Mrs. Daphne Fielding

But we start with Marta planning a sweet (literal and methaphorical) breakfast for Fina, and Manuela, providing pain au chocolat, must know at this point?! The ep then starts with Mafin, with Digna explicating and amplifying Marta’s state of mind as an exposition.

Looking at this week so far, the current, interesting question is a dramaturgical one: how to put Mafin through the wringer while keeping the couple salvageable? And the answer seems to be: in cranking up, again, Fina's behavior as a riddle of incongruity. But why does she act so insensitive, ingenue, inconsiderate? (and look at flurry of posts here, incuding this one. This setup is working perfectly). And the answer may be, yet again (and still unresolved!), Trauma Brain:

Fina is blind to Bianca's flaws because Bianca picked up Fina at her lowest, and Fina in turn as elevated her to a lifeguard ideal that she she needs for her own self-image at this point. Because if Bianca is not the overwhelming artist who validates Fina's own artistic growth, then Fina would have to question her entire success tale with which she returned to Toledo.

Marta has been making it easy for Fina: Marta is the safe place who always understands and Fina is reluctant to turn to this place of comfort into a place where she has to put in work (I saw only belatedly that @wirepaladin has stated the same thing at yesterday's Liquor Cart). Because Marta has limits, and FIna needs to do her part of the work in sharing her pain towards healing. And Fina (trauma brain) is so reluctant about that work. Marta sits her down to talk at last in this ep, and it backfires immediately. When Marta leaves here, Fina gives her a parting look, and then looks down: she knows this is wrong. Yet she still cannot bring herself to address the gaucho-styled elephant in the room. Because if she’s not the talented protégé for Bianca who is appreciated for "natural light" but for other natural things (aka young hot thing to shag), then what is Fina in her own eyes, when her validation as an artist seems to hinge largely on Bianca ?

Marta cannot have keys to the apartment because she unlocks Fina. Simple as that. And Fina still flees that. Reminiscing and flirting and idealizing with Bianca is easy for Fina: Bianca provides a narrative where Fina can see herself as having agency and importance (even when Bianca does not actually provide that. She provides the dreamspace, though.) Whereas the longer, deeper history with Marta has held, for Fina, loss of agency and feeling cast aside. Ultimately, the story with Marta is large and layered and real, and Bianca is the chacracore fantasy where a Fina who fled defiantly from being manipulated by  a single peseta of Pelayo’s ended up manipulated just as much by Bianca’s promises of artistry.

This is why it’s important that Pelayo rears his rotting head again in this storyline: it triggers Fina's trauma brain. We may never hear how hungry and desperate and cold Fina really was in Argentina early on. Fine. Horror works best in the viewer's imagination anyway. But the audience (and Marta) will need, eventually, a link between the traumatic experience then and Fina's insensitive behavior now: one triggers the other. This is not recovered Fina, this is trauma Fina. And her tendency to blow up first and think later isn't improving over this. At the same time, that connecting reveal cannot happen yet, logically. The audience is placed alongside Marta at the moment, and Marta cannot know because for the storyline's sake, she does need to not understand but to withdraw to make space for the eventual reunion.

Marta has Bianca everywhere at this point, including in her own soup. Damián is tossing out giddy little one-liners on art, Digna is half seduced by the end of the episode, and Marta gets two highlighted moments of betrayal: When it turns out that Bianca has a key for Fina's apartment, and when it turns out that Bianca knows where the coffeemaker is in Fina's kitchen.

This links to something @bloomsberries pointed out earlier this week: Fina has lived with Bianca until weeks ago, and it shows. Fina, who believed she had to renounce the woman of her life, ended up in a rebound with someone who made it easy and exploited her vulnerabilities. And Fina, as a result, has fallen into a habit with her, and now those habits are triggered again (honey, do we have some mate? Ah, you know where the coffee is). And Fina isn't aware enough to see how Bianca is taking away (with Fina's encouragement) what Marta treasures most: sharing her life with Fina. As Marta has said repeatedly (also in 377), that is her primary goal in life.

Fina's apartment is a space Marta has limited access to, and the twist they are giving Mafin now is compelling in how it asks, “What if cheating is not about sexual, but emotional intimacy?”

Mafin have been sleeping with other again since the reunion episode, but they have not talked or shared a life as much (and Fina has used seduction to keep Marta from talking). And while a core feature of Mafin continues to be their effortless sexual chemistry, another core feature for them has alway been the quest towards a space where they could share a life (a long queer rights’ struggle paralleled here: one thing is living your desires without criminalization, but another one is shared property and inheritance laws (Darío got the hotel!)). It is, in the end, about knowing where the coffeemaker is.

Marta’s face at realizing that Bianca knows where the coffeemaker is spells out clearly (again, how good is Belmonte?): You are invading my space of intimacy with Fina. And that is a plane that may be even more gutting – or just as gutting – as the space of sexual intimacy. Remember how in episode 562, the one after the reunion, when reuniting Fina with Digna, Marta was so happy to make coffee for them in the Mafinca kitchen?

Marta has wanted that life with Fina, for a long time. She rented the Madrid pisito that Jaime appropriated (and which Fina then rejected). Marta offered the Mafinca (which, after traumata outside their own making, Fina rejected, the trauma weighing more than the chance to share a home with Marta). Marta then tried to have that life with Fina at the Casa Grande, in the guestroom at the end of the hallway where they could spend their nights together (but Fina has rejected that, too).

Marta has to fight to live this life in bits and pieces, now at Fina's apartment, on Fina's terms, with Marta having to announce herself and needing to be invited in explicitly, like a vampire (even two eps ago, we got “ah, I wasn’t expecting you this early” from Fina).

But Marta accepted the conditions and gave Fina space, and now Bianca is taking up that space and the sense of betrayal and invasion transports as overwhelming (even later, when a tense Marta talks business with Andrés in the office, at 00:32:33 (Mafin Drive Cut), the stress background sound is the Chacra soundspace of raspy woods: it’s blink and you miss it, but it underlines how Marta really cannot catch a break from Bianca. Andrés asks her if she is all right, and while she says yes, the Empty Fifth Chords are back yet again, at 00:34:36).

And the most perfidious thing is that this kind of affective cheating doesn’t come with a clear social moral code that Marta could name to find understanding. Her family now knows about her queerness, they supports her relationship with Fina, but the Writing Room found a way to put Marta in a bind where those loved ones who champion her love to Fina will now be unable to see what Fina does to her because Bianca is just that open artsy type, and she hasn't asked for Fina's apartment. Fina has offered. (and Marta deduces that correcty: "You offered.")

On Costuming level, Fina, after revisting the checkered jacket of lying and cheating, now is back in her "do I really need to explain this to you, again?" fighting shirt. It is fighting red for both of them here, between the piping on Marta's jacket and the red coat over her arm, and Fina's shirt and trousers.

The sound layers are back to heavy storytelling and foreshadowing: right at the start, when Marta assures Digna she has thought through her decisions, there are the bugging melancholy high strings (of renouncement?) at 00:05:10. Marta's observation to Digna of “how much you like Bianca’s style” gets the Wispy Little Chacracore Tune (00:05:47). Marta admitting she "would have to give explanations" gets Fina’s Haunted Flutes (00:06:05) and those keep meandering for a few lines longer. When Marta walks out, Digna gets the Brooding Clarinets of Impeding Doom this time (00:06:38), but it’s all moot since Bianca charms Digna later (over Bianca's flute motif (00:24:12), which is rising and then modulates, while Cloe’s was a fall-and-rise. Also interesting we have Digna sewing (“boring”, “conventional”?!) for her meeting with Bianca, on a little-red-riding-hood fabric for Julia which is also fighting red).

Marta entering Fina's apartment with a doorbell ring (00:11:00) is set off against Bianca later using her keys; just as Marta’s “we could make coffee” (00:11:38) is set off against Bianca later offering to make the coffee on her own without asking.

Marta and the cloth-covered pastries are, again, Marta bringing suizos to the store early on (¡son suizos!). Only now, Fina doesn’t turn the pastries into a shared “secreto”, but passes them on to Bianca: an intimacy thrown away, the same way she tossed Marta’s Chacel on Cloe’s desk.

Fina wears the same shirt in which she has said “Do I need to explain to you again why I want an apartment on my own?”, in the Casa Grande guestroom, only now it’s “Do I need to explain to you again why I don’t want anything of That Person?” (00:12:00) – she cannot even says Pelayo's name here, and what do you mean by “again”, Fina? you have never told Marta the depths of your struggles, you just play up the successful, independent return.

So when Marta tells Fina “I know what you suffered,” she does not. Not yet (I still hope she will. Perhaps Bianca will be the one to tell Marta, alone, how she found Fina and “saved” her, from what conditions, to make Marta step back further?)

Fina saying Pelayo’s money disgusts her ties back to episode 376 (?), where he gloats about being invincible due to having money, setting himself apart from her through that money (tengo mucho dinero. Muchísimo), and Marta does not know that, either (the audience does, we got that flashback more than once since Fina’s return).

The worst bit Fina does here, in her rage, to me, is this little self-righteous twist of mouth at 00:12:58 when she says that it's Bianca who is entering. That twist says, “you just pushed Pelayo onto me, now you have to deal with Bianca being here. Tit for tat.” And her expression remains defiant more than contrite going forward.

Yet Fina cannot even look at Marta for a sustained moment, and that self-righteous twist dims as Marta leaves and Fina chews her lip: she knows that she has messed up, but she is too stubborn to admit it. The Empty Fifth Chords return over Bianca stepping in with “hello!” (00:13:02) and calling Fina terms of endearment (moronchita, because of course it needs to be a diminutive for her little lapdog muse). The chords continue to sound over Bianca checking out the breakfast with her eyes and Fina (00:13:26) with her hands – uhm, those hands do not belong on Fina’s torso.´??!! No wonder Marta is staggering. The Empty Fifth Chords get the high string overlay of the episode's beginning (an overlay also used for the Romance Farewell Motif) at 00:14:02, and Bianca apparently gets her first villain pose against the natural light at 00:14:30?

The next thing I expect Bianca to suggest is that she needs another portrait in her exhibition, since the Digna one turned out so well. And whether Fina would sit for her. It's her apartment, it's the easiest. She doesn't even need to suggest a half-nude, the emotional intimacy of the gaze (this crew and the performers know their Jeune Fille en Feu) is worse either way.

And even after the Mafin scenes, Bianca's insinuations continue when she meets Digna: at 00:24:38, with another dig at Marta “oh, it was you on the phone?” (Bianca has talked to both and she knows it), then with Bianca boasting about truthful approaches in art and love (00:27:44) while she flirts with Digna (“mi querida” is just a little South of good morning?!) and moves onto the next set of coffee and pastries. Collecting breakfasts like her women? Because the nostalgic Chacracore Romance Motif sounds up at 00:30:32, when Bianca lays it on about having expected Digna to be bourgeois and boring. Is Bianca perhaps not very exclusive in terms of muses and will hit on the mother in addition?

We know that Bianca doesn’t have all that many episodes – not knowing that, I would have expected her to stay on all season, to drive that wedge and take Fina away emotionally, to have Marta step back factually, and then Bianca step in to pick up the distraught pieces of Fina and reassemble them into her bed.

Ok, Easel Weasel. It’s on.

But isn’t it a relief to have an external opponent again? This is the baddie slowly exposing themselves while moving deeper and deeper into our protagonists‘ lives. The doubt is no longer whether Marta might get over Fina (she never did) or whether Fina is over Marta (because she has been back in the pivotal episode 616 that highlight all the Mafin core motifs). It’s about overcoming this obstacle now. It's prime "let's give our lead actress some more meaty drama and also put our prime couple front and center with an apparently incongruous reaction from one of them (which is another plum acting opportunity). And let's add a really good actress as a sneaky antagonist. Also let's make her a hot middle-aged cowgirl."

I caught some impressions (overhead lighting made taking photos difficult, sry - more photos under the MAK link above). Many of the prints were developed and annotated by Pflaum herself.

"Café Schwarzenberg" (1961):

"Youth" (ca. 1960):

"Furniture Transport" (Ca. 1961):

"Foreigners" (1959):

The most gutting one was this: "Policeman taking the details of a 16-year-old prostitute after a night-time raid" (1961):

"Corner of Nussdorf Market" (1961):

"More than just a nuisance, rather one of the city's most difficult existential problems: the dilapidation of many districts" (1960):

Some liner notes:

Oh, and one for the Liquor Cart crowd: a pair of old ladies in conversation on a bench, in front a store that says "bakery and wine shop" (ca. 1960):