia was there too, Lorena is shocked and wonders how all of this slots together.

When Mat awakens, he’s got a lot of questions to answer. However, Mat also learns that Zoe has been taken down to the police station after threatening the hotel worker with a gun. For now, Mat is allowed to rest and recuperate in hospital. However, this isn’t the last time the police are likely to be in touch.

When they leave, Olivia receives another message. This one reads: “Tomorrow 11:00pm Santa Eugenia Square, Marbella.”

As Lorena continues on the trail down from the hotel, she finds Ibai dead. It seems like he was shot through the hand and then the bullet hit him in the face. This would back up the theory that someone else killed him. Lorena immediately suspects it’s Mat.

Elsewhere, Mat confronts Olivia about the videos on her phone. She doesn’t remember them being taken and claims Ibai was just messing with him while she was asleep. The only ones involved in this – according to Olivia anyway – were Ibai Saez and the retired policeman Gallardo.

As Mat pleads with her for answers, the news reports show that Gallardo has been found dead. Realizing they’re not safe, Olivia and Mat decide to evade the authorities, hiding in the laundry trolley. Seizing their opportunity, they slip out the back.

At the police station, Lorena questions Zoe. She’s prickly with her answers though, eventually admitting that Mat hired her to look into Olivia. Using her expertise, Lorena gets right up in Zoe’s face and asks just what Gallardo and Ibai have in common. Given they’re both dead, she pedals the idea that Mat killed them both – and Zoe helped by revealing these details.

As they let her stew over these details, Lorena speaks to her colleague. She doesn’t think the girl is lying. However, whoever killed Gallardo did so using his own gun. This person must have been close to them though, especially given there’s no sign of forced entry with the car.

Lorena’s investigation eventually sees her face to face with SCU agents Teo Aguilar and Bruno Soto. They brief her on Emma’s background, including how she worked at the El Paraiso, which happens to be the brothel in Marbella. Ibai happened to be a bouncer at the time. Anibal meanwhile, has a much darker history.

He was mixed up in some pretty dangerous stuff, including organizing orgies for influential, powerful men. They used to pay their way into sleeping with underage girls. The real power here comes from Anibal’s blackmail. He used to film these sessions and use the tapes against these influential men. Teo apparently worked undercover on this case, which is why he knows all this. He’s desperate to find Anibal though so he can bring the man to justice.

This is what led them to Emma. Now, these facts are circumstantial but according to Teo, the night went like this: Faced with jail or telling the truth, Emma decided to break the deal with Teo. She told Anibal everything and the pair agreed to run away together.

Somewhere along the way, Candance found out what Anibal was up to. He caught her and beat the girl down, brutally murdering her. Cassandra’s disappearance from the club could well be linked to this. As an insurance policy, it seems Anibal took the tapes.

Now, Gallardo and Ibai’s stake in all this – and how they were both found dead – seems to be connected to Cassandro’s death. It seems Ibai Saez and Gallardo were working together to look for these tapes as well.

As we later find out too, Gallardo was definitely investigating Candance Russo. His wife confirms it on the phone, as shots of Gallardo’s office show numerous files stashed away.

And that leads us along nicely to Mat. With Mat and Olivia having escaped from hospital, they both now look very suspicious.

Back home, Olivia and Mat move fast to pack up their things at Mara’s place. However, Lorena and the others have already figured this out and are currently sniffing around at their house. The pair notice via their installed camera, and quickly phone Mara. They want to borrow her car – and as Mara turns the news on, she figures out why. Mat is being made out to be a fugitive and is currently a wanted man.

Lorena and Teo move their investigation along, eventually speaking to a man named Otis who knows a lot about Candance Russo’s history. In fact, it turns out Candance didn’t die that night after all. She changed her name…to Olivia Costa. The link connecting all three murders isn’t Mat after all – it’s Olivia.

The Episode Review

In true Harlan Coben fashion, the twists just keep on coming. There’s a lot of information in this episode but now everything is starting to make more sense. Gallardo was investigating Olivia and it seems he and Ibai are after these tapes.

It seems Olivia is deep in this strip club business and if she’s really Candance then it means she’s pretty heavily involved in everything that transpired in the past.

Mat’s life has been turned upside down and this convoluted web of twists and reveals continues to deliver some surprising revelations. The next episode is a little under an hour too and judging by the ending, we should be getting more details over how these puzzle pieces slot together.