I have made peace with the fact that when you come across a narrator with a troubled mind, then you shouldn’t believe anything they tell you. Because you are never really sure whether something really happened or if it’s just a figment of one’s imagination. You see, our storyteller, Alex De La Fuente, had a pretty troublesome childhood. He grew in the shadows of an overbearing mother who had grown to believe that she could see people’s futures through a strange power called “The Instinct.” Being a music teacher herself, Elvira wanted her son to become a renowned musician and therefore robbed Alex of his childhood in order to prepare him for the uphill battle in the future. Elvira had seen in her vision that Alex was going to become a talented musical composer, though it could be argued that it might not be her vision, but most likely her personal desire that she wanted to fulfill through her son. Some years later, when Alex was just a teen, he fell in love with a girl named Estrella Escude in his music class. Alex wanted to move to London with Estrella so he could escape the invisible clutches of her mother. Sadly, Alex was never really able to run away from her mother’s horrified memories and the scar that she had left on his psyche.
In an act of rebellion against his oppressor, Alex deliberately played a wrong note during his audition that could have earned him a scholarship to the Royal British Conservatory. Alex believed that winning the competition and the scholarship would not only validate her mother’s visions but also separate him from Estrella, who was the only silver lining left in his life. He sabotaged his own audition so that someone else could win the scholarship, and the winner turned out to be none other than Estrella. The thing is, in the entire music school, Estrella might be the only person who didn’t really need a scholarship because her father was a wealthy and well-connected businessman, and he could have sent her to any music school she wanted to. So, just like his mother, even I am not sure what Alex was really trying to do.
The thing is, Elvira always told Alex that no one can ever escape their destiny, and in Alex’s case, it was his mother who had determined his fate for him. She obsessively believed the idea that Alex needed to win the scholarship to fulfill the vision she had seen about his future, and it might be the same reason why Elvira was seen talking to the principal and the judges during the post-audition gala. I guess she wanted to know who the second candidate on their list was. And once she confirmed it was none other than her son, Alex, she further inquired if he would be eligible for the scholarship in case Estrella refused to take hers. In short, Elvira wanted to make her visions come true by any means possible, and it was the same reason why she stole Estrella’s car keys and decided to scare her into giving up her scholarship. But when she refused to do so, Elvira killed Estrella in a car accident so her scholarship would be given to her son. But hold on. This is the story that Alex told you, so you might want to ask the question, “Did any of it really happen?”
The first flaw in Alex’s narrative is that no one, not even Alex’s mother, could survive such a deadly car accident. So either Elvira was never really there in the car or she died with Estrella on the same night (if this person existed in real life). Alex probably never tried contacting his mother after he won the scholarship and left for London. It could be possible that instead of Estrella, it was Elvira who died on that tragic night, and soon after her death, Alex maybe left his hometown to inevitably fulfill his mother’s desire, which she had injected into his mind from a very young age. Maybe he created the narrative of Estrella’s death just because he wasn’t able to bear the loss of his mother’s death. Alex’s visit to the mental hospital took place in his visions, so I am not sure if she was still alive or if Alex just wanted to see his mother one last time, just like he saw her mother’s soul watching him play in the house on Tremore Beach.
One could also surmise that Alex wanted a reason to hate his mother and therefore blamed her for the death of his lover in order to turn his “hatred” into a tragic backstory. In Alex’s flashback, we saw how Elvira’s wound healed almost overnight, and she was able to stand and walk as if nothing had happened. I mean, Alex got into a bike accident and he had to go through such a long recovery process and, despite her old age, Elvira bounced back after being in such a deadly car accident? Through Alex’s vision, it was revealed that Alex’s father always knew the truth but hid it from his son as he didn’t want to hurt him anymore. But again, we saw this confession through Alex’s perspective, and therefore it is impossible to validate its authenticity. Additionally, one could notice that playing the wrong note tormented Alex throughout his adult life as he blamed himself for Estrella’s death. But ironically, the wrong note not only killed Estrella but also angered Alex’s mother, so, in a way, both these women in his life were somehow connected by a single “note.”
It wasn’t a mystery that Alex did have a troubled mind, but the extent of his childhood trauma was never explicitly shown in the series. One might consider that Alex had superpowers like his mother, but then it makes things too easy, especially for a show that was created by Oriol Paulo. The ending of The Last Night at Tremore Beach implied that Alex told Ramiro about his mother’s involvement in Estrella’s accident. This means this guy, who had connections with the wrong crowd and could do anything to exact revenge for his daughter’s death, would most likely get Elvira killed (if she was still alive). And Alex knew that, right? Yet he felt no remorse for his actions. So, either Alex convinced Ramiro to let bygones be bygones or he just felt happy that someone was going to kill his mother for him.
In the end, we saw Alex playing the piano, and he started to hallucinate his mother watching him play. A subtle smile on Elvira’s face and the way Alex looked at her implied that he had finally fulfilled his mother’s desire, something she always wanted him to do, that is, to become a famed musician. And if it was his mother’s validation that Alex had been looking for all this while, then none of the story really mattered, because at the end of the day, it was just about a troubled child trying to pursue the dreams his dominating mother had envisioned for him. According to Alex, he started sleepwalking for the first time when his father and mother had a heated argument about his piano lessons. A young Alex most likely wanted his parents to stop fighting and therefore played “Fur Elise” like he had never played before. Alex, from a very young age, had been longing for his mother’s warmth and affection, and it was only music that made his mother happy. But music, as it turned out, was also the very evil that ruined his relationship with his wife, Paula, and passed on the same mental trauma to his kids. It was an endless cycle from which Alex failed to escape, and maybe he would imagine many more “fictional” scenarios in the future to feel an emotional pain in his life that he could use to create music.
