Citadel Season Finale Review: Everything You Know Is Wrong

The review of the Citadel finale: episode 6, available on Prime Video from May 26, with two great action scenes and a shocking final plot twist worthy of a great film, dismisses the first season in the best way.

Everything you know is wrong. It was one of the phrases that scrolled on the screens of U2’s Zoo TV Tour 30 years ago. And it is also one of the launch phrases of Citadel, the Prime Video series that allowed the television series to make a leap and get closer to the great action and spy sagas that we usually see at the cinema. As we will tell you in the review of the Citadel endingthat is, episode 6, available on Prime Video since May 26, everything we knew was wrong.

With two great action and suspense scenes, and a shocking final plot twist worthy of a great film, the first season of Citadel takes his leave in the best possible way. Just as the second is announced. By the way, watch the episode until the end. There is a post credit scene in which we see our Matilda De Angelis, with bob hair, in what will be the Italian spin-off: Citadel: Diana.

Mason and the Submarine: Mission Impossible?

“You know how I became a spy. My father and mother left when I was five. Citadel saw me, made me realize who I am“. Are the words that, in the penultimate episode of CitadelMason (Richard Madden) he said to Nadia (Priyanka Chopra Jones). It is a scene that returns at the beginning of episode 6, to tie the story together and to tell us that at the heart of Citadel there is a history of identity and bonds. Which moves back and forth in time, between eight years ago and today. Eight years ago a Russian submarine was hacked to prevent it from launching nuclear weapons one day and causing a world crisis. It’s Operation Red Cell. Today we are in Morocco, and that operation is about to be completed. Mason must parachute over the submarine and manipulate nuclear devices. An impossible mission? We’ll see.

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Derivative series or series that takes the best as a model?

We didn’t randomly put these words, “mission impossible”. Yes, because there are two ways of seeing Citadel. It is clear that the references to the many spy stories already passed on the big screen, from Mission: Impossible a The Bourne Identity up to the world of James Bond, they are there and are evident. But – at least to the writer it seems to be so – Citadel never seems to slavishly copy these famous sagas. If anything, it seems to take them as a model to try to reach them, or even to raise the bar. Derivative series or series that takes the best of spy stories as a model to try to reinvent the genre? It depends on how you want to see it. That is, if you want to see the glass half empty or half full. Seems half full to us.

In the present but with an eye towards the future

The City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, the focus of one of the key sequences of the season finale of Citadelallows us to draw attention to one of the characteristics of Citadel. It is a series set in the present but with an eye already towards the future. We are in the present day, but everything is orchestrated to give the idea of ​​a futuristic, technological world bordering on science fiction. Wide, cold, smooth spaces, geometric architectures. Which contrast with historical places, such as noble villas, rugged and wild nature (the deserts of Morocco and the Rocky Mountains in America), historical places such as London Bridge, which we see in a sequence. The protagonists, on a mission, wear technological suits like those of superheroes. As someone said, Citadel it’s like a movie from Avengersbut with spies.

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Action and feeling

A set of action sequences and a story full of plot twists might seem cold if there weren’t, at the heart of that precision mechanics that is the story of Citadel, a family story of feelings and ties. At the heart of Citadel is an ongoing story of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, of eternal abandons and eternal returns. Also in this sense Citadel picks up on the trend of products such as Mission: Impossiblewhich in addition to the action has focused heavily on the sentimental tension between the characters of Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson, and like Daniel Craig’s Bond, and the strong and painful ties between 007 and the characters of Eva Green and Lea Seydoux.

Time to meet Mason Kane

“Time to meet Mason Kane“. It is one of the phrases we hear towards the end of the episode. Kyle, who is the new identity of Mason, is about to meet his old self. In the world of Citadel it is possible, thanks to vials with the genetic profile. The speech is intriguing and disturbing. Think about it: what would we do if we happened to understand that we were another person, to know the I that we were, to go back to being another? How would we react? This ending carries the plot with it most important twist of Citadelworthy of a great spy film.

We are just hardware

But it is also the signal that the serie makes a speech different from the others spy-story regarding identity. If the Bond saga is based on the strong identity of the protagonist, who, apart from ritual coverings, is always him (“my name is Bond, James Bond“, is there to testify it), the other great sagas make their own speech on identity. In Mission: Impossible, identity changes are frequent, conscious: they occur through the famous latex masks and vocal synthesizers that allow an individual to resembling someone else in face and voice. But it is a conscious game, it is acting: like an actor, the spy is aware that he is playing someone else. In The Bourne Identity the protagonist has no identity: he has no memory, no knows who he is. But everything happens by accident. In CitadelOn the other hand, the constant changes of identity are desired by those who orchestrate them and certainly not by those who suffer them: thus people are chosen to erase them, to remove their personality and their memories. In a word: their soul. Memory and genetic code are removed and put back at will, as if they were files, a computer memory backup. And so, like it no, we realize that we are just shells. We are just hardware.