‘Fate’ Review: Riding Shotgun With a Matador

Anyone who has seen Afternoons of Solitude, Albert Serra’s recent documentary about the life and experiences of a bullfighter, will remember that many of its best — and certainly its lightest and most entertaining — moments revolve around the protagonist’s cuadrilla, his tight-knit group of collaborators both inside and outside the bullring. In Serra’s film, the men surrounding Rey Roca form a kind of eccentric collective: they ride with him in the car, cheer him on relentlessly, and take care of every practical detail of daily life, functioning less like a traditional support team than like the entourage of a rock star on tour.

Fate turns its focus to a similarly colorful group of characters and makes the most of their seemingly endless comic — and at times absurd — potential, rooted in their eccentric, loud, and highly expressive personalities and habits. Gradually, over the course of its six tightly constructed half-hour episodes, the series begins to move the spotlight toward its true protagonists, without ever abandoning that enthusiastic and peculiar cuadrilla that gives the show its distinctive tone and texture.

Our point of entry into this world — the character who allows us to observe their routines with the curiosity and bewilderment of an outsider — is David (Ricardo Gómez), a shy young lawyer studying for the civil service exam while earning extra money by driving his father’s taxi in Talavera de la Reina, in the province of Toledo. One night, outside a nightclub, the group abruptly piles into his cab, asking him to take them to an hospital after one of them collapses. Thrown off by their volatility and chaotic energy, David has little choice but to stick with them and wait things out, especially since they don’t pay him upfront. Over the course of those few hours, his life takes an unexpected turn.

David not only begins to discover the cuadrilla’s world of parties, rituals, and superstitions, but also learns that the Maestro (Oscar Jaenada), the legendary veteran bullfighter for whom they all work, believes David has brought him good luck and decides to hire him as his new driver. At first, David — whom they insist on calling José Antonio, after his father — wants nothing to do with the job. His personality couldn’t be more different from that of this noisy group of Andalusians, and he is openly opposed to bullfighting itself. Still, he is soon made “an offer he can’t refuse,” and with his parents away on vacation, he agrees to drive them around in his own car throughout the tour.

Fate gradually pushes Jero (Carlos Bernardino), Ramón (Oscar Higares), and Marchena (Pedro Bachura) into a secondary but vivid role, shifting its attention toward the initially odd connection that develops between David and the Maestro. Unlike his collaborators, the Maestro is reserved and discreet, a man with a dark, seemingly mysterious inner life, who ends up depending on David far more than anyone might have expected — particularly on his peculiar habits and quieter presence. It is through this relationship with such a striking and famous figure that the series allows its protagonist to move beyond mere eccentric adventure and toward a more genuinely human bond.

Very funny, with a subtle dramatic undercurrent that grows stronger as the episodes progress, Fate relies on the familiar “fish out of water” structure, positioning David as the audience’s surrogate in a world that is at once vibrant and alien, simultaneously charming and irritating. David is an urban young man with, if you will, cosmopolitan habits: he refuses even to enter the bullrings to watch the Maestro perform, and as a result, the series never shows what actually happens inside the arena. He stands in stark contrast to this chorus of traditionalist, somewhat macho men who announce themselves loudly wherever they go. The charm of Paco Plaza’s series lies precisely in the way it gradually forges a connection between these two seemingly incompatible worlds.

While the narrative trajectory is largely predictable, the series’ appeal resides in the universe it depicts and, above all, in the unexpected affection one eventually develops for these characters. Much like David himself, viewers initially encounter this group and their world with the impulse to run in the opposite direction. The show’s real achievement is its ability to transform that instinctive reaction into genuine fondness — for their strange customs, their borderline superstitions, and their noisy camaraderie. For someone as reserved and studious as David, this becomes yet another oposición to overcome: an exam not found in textbooks, but out on the street, in life itself.

Fate is not a series about bullfighting per se. It contains no scenes from inside the ring and limits itself to depicting the conflicts and colorful routines that take place outside it: the crowds in the streets, both for and against the spectacle, and the practical preparations — above all the elaborate costumes, but also the rivalries of the circuit and the rituals of hotel life — that surround each performance. What the series ultimately seeks to do is establish a dialogue between two different worlds, and through that exercise in empathy, it arrives at a form of mutual understanding that transcends bullfighting itself. More than anything else, Fate is about a way of living.