Silence after Chaos (Bella ciao): My quick take on the Final Season of “Money heist”
"Everything has to come to an end, sometimes," as L Frank Baum once said, and the curtains finally fell on this originally Spanish series "La Casa de Papel," which means "House of paper," which was first released in 2017. Netflix then purchased the rights, re-edited it into smaller episodes, dubbed it in various languages, and released this "recycled" series, which became a cult classic on the OTT platform. Because of the series' global popularity, the creators decided to extend it to five seasons. After a nearly four-year run, the creators decided to call it quits.
Generally, such iconic web series end up being a damp squib, as seen in Game of Thrones (GoT). Perhaps the creators run out of ideas or suffer from mental fatigue. As a result, I had no high hopes for Season 5 Part 2 when I started watching it. Second, Amazon had released its ambitious project "Wheel of Time" as a response to GOT, in which I saw "The Professor" playing a pivotal role, and my prediction that Money Heist would end soon was correct. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see a well-crafted ending, with Professor's trademark "out of the box" tricks rescuing the team of heisters from a seemingly impossible dead end.
The final few episodes are less action-packed than the previous ones, which is understandable given that the creators had to tell us some backstories about its main characters. (This is a very good ploy used by producers to jump to flashback with a character's backstory.) These final episodes were more dramatic than action-packed.
I didn't like the plot's premise, in which they glorified a group of thieves who pull off the "mother of all heists," but the web series was regarded as a classic case study/s for management students studying Leadership, Team Building, Art of War, Strategy, and the VUCA world. If you search for money heist and leadership lessons, you will be inundated with results. (I, too, have made only a few contributions.) I particularly liked an article written by Siva Ramakrishnan KV in which he attempted to correlate the well-known Tuckman's Team Building model to Professor's team-building exercise.
Tuckman's model identifies four critical stages in group development: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. This was very clear in how the Professor cherry-picked various team members with completely different skill sets, how they were forced to stay together, how after initial bickering they developed good chemistry amongst themselves, how they began to respect the skill set of other members, and how they worked towards the common goal. All of these stages of group development can be very well classified as Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. Tuckman, on the other hand, has proposed a fifth stage, dubbed "Adjourning."
This stage is reached when the given group task is completed, and the group is dissolved. But, given how Season 5 ended, one might wonder, "was this adjourning stage" reached? My answer is a resounding NO. Because the creators have purposefully left many open-ended leads to where seeds for the following season can be found. (My best guess)
Will Rafael Berlin, Berlin's son, becomes the next Professor?
Will Tatiana turn on Rafael?
Will Alicia have any surprises up her sleeve? So why not divert the gold elsewhere?
Will the group be adjourned?
Will the gold ever be returned to the Royal Mint?
Many such questions remain unanswered, so let there be silence after 5 seasons of chaos (Bella Ciao).
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