Locked Up crackles with wit, even with subtitles, in captivating return: series two episode one review
Series two of Spanish drama Locked Up has arrived on Channel 4. A sugar-free simulacrum of Orange Is the New Black, the first series spent 16 episodes embroiling viewers in its fraught tale of a falsely incarcerated innocent sucked into the violent, morally compromising and sexually disorientating world of the glossily modern Cruz del Sur women’s prison.
The plotline saw heroine Macarena (Maggie Civantos) evolve from dupe to hard-nosed street-fighter as she fought to assert her innocence, help her family steal a former cellmate’s €9 million stash, and escape the clutches of prison queen bee Zulema (Najwa Nimri). The nail-biting finale saw Macarena’s hopes of acquittal dashed as she was forced to participate in an attempted prison break. And that’s exactly where series two picked up with the sun, sand and sea of freedom lapping around Macarena’s newly liberated ankles.
What distinguishes Locked Up from overheated Spanish telenovelas is acting that’s top of the range and a script so sophisticated that, even in subtitles, it crackles with wit. As with Orange Is the New Black, its success lies in the possibility of interpreting it at any number of levels, from a parable of how prisons drag everyone to the lowest level to a tongue-in-cheek sexploitation drama dressed up in the garb of inclusivity and diversity.
But what puts Locked Up ahead of genre potboilers like Wentworth, Bad Girls and Prisoner: Cell Block H is its ongoing involvement with the world outside the prison walls. This second run cleverly inverted that device as Macarena found herself in more peril than ever before: on the outside, on the run and, within minutes of achieving freedom, caught on camera killing one of her fellow escapees.
That’s the sort of moral ambiguity this series loves to play with and which, at times, in this captivating opener exhibited all the dramatic confidence and flair of more male-oriented – and more feted – American fare like Breaking Bad. These breathtakingly bad Spanish women are just as criminally entertaining.
