It can be understood that María Galiana said in an interview that her character in Tell Me How It Happened would be like Chanquete, insinuating that she would die in the final stretch. The final season of the iconic RTVE series began this Wednesday and did so with the entire Alcántara family in the cemetery, throwing dirt on the coffin of Herminia, who died in 2001. This includes Carlos and Karina, with Ricardo Gómez and an Elena Rivera who returned to say goodbye to her characters.
What should be a moment of togetherness is quite the opposite. “Are they all leaving? What has happened to us?” Ana Duato’s character asks when she sees that none of the children stay after the ceremony. She has lost her mother and no one stays to spend a few hours grieving together. To understand the situation, we have to go back in time, to 1994 in which Herminia is still alive, and see what led them to this distance: the decision of the Alcántara couple to give the inheritance during their lifetime to her children.
“I’m older but I have a lot of life ahead of me,” says Imanol Arias as Antonio upon hearing Merche’s plan to donate goods and money to her children while she is still alive. He wants to make sure that their lives are resolved or at least on track, to see it with their own eyes and thus be able to breathe a sigh of relief. While waiting for a biopsy that has her worried in case she has cancer (and which turns out to be a false alarm), he fears that she has not been generous: “I don’t want houses, I love my children.” But, as the footage predicts, this decision will break the ties that bind them.
And how has the audience embraced the premiere of the final season? With a certain indifference in numerical terms in a primetime where two million already seems an impossible challenge for the original fiction: 1,473,000 viewers and a 13.3% share in its live screening.
The previous season said goodbye with an episode that attracted 1.3 million viewers. That figure led Rtve to consider closing the story of the Alcántara forever due to the difficulties of amortizing expensive and increasingly minority content. Luckily, in extremis it renewed for this final season of seven episodes in which, after dedicating an episode to Merche, it now claims the rest of the Alcántara, delivery by delivery.
But, if we talk in terms of engagement, Cuéntame moved its parish mercilessly with the final montage that paid tribute to Merche. “How do you do all the chapters of this finale like this, the tears we are going to shed will not fit in a basin…” warned one of the followers on social networks when watching the video again.
