The Resort – Season 1 Episode 5 “El Espejo” Recap & Review

‘El Espejo’

Alex records a message for his dear friend Baltasar through a phone about his location that he is not sure of. In one of several surreal-like images showing the temporal changes in his unique ear and mind, we see a shifting of the scene to Christmas Eve in 2007.

Episode 5 of The Resort sees Alex wake up from his slumber in the room, sitting completely naked at a table. Seeing a pair of pants on the floor, he instantly smells them and spots the size: 30 inches. It does not belong to him. He soon finds out the owner of the pants but ignores Sam and Violet as he takes out a shirt.

The young couple decides to escape while Alex is busy sorting himself out. But the attempts aren’t successful and Alex sits them down on the sofa. They are nervy moments: because of Alex’s memory leaks, he is extremely unstable and circumspect of other people.

This is the first time he is seeing Sam and Violet and thinks they are stealing from him. To cement them in the periphery of his memory, he paints them in the mural. Baltasar takes Emma and Noah to his place. Luna joins in too and Baltasar begins his earnest investigation into the episode. Baltasar begins his inquisitive investigation into the personal lives of Emma and Noah, making them uncomfortable.

Noah is actually more forthcoming but Emma’s guard is up. We go back to Christmas Eve where Alex empties Violet’s back and discovers the black book her mother gave her. He opens “El Pasaje”, the bookmarked chapter, and is instantly fascinated. It is a mix of excitement, shock, and horror. It tells his story!

In a bizarrely prophetic way, it kind of narrates past events from Alex’s life. Baltasar reveals to Emma and Noah that they share a lot of similarities with Sam and Violet. Both the pairs met around 15 years ago; both were struggling with personal traumas that wouldn’t let go, and both feature in Alex’s mural.

Baltasar isn’t convinced and wants to take them back to the trail where the accident happened. Because according to him, there are no accidents in life. Everything has a place and reason in a larger conspiracy.

Alex realizes that he needs to look for a cave beneath the ground to look for answers. He follows the address in the book to the author’s house in the city. Sam and Violet choose to go with him. Baltasar and co find the spot where her bike crashed. They split up – Luna with Noah and Emma with Baltasar – to find the exact spot. Alex returns the book to Violet and forgets to give their phones back before heading to “someplace”. He also asks Sam and Violet not to go back.

‘El Espejo’ Ending Explained

Emma and Baltasar have moments alone with each other. He asks her to lie down at the exact spot and place the phone right where she found it. He believes she was “meant” to find it and that she must express what she felt when she first saw it.

We learn from Noah that he and Emma lost their newborn baby. She wasn’t able to see her as she lived only for 63 minutes. That is the scar their marriage has been carrying for so many years. We intercut between the video of Alex that we saw at the beginning and the group’s recreation of the exact moments in which Emma found the phone.

Alex tells that Sam and Violet have gone to find Iberra in Pasaje. The message then ends and we see him in real-time. Noah and Luna circle back to Emma and Baltasar. He sees her lying on the ground and is concerned. In rushing toward her, he trips and falls off the rocks.

When he does, he opens his eyes and spots a phone right in front of him. Just before that, we see Alex throwing that same phone in that exact spot. They are all stunned. It is Violet’s phone.

We see Alex going down a bit further and placing Sam’s phone in that exact same spot. He has another one of his leakages and hears an ATV motor coming toward him. He hides in the bushes and we see Emma rolling in right after him toward the phone.

I mean, what even was that? The twists just keep on coming and ship us further away from answers. More and more questions pop up after every episode and the pile is certainly making things hard for us.

Is there a temporal connection between the past and the present through Alex’s leakages? Are they part of a continuum where the worlds on either side of time can co-exist? I just cannot say at this point. We need more information in this regard.

It is so funny how “everything just comes back around, again and again”. Indeed!

The Episode Review

The second half of The Resort’s season 1 has kicked off on a bright note. Notwithstanding Alex’s caveat that the second half will be a heartbreaker, things really have started to take a suspenseful turn that is at once exciting and confusing.

The Resort’s unravelling, almost like Alex’s memory leakages, is constantly unfolding new surprises for us. The new information caught us unaware on many occasions in episode 5. There still isn’t any clarity provided by the creators about the tempting quality of time in the show’s universe.

From the looks of it, the second half is teeing up to be told from Alex’s perspective and if there is one thing the eccentric genius is, it is unreliable.

He is indeed an unreliable narrator of his experiences and hence, keeping a hold on what goes on and why will be tough. We also finally get a peek into the personal lives of Noah and Emma.

The scars from the tragedy of losing their baby have yet not healed. Constant attempts have been made by them to move on but all they have done is run away from it. Baltasar rightly pointed out the “emotional wall” Emma has constructed to resist anyone from probing into her trauma.

She has hidden her pain deep inside her in a place where only the cold glow of her suffering gives her consolation.

It was a beautiful way for the show to align the story with a certain dramatic heft missing until this point. The creative choices in episode 5 certainly tempt viewers into giving the runners of the show brownie points. Probably the best in the season so far.