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The three Spains and a frustrated fifth season: the secrets of a 'Ministry' that "endures time very well"

Javier Olivares, co-creator of 'El Ministerio del Tiempo', reflects on the legacy of the TVE series and gives details of the episodes that were never filmed.

Every story has a beginning (and, in principle, an end) and that of El Ministerio del Tiempo, the adventure series that aired La 1 of TVE between 2015 and 2020, goes back twenty years when its creators, the brothers Pablo and Javier Olivares, set out – while they were drinking beers – to write a series that they would like to see as viewers, but that they knew would never be made.

In between, around 2007, they developed the Spanish adaptation of the series Life on Mars, a police officer who travels to the past, to the seventies, after a car accident. Diagonal TV was going to be in charge of its production (Amar En Tiempos Revueltos, Isabel) and they even started a conversation with British public television, the BBC, for said remake they titled it La Leyenda del Tiempo. If the English had David Bowie; the Spanish had Camarón.

In the end, Antena 3 bought the rights and commissioned it to another production company. The result was La Chica de Ayer (2009), whose title responded to a song by Nacha Pop (1980), ahead of the time on which the series was based (1977).

Anachronies aside, Javier Olivares payed off an old score in the fourth season of El Ministerio del Tiempo. The second episode, in which the patrol of civil servants and time travelers has to obtain financing for Pedro Almodóvar's second film (Laberinto de Pasiones) and for the filmmaker from La Mancha to hire Antonio Banderas as the protagonist, ends with a performance of David Bowie's song Life on Mars. Thus a circle was closed; one of many.

"I was certain that there were not going to be more seasons. I wanted to close the story of the characters. I owed it to the characters, the actors and the audience. With greater or lesser success," recalls Javier Olivares in conversation with El Independiente. This Monday, February 24, marks a decade since the premiere of the first chapter of The Ministry of Time; the first of a total of 42, which, by the way, are not available in full on RTVE Play (yes on HBO Max...)*.

A series of adventures in front of and behind the cameras, since it was not easy, the schedules, late renewals, departure of interpreters and, therefore, rewriting of bibles, that is, the skeleton of each batch of deliveries. More than two years passed between the filming of the third and fourth seasons, so they were paying for a set that finally collapsed. In fact, in the last season, due to budgetary issues, they were unable to build a set. But they found a solution: an old Spanish National Radio building on the outskirts of Madrid where they could decorate.

"When I finish a season, I always think that there won't be another one. And El Ministerio del Tiempo has shown me that. What I don't like is leaving a series unfinished. It was necessary to put an end to it so that, if suddenly there was a new season, it would already be a new patrol," he continues.

Then TVE asked Javier Olivares for a fifth season of El Ministerio del Tiempo. With Star Trek (and its sequels) and Doctor Who (and the physical regenerations of its owner) in mind, the scriptwriter planned a renewal while maintaining the essences. That fifth season was going to be the shortest, of four episodes, to turn its broadcast into an event, and it was going to feature a new protagonist patrol, made up of a female mathematician from the late 17th century, a lieutenant from the War of Independence (1808-1814) and a young ram raider from 2020.

They were going to talk about fake news, the invention of the submarine, The Beatle's performance in Las Ventas (Madrid)… and there was going to be a Christmas special with the story of La Lotería. "Tornero [the then president of RTVE] said it was very expensive and the door was closed," Olivares recalls. Like that other door that closed between the second and third seasons of The Ministry of Time when the possibility of moving to a platform arose...

"Each season is what it inherits from the previous ones. It's better not to think about what would have been and wasn't. You play with the instruments they give you and I'm delighted with how the fourth season turned out," acknowledges Olivares.

If in that fourth and final season he had to remake the bible after the departure of the actress Macarena García (Lola Mendieta) during the halfway point, in the second it already happened with its protagonist, Rodolfo Sancho (Julián). If he hadn't fallen out of the cast, perhaps the merger between Lorca and Camarón would have happened sooner...

"The character of Rodolfo [Sancho] was basic in the first season and a reflection of my brother [Pablo]," recalls the co-creator. But as soon as one goes out the window, another comes in the door, since Hugo Silva won the affection of the screenwriter ("For me, one of the great discoveries of the series is Pacino") and the public. With Julián's departure and Pacino's replacement, there was a third party in contention, Amelia (Aura Garrido).

But Olivares did not succumb to the love affair: "Already with Isabel, in the first season, I did not do a love story. I did the love story that was historically as I told it. I did not entangle it or turn it into an affair. And in El Ministerio del Tiempo, the same: I did not want to do a stable love story for anyone."**

The series itself also didn't marry anyone. Each of its three original protagonists represented one of the three Spains: Amelia (progressivism, feminism), Alonso (loyalty, Christianity, patriotism) and Julián, "who is fed up with the two Spains fighting and wants to have a beer in peace." The three, with their differences, rowed together in the same boat. "They did not fight among themselves. They fulfilled a function as patriots, as civil servants of a ministry," he adds.

Even so, he was accused of politicization and turning to the left: "It is not a political series, but everything is political. It is a series of adventures, but obviously we talk about corruption, inequality, that everyone loses wars... We can't have a party with Lorca, or do we? We also gave a comical twist to many things, like Velázquez, Lorca...".

Olivares recommends that the most critical review the first season, whose last chapter, set in the Madrid Student Residence, "has the same social, but not political, burden as the rest of the series. The pilot episode, essentially written by his brother Pablo, is one of his favorites along with two others from the second season, those starring El Cid and Felipe II.

Still, the third season of El Ministerio del Tiempo was a turning point after experimenting in the second, jumping from one genre (pure comedy with Napoleon) to another (pure drama with the Spanish flu) in each episode. A painting by Goya, Duelo a garrotazos, inspired that third volume.

"The third season was the darkest. There was a very hard plot, that of the two Spains. Since the 19th century, people of different ideologies killing each other. It was the hardest in terms of sadness and also the hardest in terms of production. In the first two seasons we had a first-class technical cast. We had Goya award winners in our ranks. All those people came for a cheaper price with the condition that, if a movie came out, they would leave, but they would come back. You can use them as a favor in that moment of passion and epic because everyone knew that we were doing a different series. But It was something you couldn't stretch," Olivares admits.

There were times to which they did not travel (Al-Andalus, Roman Spain) due to budgetary and even language issues ("They did not speak Spanish") and ideas that did not prosper because they did not have a good script, such as fake news. Olivares would have liked to create a episode on the Santo Niño de La Guardia ("a myth about some Jews who martyred a Christian child, the Inquisition arrived and took charge of the culprits as a milestone of Christianity, but it had never disappeared for a year, there was no case, there were rumors that became reality because it was of interest at that time") or on the way in which the minister Esquilache was expelled from Spain at the end of the 18th century for trying to modernize the kingdom.

He would also have liked to integrate the curious filming of Dracula (1931) into the plot, during the day with an Anglo-Saxon cast and at night with a Spanish-speaking cast; What didn't change were the sets. Olivares recognizes that they should have given more scope to scientific culture (he redeemed himself with Emilio Herrera, the creator of the diving suit, to whom he dedicated an episode of the fourth season). "I would have loved to tell the story of table football. There was no time for everything," says Olivares.

But let's go back to the beginning, since fiction allows it. Pablo and Javier Olivares returned to the idea of The Ministry of Time after abandoning Isabel (2012), once the first season had been created and written, due to creative differences. Pablo, already diagnosed with ALS, asked his brother to develop that idea they had while they were drinking beers years ago. TVE bought it almost immediately, but it took them a year to find a traveling companion, producer José María Irisarri: "Before, we negotiated with four important production companies and the conditions prevented us from making our decision: they did not want a showrunner. There was total resistance to a scriptwriter being an executive producer – TVE's request –. We proposed an Anglo-Saxon model in which we carried out the creative part with the network without intermediaries. It was one of the most unpleasant moments."

"Olivares took the lead in the end and had decision-making power even in choosing the cast: "We were clear about all of them except one, proposed by TVE. We were very clear about Víctor Clavijo. It was the first one we were clear about. We had always spoken with Rodolfo [Sancho] because we needed an important name. He was part of the family [he played Fernando de Aragón in Isabel] and he signed up. A very clear one that I chose was Nacho Fresneda. And Aura Garrido. "We had doubts between Jaime Blanch and Luis Valera because we wanted an actor who represented traditional Spanish television, an icon."

Javier Olivares has never seen his own creation again. "I have occasionally seen an episode," he admits. "When they show it on television***, I stay to watch it. It strikes me that, despite its age, it holds up very well over time."

* yes, on RTVE Play season 4 is not available at this moment, but in HBO Max it is available.

** I would argue that's not exactly true, like there's some canon relationships like Alonso/Elena or Julián/Maite that have become very important for much of the series.

La Mesías / The Messiah Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvo. 2023

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