At the end of “Brotherhood” Season 1, Edson Ferreira, aka, Savage Edson, started a riot inside the Colonel Roberto Tibirica penitentiary, also known as the “mousetrap,” and took over the prison. In front of the media and the public, Edson demanded the resignation of warden Oliverio Noronha, who had been brutally torturing the prisoners inside the mousetrap. It was because of these inhumanities that Edson started the Brotherhood faction inside the prison to get justice for his fellow inmates. However, soon the rebellion became violent, and Edson and his gang members were labeled as members of a violent criminal organization.
In the other part of the story, Edson’s younger sister, Cristina Ferreira, who used to work in the DA’s office as an assistant lawyer, got caught in a world of crime as she lost her job after she tried to forge government documents in order to protect Edson from the hole. Later, she was contacted by a police officer, Jose Carlos Andrade, who offered Cristina to become an informer for the police in exchange for her release. To save herself, Cristina agreed to the deal and helped Andrade dismantle the gang. However, while working for the law, she soon realized the ironies of a flawed legal system and hence started working for both sides. Though by the end of Season 1, Cristina shot Andrade in the end to cut all her ties with the gang and the police, but the season’s cliffhanger revealed that Edson’s wife, Darlene, who knew Cristina’s secret, was very much alive and would seek revenge from her, thereby pulling her back into the criminal world.
‘Brotherhood’ or “Irmandade” Season 2 majorly focuses on the tussle between Darlene and Cristina, who both possess evidence against each other, yet they do not reveal it to Edson, as they both need each other to save Edson from the new secretary of public safety and his puppet Warden of the Mousetrap. In the meantime, Edson and his close associate, Ivan, plan a prison breakout to run the faction from the outside after the death of their comrade, Scavenger. But will the new Warden and the secretary let Edson escape so easily? Let’s find out.
‘Brotherhood (Irmandade)’ Season 2: Recap
After the demands were met, Edson and the other prisoners submitted to the government, and the SWAT team quickly controlled the situation inside the prison. The government sent in another warden to control the prisoners, and as it was expected, he was worse than his predecessor. The new Warden, Mauro Jordao, took Edson to his office, where he met the antagonist of Season 2, the new secretary, Fernando Gomes, who was known for his brutal ways and corrupt methods. The government called in Gomes because they wanted to get rid of Edson and his gang. However, Gomes was already aware that his government would send him back to his retirement after Edson and his gang were dealt with, and he wouldn’t get anything out of it. Hence, he made an offer to Edson. Gomes offered Edson to operate freely inside the prison in exchange for 80 grand each month, and to keep their operation off the radar, he especially asked them not to attract any cops’ attention. When Edson denied the offer, Jordao started torturing Edson’s inmates, which forced him to make a deal with them. However, Edson didn’t have that kind of money to pay Gomes, and hence, with the help of a former gang member, Zica, he learned about half a ton of drugs lying in a police evidence room that was soon going to be incinerated.
Meanwhile, Cristina, who believed that she would finally be able to live her life peacefully away from the shadows of the gang, was followed by Darlene, who tried to kill Cristina for being a snitch for the police. Cristina, too, had evidence against Darlene, which was a voice recording that Andrade had recorded. In the recording, Darlene informed the police about Scavenger’s whereabouts, and Cristina believed that it was her ultimate weapon against Darlene. However, when Cristina went to the mousetrap to see Edson, she couldn’t inform him about Darlene. Edson, on the other hand, handed over a new responsibility to Cristina. Edson wanted Cristina to infiltrate the DA’s office and find out about the drugs lying in the evidence room and the date of their incineration so that the gang could steal them before they were destroyed.
Edson asked Cristina to contact Darlene and plan a heist, and Cristina had no other option but to make a truce with her. She gained Darlene’s trust by arranging the murder of a cop who believed that Darlene had killed his friend Andrade. For the time being, Darlene agreed to help Cristina, thinking she was the only one who had contacts in the DA and would be able to help the gang steal the drugs. However, she planned to kill Cristina soon after the heist. Unlike the other members of the gang, Cristina didn’t believe in unnecessary bloodshed and thus devised a safe way to steal the drugs from the incineration center, but things got worse, and they were only able to steal half a ton of drugs. To add to the conflict, the drug dealer, Oseas, the lord of the Favela, who promised to buy the drugs from the gang, refused to pay them until they brought the promised weight, which was half a ton.
Cristina planned to steal money from Oseas with the help of one of his gang members, Flare, and later informed the police about Oseas. The police raided Oseas’s den, and he quickly ran away from the Favela. With the stolen money, Cristina paid Gomes to help Edson buy some time to plan an escape from the mousetrap. Inside the prison, Edson bribed some cops and, with the help of the janitor, Zica, planned to leave the jail in a garbage truck along with his most loyal man, Ivan. However, Edson’s escape would have enraged Gomes, who would have massacred the entire gang; hence, to control the devil, Cristina and Darlene decided to blackmail Gomes by kidnapping his 14-year-old son, Antonio, who was suffering from epilepsy. Cristina had warned Darlene that their plan to threaten Gomes using his ill son could complicate the situation, yet Darlene, who greedily wanted Edson out of prison, was ready to take that chance. And finally, what Cristina feared finally happened. At Gomes’ house, Darlene hit Antonio with the gun, which resulted in a seizure that took away his life. As soon as Gomes found out about Antonio’s death, he couldn’t control his rage and ordered Mauro Jordao to shoot down all the brotherhood gang members. Jordao only kept alive Buri to interrogate him about Edson and Ivan’s whereabouts, who had recently escaped prison in the garbage truck.
Antonio’s death tormented Cristina as well, who finally blamed Darlene for it. In order to protect herself, Darlene revealed to Edson that Cristina was the snitch in the gang, but Cristina had proof against Darlene that convinced Edson and others that it was indeed Darlene who told the police about Scavenger’s location. Edson ordered Bird to shoot Darlene, while at the same time, police infiltrated their hideout. The investigating officer, Firmino, found out about their secret hideout from Edson’s younger brother, Marcel, who was done with the gang business and wanted to protect Cristina from it.
Fortunately, Cristina and Edson managed to escape the police raid. However, Edson was slowly losing his mind. He found himself guilty of Scavenger’s death and quickly made things personal, due to which he lost sense of the revolution and the real motive for which he started the brotherhood. In the battle against the corrupt system, Edson had lost all his close ones, and so he wanted to take revenge through the most violent means possible. He wanted to bomb a police station, but Cristina knew the consequences of such an attack and tried to persuade Edson that in his vengeance, innocent people could lose their life, but Edson was blinded with anger. And hence to stop Edson, Cristina gave an anonymous tip to the police about his whereabouts, and the very next morning, Gomes and his men surrounded Edson’s building. Edson used the same bombs to detonate the explosion, and Gomes and others believed he was killed in the blast.
Is Edson dead?
Edson didn’t die in that explosion. Instead, he used the distraction to run away from the police. However, by then, Edson was certain that it wasn’t Darlene, who worked as an informant for the police, but her own sister Cristina, who had been lying to him since the beginning. Earlier in their childhood, it was Cristina who told their father about the drugs that Edson was hiding in their house, and as soon as the father learned the truth about his son, he informed the authorities, who soon arrested Edson and threw him into prison in 1974. Edson never came out of prison because his sentence kept on increasing due to his increasing number of crimes inside the jail, and so he made it his personal abode. However, when Cristina met Edson again after 20 years, he gave her a second chance to redeem herself. Cristina did try to help the gang, but she wanted to leave it and live a peaceful life, but Edson never gave his members the option to leave the brotherhood. A similar thing happened with Ivan, who wanted to leave the world of crime behind, but Edson compelled them to stay and fight for his word and his justice.
At the beginning of Season 2, Cristina really wanted to leave everything behind, but as the end of Season 2 came closer, Cristina finally realized that there was no way out. And no matter how much she tried to fight for justice from the legal side, she would never be able to finally achieve it as the entire system was corrupt, and hence she eventually became an integral part of the brotherhood. Yet what distinguished her from Edson was the fact that Edson believed in brutality, while Cristina believed in lawful ways to carry on unlawful business. She didn’t believe in unnecessary bloodshed and wanted to keep her conscience clear. Cristina argued the fact that if Edson and Gomes were both going to kill everyone around them, then what would be the difference between brotherhood and the corrupt system? And to make things worse, Edson had an unstable mind, and he couldn’t think straight. There is no “I” in revolution, yet Edson believed that brotherhood was his word and his voice, and Cristina could see her brother slowly turning into a violent tyrant. Edson needed to die, but he managed to survive the blast and arrived at Cristina’s house to kill his sister. Fortunately, Marcel, who had been hiding near the window, shot Edson before he could harm Cristina, and Cristina shot Edson again to confirm the death of the person who had destroyed his own family. Fortunately, Edson and Darlene’s daughter will be raised by Marcel and his wife, and she will be away from her father’s shadows. Cristina and Marcel wouldn’t let Edson’s daughter become another Cristina or Darlene and would try to give her a peaceful moral life.
Brotherhood (Irmandade) ‘Season 2: Ending Explained – What’s Next For Cristina and Ivan?
Cristina, who was in love with Ivan, asked him to run away from the gang, but Ivan knew that there was no way out. Though, for the time being, Cristina believed in the lie that one day she would be able to leave everything behind, but ultimately realized that she had apparently become a part of the criminal world and now only her death would separate her from it. Though Cristina had accepted the ideologies of the brotherhood and decided to do what’s right, she didn’t completely agree with Edson’s violent measures to seek justice. For her, there was always a lawful way to conduct an unlawful business. She evaluated the risks instead of going around mindlessly killing people. Ivan knew the fact that Cristina thought from the head, and she would definitely become a better leader than her brother. And thus, after Edson’s death, Cristina took over the gang.
Cristina and Ivan needed a steady flow of income to keep the gang running, and thus they decided to take over Oseas’s business and the Favela. She gave her word to Flare and therefore didn’t kill him after he helped the gang steal the money from Oseas. Later, with Flare’s help, Cristina won the trust of the people of the Favela, as Oseas had lost his cred in the community. To take out Oseas, Ivan shot him dead, and Cristina convinced his henchmen to pledge their loyalty to the brotherhood if they wanted to live. In reality, everyone was fed up with Oseas as he used to humiliate and kill his own men, and they only obeyed his orders out of fear and not out of loyalty. The new gang promised to rectify those errors and protect each member against injustice while giving each their own separate voice to get the justice that they deserve.
At the end of “Brotherhood” Season 2, Cristina and Ivan finally won the trust of the Oseas’s Favela; while in prison, Jordao released Buri from the hole after Edson’s death. However, Zica took over the gang inside the prison, and to take revenge on Buri for a past rivalry, he convinced everyone around him that Buri gave away Edson’s location, because of which he was killed. The prison mates tried to kill Buri, but he ran away from them. He survived by the end of Season 2, but Zica promised to kill him soon.
The closing sequence of Season 2 depicted Cristina, Ivan, and Flare managing Oseas’s drug business from his den. Flare brings in hard cash from the new den, and Ivan quickly moves towards a map on the wall where he marks yet another territory that has come under their reign. The brotherhood is expanding all throughout Sao Paulo and even has a new emblem, which is an Ouroboros symbol, which Ivan saw in prison on a fellow inmate’s arm. The symbol represents a serpent who is eating its own tail, which symbolizes the eternal cycle of life. In this case, it can be surmised that the symbol represents the renewal of the gang. The old gang that Edson founded died with him, because Edson’s words and voice were the brotherhood’s command, but with his death, the gang has been renewed with new members who bring in new ideologies to its operation. Maybe it is what Cristina tried to tell Edson, that a revolution is never about a single person but a group of people who are fighting for the cause. The cause is what keeps the rebellion alive, and it is the cause that will help them to gain the support of the people of the Favela.
If the series isn’t canceled, then “Brotherhood” Season 3 will further follow Cristina and Ivan’s struggle to take the gang to new heights, while inside the prison, Buri will try to escape Zica’s vengeance. Season 3 may be the final season in the series, and will, fortunately, bring closure to all the remaining characters. Cristina is the new boss, or as Ivan calls her, the counselor of the gang. The question here is, Is Cristina going to transform into a full-fledged criminal like her brother? Will she become everything that she has been running from? Will Marcel let her sister rule the brotherhood, or will he become an informer for the police to help them take her down? The upcoming season will tell us better.
