Zorro: Capítulos 46-50 (Apr 16 - Apr 20)

You know, I've been keeping careful count. But I think my chapter numbering may be off by one from what the Web site's using. It's been running every weeknight for 10 weeks, so that adds up to 50, right? At least on the station I watch, though, they did run two back-to-back one night because the following night was pre-empted by a soccer game. Anyway, I'm sticking to my count for this week. I bet when they come out with the DVD the chapters will be numbered my way!

This may overload the photo capacity for a single post. But I'm going to use several screen shots to help me on this week's story.

As regular readers know, the Sor Suplicios demon-possession subplot has been one of my fovorites. This week, she was in raving-lunatic-tied-to-the-bed mode again. Her slave friend that she's hiding in the room made her better by waving some kind of plant over her and singing a song in his native language. I think that's a relationship with a future.

But Cardinal Olivieri brings in an exorcist, who looks even crazier than Sor Suplicios. Check this dude out:

In this scene, he's giving the nuns the willies by ranting about how he's going to expel the powers of darkness from Suplicios. He already freaked out the Cardinal by telling him that even though he's an official exorcist with the Vatican franchise, he's not a priest because he was touched by evil once himself and couldn't be a priest. His test for whether Suplicios was possessed was to confront her face to face, saying the Devil would recognize him if she was really possessed. They both seem to recognize each other and be spooked by it, Suplicios a bit more so because she went into a mild Linda Blair mode then. One possibility: this might really be Suplicios' brother who she had sex with which was the start of this whole raving lunatic thing.

And does this shot portend a new subplot? As Zorro rides by - that's him disappearing on the left - there seems to be a UFO hovering in the air! Could Sor Suplicios be suffering from an alien abduction?

A lot of things happened this week, with several plot threads coming together. It turns out that Olmos the hunchback really was doing something devious about springing Sara Kalí. He had one of his men hold Esmeralda at gunpoint out in the countryside. But she went into her Nancy Drew persona and knocked him unconscious. She got wounded in the process but got the key to open her mother's iron mask.

The Monday episode had a nicely-done parallel plot with Zorro and Bernardo trying to find Esmeralda and Almudena trying to find el Gobernador Fernando and María Pia to prevent their marriage. Almudena got to the church just in the nick of time and wound up revealing the secret that Fernando's wife is still alive. Mercedes is her Spanish name, Sara Kalí her gitana (Gypsy) name. This played out over the week with Fernando eventually knocking Almudena unconscious and accidentally shooting María Pia. At the very end of the week, he was about to commit suicide, but Mariángel showed up in what I'm sure will prove to be time to stop him.

Zorro and the gitanos finally got Sara Kalí out of jail working together with Zorro. Zorro unfortunately wound up getting shot in the back. He still managed to get up and help the gitanos escape with Sara Kalí and his faithful horse Toronada took him back to the Zorro cave. Unfortunately, there he staggered around and clunked his head on a rock. Padre Tomás the radical priest had a dream that something was going wrong so he went out and treated Zorro/Diego's wound, muttering as he extracted the bullet that he must have been thinking of Esmeralda and that's what made him careless. Like I said before, messing around with dames can really complicate a masked hero's life!

When Diego wakes up, he's lost his memory. Both his Diego memory and his Zorro memory. That complicates his life even more than the Moncada sisters have.

Meanwhile, the gitanos get Sara Kalí safely to a hiding place Zorro has set up for them. And she finally gets her mask off and she and Esmeralda get to bond a bit. I thought this was a really cool way to first show us the face of Sara Kalí, la Reina verdadera (the real Queen):

We get to see her face as she sees it for the first time in 20 years or so after Esmeralda removes her iron mask. Fortunately, her teeth and skin seem remarkably well preserved after two decades in an iron mask in a dungeon. Actually, I was kind of hoping she would turn out to be played by Danna García, but that's okay.

Unfortunately, Pizarro has captured all the female members of their gitano tribe and is threatening to kill them one by one unless the gitanos bring back Sara Kalí. At the end of the week, she's inclined to do so.

Meanwhile, back in the Old Country, the reigning Queen has taken a notion to visit her Mexican colony, la Ciudad de los Ángeles, in particular. This is la Reina falsa:

We now know that Olmos has been working with one of the Queen's unfaithful courtiers, Don Jacobo, though we don't know their exact plan. Apparently it's to use Sara Kalí to seize power for their faction. So there's some political intrigue in the works.

Alejandro got to show off his pecks while rescuing Yumalay from some treacherous members of her tribe:

The backstory on this one was that three guys from Yumalay's tribe came to get her because the eldest woman in their tribe, Buffala Blanca, was expected to die soon. Alejandro insisted on going with her because that was the name of the grandmother of Regina, his first wife who was from that same tribe. But the three guys turned on them once they were on their way, because they really wanted to murder Yumalay, who they thought had betrayed them by giving up her mission to kill Fernando, el hombre con sólo un ojo (the man with only one eye). Fortunately, before they could do the deed, several of Alejandro's hacienda works came charging over the hill to the rescue.

Alejandro was glad to see his grandmother-in-law Buffala Blanca:

But the visit has complicated his life in a couple of ways. One, in the shot above, she's giving Yumalay to Alejandro as his wife. He finds out she's the younger sister of Toypurnia/Regina, his first wife. Buffala Blanca also tells him that it was el Gobernador Fernando that murdered Regina. Alejandro was definitely not happy to hear that. But Buffala Blanca advised him against seeking revenge because it's bad for your soul, or something to that effect.

Still, Fernando murdered Alejandro's first wife. He knocked Alejandro's current Spanish wife unconscious. He shot Alejandro's sister in the stomach. He wants to kill Alejandro's current Indian wife. It seems to me that Alejandro going to have to straighten some things out with that old boy.

But first, there's a more pressing problem. El Comandante Montero has decided to seize the De la Vega hacienda for himself, a theme that Isabel Allende included in her Zorro novel and that also appears in one of the Zorro movies. Although in Allende's novel, it's el Governador Moncada who takes over the hacienda. Montero's men are out to arrrest both Diego and Alejandro and to kill Esmeralda, who gets cornered by Pizarro in the last scene of the week. Alejandro has resolved to mount what amounts to a revolution against Montero's military dictatorship. As a first step, he send Bernardo and Yumalay to sneak into the hacienda and get some weapons. A mission which they are in the process of completing here:

It looks like Yumalay has ideas of being the Bernadine Dohrn of Alejandro's revolution (gratuitous "hippie" reference there). That blotch on her cheek, by the way, is due to my camera's flash, not to a tribal tattoo. But check out Bernardo's look. I'm still thinking he and Yumalay might wind up together, though she and Alejandro seem increasingly committed to their current polygamous arrangement. The "Big Love At the Hacienda" theme still has a ways to play out, I think.

Tags: zorro, zorro telenovela