Valeria – Season 1 Episode 8 (The Finale) Recap & Review

Not The End

We begin the season 1 finale of Valeria in the past with Valeria getting a job at the magazine and celebrating with Lola. Once there, she locks eyes with Adri and he snaps Valeria’s photos. Lola figures out what’s happening and lets them talk, as we see snapshots of their relationship through the years. It’s a beautiful montage but one that makes her recent affair all the more difficult to see occur.

In the present, Val finishes her novel called Impostor and phones Chus, letting her know the good news. Attaching it on an email and sending it over, she feels like a weight has been lifted from her. Victor messages and tells her to speak to Adri about how she feels. Val however, changes the subject and talks about his trip to Stockholm, contemplating the best way to break the news to Adri.

Adri’s YouTube channel completely blows up and as he excitedly tells Val about the money he’s making in sponsorships. Thanks to their positive financial outlook, he mentions a road trip to Georgia which is actually something they spoke about in the past together. Unfortunately Val’s unable to break the news and decides to go on the trip with him instead.

Nerea finally breaks the news to her parents and admits she’s a lesbian but unfortunately they shun her and drive away. Instead, she heads over to Lola’s who tells her to be proud of standing up for herself and begrudgingly allows her to stay for a month until she can find her feet.

Carmen and Borja pitch their combined idea together at work, involving a mirror and making it so there are no models; the individual people are the models. In the aftermath of this, her boss offers Carmen a promotion. Unsure on what to do given her loyalty to Borja, she speaks to her friends and uses a theoretical scenario involving a “friend” over what to do. They instantly tell her to proceed with the job offer. Unfortunately her delays cause Carmen to receive some bad news when she learns the promotion she was going to take has actually been handed to Borja instead.

Val decides to leave Adri for good this time and once again we see fragments of the past, where Val excitedly meets Lola and Carmen at the bar and toasts over her upcoming wedding to him.

Back in the present, Rebe goes into labour and Val rushes over to her house to help. While Rebe tries to remain calm, Val admits to leaving Adrian. As Rebe heads to hospital, Val heads back home but continues to struggle breaking the news to Adri.

Later that day, Sergio phones through to Lola and tells her he wants to meet. Not long after, Dani messages Lola and tells her their Mother is really trying this time. She heads off to visit Sergio nonetheless, who admits that he misses her. After laying out some ground rules, they start screwing again.

After seeing a montage of Val’s time with Adri through the years, Val finally talks to him but it’s actually Adri who decides they should split up. As they hug it out, Val starts packing her things and leaves. After their break-up, Val rejects Victor and decides to take it slow this time as she’s still hurt by what’s happened.

She heads to meet Chus later that day to discuss the book who admits that they’re going to go ahead and publish the novel. Only, it’s not going to be under her name – it’s going to be under an alias. As she contemplates whether to take the offer or not, the episode and season ends on a cliffhanger.

One of the stand-out moments from this episode comes from the back and forth cuts to Valeria and Adri’s relationship. It also highlights one of the biggest problems with this show and it comes from empathy toward Val. Given how many times she’s danced around telling Adri the truth, leading him on and screwing around behind his back, the decision to keep her fearful right up until the end and have Adri make the big decision to break-up undermines her character journey somewhat.

It’s even more confusing given she hasn’t expressed a single bit of guilt or compassion for what she’s done until right at the end when they break-up. Still, thankfully Nerea and Lola both get pretty good character journeys here and enough scope to move forward given a second season has already been green-lit.

The Carmen and Borja situation is still left up in the air so it’ll be interesting to see what happens with that, while Lola and her Mum remains a pretty volatile situation too. With Val now free to pursue Victor, will this be a happily ever after between these two or is there another twist in the tale? I guess we’ll have to wait for season 2 to find out!