I Got A Boat
Episode 6 of White Lines begins with Zoe hauling a boat across a field. It’s been a week since the previous episode and she phones through to Boxer and tells him that she has a big problem on her hands. As the camera pans up, we see the boat is full of cocaine and a dead body too. We then cut back and see Zoe phoning Mike and daughter, telling both that she loves them. She then goes on to tell Mike that she needs some space and for the first time she feels like she’s free to set out on her own. As Mike talks to her about this “big bang” that’s happening between them, their conversation is left up in the air for now. Instead, Mike phones Clint and mentions the peacock feathers and Axel’s autopsy. As he mentions the photos that Zoe was talking about, Clint realizes that Axel died on the island. Marcus speaks to Dave who admits that Anna’s aura is pink which means she’s happy. Not long after, Zoe turns up and requests to see Dave’s photos from that night. As they start sifting through the different photos on a projector, Dave mentions how Axel jumping off the top of the building was the catalyst for his downfall as things got really wild after that. One picture of Oriol and Axel sees us jump back in time and see the scene that follows play out in real time. Given the bad blood surrounding the burning club and Conchita’s money, Axel challenges him as the entire party crowd circle around them. As they egg each other on, Axel rips one of his teeth out with pliers and given Dave snapped a photo of blood oozing out his mouth, he tells Zoe that Axel was “addicted to strong emotions”. Dave goes on to show her a number of different scars on his body and that came from him and Axel street fighting to feel alive. Meanwhile, Andreu returns home and greets his family while sporting a new mechanical wheelchair. Boxer stands by his side and as day turns to night, Kika and Oriol discuss the future of the business. At a meeting that evening, Kika confronts her Father around whether she’ll be the next CEO of the company. Meanwhile, Marcus runs into even more problems when he learns his house is going to be repossessed unless he can come up with 30 grand. Desperate, he draws on Zoe’s help to collect the gear from the Romanians that’s on their ship out at sea. Eventually she agrees to collect the drugs and they head out into the water to fetch them. After a close encounter with a police patrol boat, Zoe manages to grab the gear and heads back to the surface. Only, because one of the bodies starts to rise up, she decides to protect Boxer, believing their death would link back to him. Instead, they bring the floating Romanian up and bundle him onto the boat. As they race through the streets in town, they drive straight into a procession. With things looking bleak for Marcus thanks to hitting his leg on the propeller while warding off some boys jumping onboard, Zoe takes the reigns and drives off alone. Unfortunately the car breaks down which catches us up to the opening scenes of the episode. Boxer shows up to help and she shows him the body and together they bury it in the woods. After dropping it in the hole, Boxer and Zoe start kissing and hook up right there in the mud while Oriol and Kika agree to work together back at the estate. With Zoe fully embracing her affair with Boxer, it looks like we’re gearing up for some romantic melodrama in the future as no doubt Zoe will be forced to make a decision between Mike and Boxer, with the former’s more unpleasant traits starting to come to the foreground to justify her position. The contrived logic behind Zoe choosing to bundle a Romanian onboard a boat and driving it through a busy town to bury it in the woods seems like a really far-fetched plan, given it’s more likely to be found than out at sea. Unfortunately the biggest problem with episode 6 comes from the way it has been edited together. Showing a scene of Zoe hauling the boat up on land before cutting back means the scenes involving the police patrol boat midway through have zero tension or thrills. We know Zoe survives, along with the coke and body, so the only question comes from whether Marcus makes it out in one piece. Unfortunately the show has done a very poor job making him a likable character so whether he’s caught or not remains inconsequential to the emotional outcome of the scene. As we start gearing up toward the final act of this drama, White Lines has seemingly squandered any potential it had early on with some contrived plot twists and illogical character decisions. Quite what the rest of this series has in store for us though, remains to be seen.
