Money Heist follows a group of thieves attempting to pull off a heist on the Royal Mint of Spain.
The mastermind of the heist is the Professor, adapting a heist originally conceived by his thief
father, and he runs things from a secret hideout outside of the bank. Pulling off the heist on the
inside was a team of mostly strangers with various skills and codenames. The team leader was Berlin,
the hotheaded, wild card brother of the Professor who has a terminal illness that will kill him in a
few short years. There’s the father and son team of Moscow and Denver. There’s Serbian cousins
Helsinki and Oslo. There’s counterfeiting expert Nairobi. And there’s Tokyo and Rio,
who had developed a romance during the planning of the heist. The main goal of the heist was for the
team to hold the bank’s inhabitants, including the British Ambassador’s daughter Alison,
hostage long enough to use the bank’s printing presses to print one billion euros.
The hostage negotiation with the authorities is being run by Raquel Murillo, who the Professor
secretly forms a relationship with to keep tabs on the government’s moves against his
team. And while at first this relationship is purely business for the Professor,
he soon actually falls in love with Raquel, seriously complicating things for them both.
When Raquel discovers the truth about the Professor, she is distraught and tries to
arrest him, but she’s implicated in his plans and turned on by her colleagues.
Inside the bank, the crew has problems of their own. The Royal Mint’s general director,
the sleazy Arturo, is a constant thorn in the side of the team. His pregnant mistress, Monica,
is caught hiding a cell phone, and Berlin orders her execution. Instead,
Denver stages a fake execution and keeps Monica hidden, leading to the two eventually falling
in love. Helsinki is forced to put down Oslo after he’s critically injured in an escape
attempt by several of the hostages, and Moscow is killed following a fire fight with the police.
In the final moments of the heist, a tactical squad fights their way into the Mint. The team,
with Monica in tow, escape with the one billion euros through an underground tunnel leading to
the Professor’s hideout. Berlin stays behind to buy the others some time, and dies in a shootout
with the police. And so, the gang escapes and goes their separate ways, riches in tow.
Two years later, the gang has split up and moved on with their lives. Helsinki and Nairobi are
partying together in Argentina. Over in Indonesia, Denver has married Monica, now known as Stockholm,
and she’s given birth to a son, Cincinnati. The Professor has married Raquel, now going by Lisbon,
and brought her mother and young daughter to live with them. And Tokyo and Rio are still together,
living a simple life on a small island in Panama. But Tokyo misses the crazy, big city life and
leaves paradise behind. When Rio calls her using a black market satellite phone, the authorities
are alerted to his location and apprehend him. But Rio is not taken to prison to await trial.
Instead, under the orders of the very pregnant Alicia Sierra, he is illegally taken to a secret
location where he is tortured and questioned over the whereabouts of the rest of the crew. And so,
the heist crew come back together to devise a plan to save Rio. They were going to rob
the Bank of Spain to orchestrate the release of Rio. This heist was originally planned by
Berlin years earlier. Helping the crew on this mission are Denver’s childhood friend Manila,
who is secretly in love with him, and Berlin’s old partners in crime Bogota,
Marseille, and Palermo, who harbors an unrequited love for his newly deceased friend.
For the Bank of Spain heist, the Professor, Lisbon, and Marseille run point on the outside
as the rest of the team takes the bank, which holds tons of gold that the team needs to melt
down into small grains, and a lot of documents detailing shady government secrets. The crew
manage to negotiate the release of some of the hostages in exchange for Rio, who now joins the
heist in the bank. And, inexplicably, during this hostage exchange, the slimeball Arturo manages
to rush into the bank in a poorly thought out attempt to win back Stockholm and become a hero.
From here, things quickly begin to spiral out of control. This time, the officials and negotiators
on the outside, led by Alicia Sierra and Colonel Tamayo, aren’t playing by the law and will stop at
nothing to bring down the Professor and his crew. On the outside they manage to apprehend Lisbon,
and on the inside, the bank’s psychopathic head of security Gandia uses his expertise to flip the
tables on the crew. He begins hunting them down, eventually executing Nairobi, to the horror of
everyone. In retaliation, the Professor releases Rio’s testimonial detailing the torture he endured
at the hands of the government, leading to Sierra taking the fall and being branded a criminal.
And just as the Professor orchestrates the rescue of Lisbon from the authorities and transports her
to the others inside the bank, a rogue Sierra finds his hideout and holds him at gunpoint.
In Part 5 Volume 1 of Money Heist, things have never looked worse for the team. The
Professor is released by Sierra after she goes into labor, but for everyone inside the bank,
things couldn’t be bleaker. Following Nairobi’s death at the hands of Gandia, the team release
him to the authorities in the hopes of gaining a truce. But Tamayo has other plans,
and he authorizes Commander Sagasta to lead a mercenary team, including Gandia, to break inside
the bank and kill the thieves, even if it meant several hostage casualties. During all of this,
Arturo is trying to lead his own hostage revolt, stealing some guns and fighting back against his
captives. A remorseful Stockholm is forced to shoot him, leaving her with severe PTSD. But
while Arturo’s assault failed, Sagasta and Gandia’s assault is an all out, bloody war.
Helsinki’s leg is crushed after an explosion, and Tokyo, Denver, and Manila find themselves trapped
in a kitchen with no way out. As Sagasta and Gandia break into the kitchen, Tokyo sacrifices
herself to give Denver and Manila time to escape, blowing herself up and taking Gandia out with her.
Throughout Part 5, we also get flashbacks to Berlin reconnecting with his adult son Rafael
and taking him on his first heist alongside Bogota, Marseilles, and Berlin’s newest wife
Tatiana. How these flashbacks will factor into the main present day plot of the show remains
a mystery for now, but as the show has proven countless times before, there’s always a twist.