The Assassin - 1.6 (finale)

[shallowness]

Relatively satisfying as a final episode (they could make another series, although I think it would be a stretch to find a plot that involved all the main characters so personally.) There were a few bits that I found hard to believe.

Kayla facilitated Julie and Luka’s flight to SPAIN, and a colleague of hers had left a campervan for transport containing weapons and explosives and a mixtape including ‘Especially For You’, which shows the show knows its target audience, I guess. There was a bit of sharing from Julie about how she’d got into this line of work – army first – and what it was like to have killed someone, as Luka had now done and was wrestling with.

Edward woozily woke up in a kid’s room, Marie gave him some water to drink, and eventually he was in a position to ask questions. She revealed the whole ‘Julie killed your dad’ thing, and increasingly more, but in a very monologuing villain way (commented upon), and in a way that pointed to psychopathy. As he pointed out, why pretend that Jean-Luc was her brother? He was mildly relieved to learn that she wasn’t his biological mother, but horrified to learn that his birth name was Florien.

They made it to his father’s office which was very much an arms dealer’s trophy room.

In FRANCE, Ezra was the de facto head of the family company, and made it clear to Kayla that he’d only fund her efforts to rescue Edward if she kept their family’s involvement in Chantaine quiet. When an underling announced that Aaron had died of his overdose, he rather clunkily said out loud that one of the drugs in the killer cocktail was oxycontin, which Aaron hadn’t been prescribed, but Ezra had. Ezra lied unconvincingly and the underling backed out – depends on how upstanding he is as to whether he decided to stick with this evil moron or decided to get another job. We also saw Ezra burn all the evidence her had about Chantaine (ignoring that Kayla had ‘made copies’.) My read is that Ezra is stupid enough to ruin the company quite fast.

After having a good look at Maria’s lair, now with added security guards, Julie gave Luka a radio and a gun and told him to keep watch while she infiltrated the grounds. He did kiss her before he left, apologised, then got kissed back, which was quite satisfying.

She had a good look around a studio that was housed in an outbuilding, where, in a rather meta way, Marie had obsessively drawn graphic novel-style panels of the past, Edward, Julie and herself. Eventually, Julie started killing the guards and the cameras.

Meanwhile Edward had had enough of Marie’s self-obsessed rambling, took the chance to bish her on the head, and tried to escape, although all he was doing was going deeper into the building. Eventually he and Julie met each other. He wanted a reckoning; I was on her side when she demanded that they save it for later and escape first. Her version of the story was not quite the same as Marie’s, but she acknowledged that she’d shot his father, then Marie, but hadn’t checked her pulse because she’d heard him cry, and picked him up and taken him because it was her instinct to make right for having, as far as she knew, orphaned him.

It turned out Marie had a camera on them and could talk to them over an intercom. So, Julie shot the camera and led Edward outside. Trouble was, there were still some guards, and Edward was not looking or moving great.

Luka had lost contact with Julie over the comms, so couldn’t warn her that more men had come. He’d recognised one of the security guards as the lead fake police who had added to the massacre on his island. He was dithering about whether to go to the property himself when Kayla and a team of her security guys (helpfully wearing white shirts under their body armour to differentiate them from Marie’s guards) arrived. So he put a bulletproof vest on and, like Kayla, proceeded, surrounded by armed and trained men.

Julie blew up the studio as a distraction, but Edward was really in a bad way, and it ended up being a face-off between her, Marie and ‘don’t call me Florian!’ Edward. Marie announced that she had poisoned her husband’s son, and would only give him an antidote if he killed Julie. Guilt-ridden Julie was for this plan, Edward pointed out that they probably couldn’t trust Marie (very valid point!) But Julie handed him her gun anyway, all willing to be self-sacrificing (which is motherly, yadda, yadda), forgetting that he had agency.

So he shot Marie. Huge suppression of disbelief that someone who could no longer walk and has barely handled guns could pull off a killshot, but whatever.

Luka had sneaked off from the others to corner the guard from the island, got him to disarm himself (well, of one gun. I’ve watched too many of these things not to wonder if he had other weapons on him) and had him at his mercy. But he couldn’t shoot him. Fortunately, Kayla’s guards could.

When Kayla and co. met up with Julia and Edward, Julie was heartened to learn that the smart little rich girl had access to a helicopter and should be able to take him to the medical assistance he needed. Despite Kayla’s invitation, Julie did not get on the chopper, and despite her telling Luka not to try to cheer her up, let him hold her hand.

We had an epilogue three months later, with a recovered Edward on a fancy boat with Kayla, revealing the engagement was back on. It seemed he was going to meet his real mother – it had been ‘explained’ that Jean-Luc was the one who wanted children, not Marie, and they’d hired a surrogate, so presumably Florien/Edward was conceived via artificial insemination, not in-vitro fertilisation. I did feel that all this and whether the birth mother would feel that Florien/Edward was hers when it was a ‘surrogacy’ arrangement was a bit handwaved.

Cheeringly, it turned out that Julie was also on the boat, and still in touch/a relationship with Luka, and had some kind of affectionate, but very sarcastic relationship still with Edward, even if they never got into how she’s still the closest thing he had to a mum, or what he’d done with his father’s (ill-gotten) money and estate.