The clothes do not make the Espooky. While it’s sweet that Tico is trying so hard to fit in with his nephew’s crew, he doesn’t need to wear a black mesh tee and wide-legged shorts to live the horror life. His suggestion that a little face time with the desiccated skeleton of Nuestra Belleza Latina might cure Renaldo’s ghost problem is more than enough. (I would think that exhuming the corpse of the woman who’s haunting you would only make the haunting worse — unless, of course, you solve her murder afterward. That tends to shut ghosts up.)
Of course, Andrés, the most fashionable of the Espookys, would disagree with this statement. He obviously feels a little called out by Prof. Robert Roberts’s presumptuous but partially sort of semi-correct observation about dangly earrings — which mean “nothing and everything,†according to a 2019 article in the Cut that mentions Julio Torres and Los Espookys by name. But buying leather pants — a hobby for which he doesn’t have a justification, unlike the music boxes — is important enough to him that he takes a job, however briefly, modeling staircases. And how is one supposed to go about selling disembodied steps without a staircase fascinator and a sequined patchwork turtleneck cape, hmm?
To get all grad school about it, this season of Los Espookys has been following a very interesting thread about presentation (both gender and otherwise) and the construction of reality through images. Take the ongoing thread about those sexy-lady signs (fictional) President De La Guarda has been posting around the city: Both Tati and Mayor Teresa Lobos respond to Úrsula’s discomfort with the figures with casually misogynist comments, suggesting that this campaign is doing exactly what it’s meant to — reinforce casual sexism and create an atmosphere where women’s second-class citizenship is a given. Úrsula also faces the classic feminist dilemma of choosing between an imperfect vessel for her political ideals and not acting on them at all, something we Americans wouldn’t know about in the slightest.
The subtweeting of America in “The Ruins (Las Ruinas)†doesn’t stop there, however. There’s also the Ambassador’s pink-blazer-bikini combo, which made me ever so briefly proud of this ridiculous country I live in, before the devastating and well-deserved skewering of “if it’s in English, it’s for everybody!â€Â Los Espookys is a casually bilingual show, where whether a character speaks Spanish or English seems largely to be character driven. Take Tico and his daughter, Sonia: Tico has lived in multiple countries, and genuinely wants to connect with his nephew Renaldo. Therefore, he alternates between languages. On the other hand, Sonia is incurious and confrontational. She is mostly concerned with imposing her will on others — like Renaldo’s little sister, Beatriz, who she’s molding into a mini-me. So she only speaks English, even while she’s staying in a Spanish-speaking household.
Tati is on her own planet, both in terms of language — “a little of neither,†as she tells Tico — and misogyny. Tati’s galaxy-brain contradictions and essentially childlike nature shine through best in the divorce proceedings that open this week’s episode, where she leaves Juan Carlos’s fortune on the table but walks away from what Úrsula calls “a fun chapter†with an entire box of cookies and a yo-yo. Tati’s both an independent woman who doesn’t need a man and a misogynist who wouldn’t hire a female lawyer because she might flirt with her soon-to-be ex-husband. She’s a radio transmitter, a conduit that simply absorbs and barfs back out life’s many contradictions — no wonder she so rarely makes human sense.
But Tati is creeping toward something akin to a feminist statement by rewriting Don Quixote, Tati’s version: Putting on our grad-school caps just a moment longer, we could rationalize this as performance art, a subversion of the white male canon by hijacking one of its cornerstone texts. Or we could say that, since she exists beyond the space-time continuum, in her mind, she did write Don Quixote before Miguel de Cervantes, and he stole the idea from her. Regardless, it’s keeping her busy.
Tico is the bigger issue for Los Espookys at this point: He means so very well, but he’s so anxious to fit in he ruins the vibe, whether it be interrupting afternoon bone-craft time or talking too loudly and blowing their cover at the archaeological site. Renaldo is a calming presence, but even his easygoing, accepting presence isn’t enough to get Tico to chill. Perhaps some family bonding time at the cemetery might help, or an emergency exorcism to release Andrés from the djinn I’m wondering might be trapping him in a hallucinatory moral quandary with an ironic comeuppance, given how easily he found a handsome, wealthy widower with a pool to save him from the hell that is 15 minutes of work per hour.
It’s not in Andrés’s nature to question good things when they come to him; his earring reminds him that he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants. And he’s almost as skilled at creating his own reality as Tati, which means that he might actually have conjured this man into reality from his own imagination. But then why would there be children there? The whole thing smells, and with José Pablo Minor listed as a regular cast member and not a guest star, I have a feeling this isn’t the last we’ll see of Juan Carlos this season.
Creating your own reality can be dangerous. By trying to bend history to his own purposes — namely, avoiding his impending cancellation — Prof. Robert Roberts sows the seeds of his own demise. Seeing how the whole scenario played out, I wondered if perhaps Los Espookys deliberately sabotaged him. Andrés did seem to take the earring comment personally, and surely this group knows that skeletons don’t have ears. They love skeletons! They look at them all the time! How could they make such a rookie mistake?
The implication is subtle, as are many of the thematic threads this week. The balance between these cunning through-lines and the laugh-out-loud silliness of the jokes is a tricky one to pull off, but the writing and direction work together to make “The Ruins (Las Ruinas)†work on multiple levels — thus, the bump back up to five stars.
It’s Me, Tati
• Andrés’s internal Village People substitutes a nurse for an “Indian†because this is 2022 and Los Espookys doesn’t fuck around with those types of stereotypes, thanks.
• Very few questions are being asked here about the source of those three human skeletons or what Andrés wants with the third one. Oh well!
• Is Prof. Robert Roberts’s comment that “two, maybe three†queer people worked on his ill-advised gay skeleton stunt a reference to Renaldo’s ace journey this season? Or to Ana Fabrega, who identifies as queer IRL? You be the judge!
• Speaking of the good professor, you might recognize guest star Ikechukwu Ufomadu from his appearances on Ziwe and Three Busy Debras or from Judas and the Black Messiah, where he played a supporting role.
• “But Úrsula, politics don’t affect me at all!â€
• What would your Mayor Teresa Lobos campaign promise combo be? I’m going to go with a personal pizza and a picture with the sea monster.