‘One Hundred Years of Solitude – Grand Finale’ Netflix Review: The End Was Written From the Beginning

The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants,” wrote Gabriel García Márquez, in a summary that intermingles past and present within the same temporal framework, coexisting with one another. One Hundred Years of Solitude therefore ends as it began: a story that has already been told — by Melquíades, by the writer, by the series itself as it reinterprets it — being told again, brought back to life visually. In its final episode, faithful, like the series as a whole, to the prose and events of Gabo’s novel, the saga of the Buendías concludes just as it was always known it would, with “a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane.”

The eighth and final episode of the second season concludes, if understood linearly, the family story. It is the moment that everyone knew was coming but feared nonetheless, when the prophecy comes true because it had already come true, and the family line comes to an end because its ending had been written from the very beginning: as a novel and within the novel itself, which in some sense narrates itself. It is Aureliano Babilonia (or Buendía) who takes center stage, the young man who has spent years and years locked in a room studying the indecipherable parchments left behind by Melquíades, until he discovers that they contained “the history of the family, written in all its details, one hundred years ahead of time.”

Spoiler alert

The final episode begins by evoking his strained relationship with Fernanda del Carpio (his grandmother, although he does not know it), who treats him almost like a slave and would not let him leave the house. It continues with the arrival of his uncle José Arcadio, who returns from Rome and reveals himself to be a very different person from the one his mother had imagined. And then comes the final twist: the arrival of Amaranta Úrsula, the woman with whom he will ultimately fulfill the curse that had, in reality, already been fulfilled. Beyond a few minor specific alterations, the series remains remarkably faithful to the novel, something reinforced by the omnipresent voice-over, which reads passages taken directly from the book.

End of spoilers

What has been done, and done with great care and coherence with the novel’s historical, melodramatic, tragic and, if one wants to put it that way, operatic tone, is to put it into images, give it a certain vitality — more and better in the second season than in the first — and provide it with a physical, even tactile quality that is already present in the text and that director Laura Mora and her collaborators have managed to capture. It is a more derivative than personal vision, more consensual than radical — except for one strange moment in which a reference to… David Bowie appears — but one that surprises with its meticulousness and, at this point in the saga, its decadent elegance.

Over the course of two seasons, we have watched Macondo grow, develop and die, in a parallel to what was presumably the production process of the series itself, which gradually built that fictional town and developed it, only to eventually destroy it in a whirlwind of dust and wind “whose cyclonic power tore the doors and windows off their hinges, ripped off the roof of the eastern gallery, and uprooted the foundations.” In that sense, this One Hundred Years of Solitude is yet another echo of the story written by Melquíades and reinterpreted by its characters, including García Márquez himself, who, as in the novel, takes on a brief role here as a witness to the destruction of the town and the end of the family line.

Following, if one wishes, the novel’s quantum metaphor, the series is both unimpeachable and open to reproach; it depends on the perspective and the weight of the observer, and on what the novel has drawn in the reader’s mind as its representation, assuming they have read it. In fact, it is something similar to what happens within the Buendía saga itself. The past had not yet been completely decided. The parchments contained a story in a suspended state that could only be resolved when Aureliano Babilonia discovered how to decipher them. García Márquez did not write a novel about circular time or fulfilled prophecies, but about one hundred years in the life of a family, a story that had not quite finished happening until someone, at the end, dared to read it. And someone else dared to film it. And someone else to watch it.