There is NO TIME for any chill heart-to-hearts in the bank in “Your Place in Heaven,” which opens more or less where we left off: Helsinki is building his trench in the dining hall when the ceiling explodes, blowing him backward. The blast also knocks over what we later learn is a two-ton marble statue, pinning Helsinki and crushing his leg. Palermo keeps Helsinki awake by talking to him on the walkie while they make their way to him, but it isn’t good. The soldiers make their drop-in, and a firefight ensues between them and Palermo’s team. Some of the commandos get injured, and lots of art and artifacts get destroyed. Helsinki eventually tells Palermo to cut his leg off, which — since his bones are basically all shattered, and he’s bleeding out from the femoral artery — he’s pretty sure is what they’ll do if he makes it to a hospital anyway. Bogotá is ready to do it if Palermo can’t, but Palermo insists they can move the statue with a lever, and Rio notices that a ceiling beam is coanveniently hanging down by a sliver. Leverage does indeed lift the statue off Helsinki, permitting Palermo and Bogotá to drag him into the museum, and somewhere the gangs’ high-school physics teachers beam with pride. Who says you won’t ever use this stuff in real-life situations?
In the hideout, after the Professor has saved her baby, Sierra is beyond caring as he gets back on his headset to get the update inside the bank. Once he has stopped Tokyo and the rest of the rear-guard team from rushing onto the roof (where one of the 100 snipers surrounding the bank will immediately kill them) and hears Lisbon confirm my theory that she snuck a microphone into the Governor’s cuffs before releasing him, the Professor turns to practical matters. After telling Marseille and Benjamín to get their guys to start the foundry, he sends Marseille out for whatever baby gear Sierra will need to improvise a nursery in the hideout; generously, she adds that Marseille should get something for the Professor’s foot since he seems to have forgotten that she shot him. The Professor asks Sierra to give Marseille her cartridge clip for everyone’s safety, and the ease with which she complies makes me assume she has another one somewhere. (I guess we … all know one place she didn’t hide it.)
There is, of course, a plan for the roof: Tokyo, Manila, Denver, and Matías will lead the remaining hostages out there — some masked, some not — and mix in with them so that the authorities won’t know who’s who. (We haven’t seen Matías much this season; he has generally been managing hostages away from the action.) As soon as this phase of the plan kicks off, Tamayo orders the snipers to shoot anyone who gets near the hole, which is when the Professor uses his relay in Pakistan to call Tamayo privately. He compliments Tamayo on his flexibility with regulations and ethics — he’s so flexible he must do yoga! This MF claims he does CAPOEIRA, LOL, and has no patience for the Professor’s cheeky guess that it must make him an excellent lover, so the Professor gets to the point and plays the recording of Tamayo stating his hope that Arturo dies of his wounds so Tamayo can paint the heist gang as murderers. The Professor has a whole plan in place to prove how Tamayo forged the evidence against Sierra and link Tamayo himself to the Professor via a cash transfer. Tamayo decides not to test the Professor’s resolve and calls off his plan to have a bomb robot enter the ground floor of the bank.
The roof plan proceeds as designed, other than Manila needing to find a piece of wall to shield herself while she has a minor panic attack. Tokyo and Denver try to calm her down by distracting her; only because, she says, she believes they’re all about to die, she confesses she has been in love with Denver her whole life. Tokyo makes Manila repeat after her: Nobody is going to die today — and honestly, if even poor Helsinki has survived this long, it seems to be true!
When the time comes for the rear team to move, Matías opens the roof door just long enough to release a duffel bag full of weapons tethered to one of their ankles. Matías then gets shot almost immediately — not fatally, but still, he’s all alone in the stairwell, which is probably not great. Still freaked out by the Professor’s call, Tamayo refuses to permit the snipers to shoot as Denver, Manila, and Tokyo approach the hole in the roof and get ready to drop into the action …
… which is getting intense. Stockholm pauses in her covering fire when she thinks she sees Arturo walking sadly toward her through the smoke but soon shakes it off as she and the rest of the gang back into the museum to draw the soldiers out of their trench to follow them. Once the soldiers have cleared the roof hole, the rear team drops in behind them, and Palermo’s strategy proves out as the commandos find themselves surrounded. Sagasta seems ready to wait it out until Tamayo gets on the radio: Sagasta and his team will have to do what they can to resist the assault because Tamayo won’t be sending anyone in after them. It seems as though the gang has the advantage. And that would be true if only the Professor had known he wasn’t designing his plan off the most recent information for the building. It turns out there’s a fingerprint scanner in the museum that will drop safety doors, and Gandía has access to it. The soldiers feint like they’re about to drop their weapons, then toss out grenades to occupy the gang while they get to the scanner. The doors drop, leaving nearly all the entire crew members on the other side of a steel barrier.
Nearly all: Denver, Manila, and Tokyo are trapped on the other side of the library and inside with Sagasta, Gandía, and the war criminals. They manage to make it to the kitchen, where the Professor orders them to make a trench. (Here’s hoping Helsinki didn’t use up all the rice making his.) Staying on-brand as a true psychopath, Gandía calls out to Tokyo, “A little bird just told me Nairobi is saving you a place in Heaven.” Gandía can’t, of course, know that Tokyo was just thinking about a chat she and Nairobi had back at the monastery, during which Nairobi said she didn’t believe in an afterlife; she hoped to be remembered by her friends for the way she touched their lives. Tokyo replied that she believes she’ll keep living in the final thought before her death, which is why, whenever she’s in the shit, she thinks back to when she was happiest. Let’s assume Tokyo’s getting ready to make some new happy memories by blowing Gandía’s disrespectful mouth off his fascist head in the midseason finale.
The Spoils
• We see the heist Berlin drafted Rafael for! Without getting into a full blow by blow, it involves Rafael posing as Tatiana’s piano tuner, a security guard’s senile father crashing Tatiana’s performance, and a vault with moving walls. After Rafael successfully hacks the vault and swaps out the gold burial gifts for the brass ones, he is justly giddy until Berlin says he’s going to teach Rafael his most important lesson of all, tossing the case full of booty out a bathroom window and into the water below: “Only a thief can feel that something they don’t own is theirs. Now you know you’re one of us.” It’s a ruse, of course: Bogotá, in scuba gear, retrieves the case, and they pick up both him and the gold in a motorboat afterward, en route to Malmö. Berlin is still in an instructive mood, telling Rafael, “If you really want something in life, you have to steal it from whoever has it. That’s how the world works, my son.” As Rafael looks backward and exchanges a significant look with Berlin’s beautiful wife, it seems as though Rafael is plotting his next heist already.
• I feel like the Alicia Sierra of earlier this very same day would have torn out Marseille’s throat for daring to ask if she planned to breast- or bottle-feed. Maybe motherhood has mellowed her. Or maybe she’s just too tired to be homicidal.
• I don’t know anything, but I have watched a TV show before, and Manila’s declaration of love means that either (1) she’s about to get killed, (2) Denver’s about to get killed, or (3) Stockholm’s about to get killed, leaving Manila and Denver to get together and raise Cincinnati together. I know which outcome I’m hoping for — you?
