We've finally made it.
After 48 episodes, two robberies
and one man disguising himself as a couch,
yes that happened,
Money Heist reached its thrilling conclusion.
This is not just the end of season five,̧
but of all Money Heist,
and what a series to go out on.
The Professor got to boogie,
Berlin had the world's first one-man bar fight,
and we enjoyed the funkiest rendition of Bella Ciao yet.
Even with the cops at the door,
there's no stopping the grooviest robbers on TV.
Money Heist's final run
also delivered answers we've been waiting for:
how to get the gold out of the bank,
how to get the robbers out of the bank
and just what was the relevance
of all those Berlin flashbacks.
With the series wrapped up
and our thieves scattered to the wind,
it's time to take a look at the final episodes
and break down the masterstrokes
of The Professor's greatest plan yet.
As if it needs to be said, beware spoilers!
Let's start with the first part of the plan.
How do you get 90 tonnes of gold out of a bank?
Turns out it takes a smelter,
an industrial oil pump,
some complicated maths
and one very virile oil rig worker.
Seven kids with seven different women.
From the moment the gang crack
the flooded vault in part three,
and started melting the gold into tiny pellets,
it was obvious they weren't going
to transport the gold via traditional means.
They were very open about the fact.
Lisbon explained it to the court
before being rescued using the Paris plan.
The plan is to steal 90 tonnes of gold
from the national reserve.
We're melting it.
And the Professor spilled the tiny golden beans
to Sierra,
but she chose not to believe him.
It'll come out mushed up with the water.
You think I'm stupid, right?
The answer came in episode six of part five,
where Berlin visited an oil rig in the Barent's Sea
a whole five years before the Bank of Spain heist.
Here, we learn two things.
One, that Berlin makes
for a hugely fun passenger on long trips.
And two, that the pumps used by the rig have
the power to shift liquids at high pressure.
This thing sucks stuff from the seabed
as if it were baby food.
By mixing pellets with vault water,
the robbers fill the drain pipes under the bank
with gold.
This process uses a small pump
which doesn't have the force needed to push that gold
through the 11 miles of pipe
from the bank to the storm water tank,
which is where Benjamin and the gang are waiting for it.
Enter the industrial pump,
with the raw power to flush the remaining vault water
and the pipe gold all the way to the storm water tank
Too little pressure
and the gold won't get there.
Too much and the pipes will explode.
The tricky part is manually controlling pressure
and calculating the values.
Palermo cites Darcy Weisbach
which is an equation in fluid dynamics
used to find the impact of friction
on liquids moving through a pipe.
For once,
The Professor has met his galaxy-brained match.
Am I crazy or am I the only one who sees this?
The final twist in the plan?
Instead of pumping the gold downhill,
where the police are more likely to look,
Palermo chooses to pump it upstream.
We'll get the gold up the river like fucking salmons,
to the storm water tank.
So when the police turn up
at the wrong storm water tank,
there's not a single gold ball in sight.
Of course, maths only gets you so far.
To Palermo, the plan is a love letter
to his time with Berlin
and it's his faith in that plan and that relationship
that pushes the gang and the gold
to where they need to be.
Speaking of Berlin, the drainpipe plan feels
like an echo of his earlier robbery
at Frederiksborg castle…
where he stole Viking treasure with his son,
then used the river outside
to safely transport their swag to another location.
And speaking of Raphael, now's a good time to address
a tiny problem in The Professor's plan.
No sooner have they extracted the gold by pipe
and smelted it back into ingots,
the team is robbed by another gang of thieves
posing as policemen.
Yes, the irony of robbers being robbed
isn't lost on us.
Our gold's been stolen.
The culprit?
Berlin's son Raphael and former wife, Tatiana.
-We did it! -We did it!
To pick this twist apart,
let's rewind back a few years.
In part three,
we're introduced to Berlin's new bride, Tatiana,
during one of the show's many flashbacks.
On the plus side,
it means we get another Berlin musical number.
But The Professor is alarmed that Berlin has shared
his plans for the Bank of Spain heist
with an outsider.
By the way, she loves the Bank of Spain heist.
She knows.
Staying in the past,
but jumping forwards a few months,
Berlin introduces Tatiana to his son, Raphael.
He needs them both to rob the Danish castle.
But while the Copenhagen job goes without a hitch,
it ignites a spark between Raphael and Tatiana,
and nervous looks in the boat
blossom into a full-on affair.
We'd feel bad for Berlin
but it's only what he taught his son to do.
If you really want something in life...
you have to steal it from whoever has it.
This results
in the most expensive bar bill in history
for a heartbroken Berlin.
But in a way,
it also triggers the entire Money Heist story.
Berlin's broken heart
and stint in jail for smashing the bar
is what opens him up to working
with his brother, The Professor,
on the original Royal Mint heist.
Before I die,
you and I are going to rob the Royal Mint of Spain.
Yes, Money Heist is basically
just a really messy breakup.
Eating a massive tub of Haagen-Dazs
would have been much easier.
Back in the present, we have fun
seeing The Professor lose his cool for a minute.
She's a pianist.
And a thief!
But it's also neat seeing the family resemblance
between his work and Raphael's.
The idea of Raphael observing the crime scene
from a bank of monitors
is a classic Professor move.
as is the attention to detail
when he and Tatiana hide the gold under the house.
The total commitment to the disguise is the same
as The Professor dressing as a homeless man
back in season one,
to, yes, stapling himself and Sierra
inside the couch.
Of course, Sierra does get the gold back.
After The Professor realises
Raphael and Tatiana must be hiding the loot,
Sierra tracks it by looking for recently purchased land
and confronts the pair of lovebirds.
And reclaiming the ingots is crucial to the plan.
It's the answer to the other huge question
hanging over the heist:
how to get the robbers out of the bank.
Because while you may be able to squeeze gold pellets
through 11 miles of pipe,
Helsinki is more of a challenge.
Without the gold, we're done for.
Then we're done for.
The short answer is
they plan to hold the gold hostage outside the bank
to secure the release of the robbers inside the bank.
That might sound like backwards thinking,
but you have to remember the whole point
of robbing the Spanish Reserve in the first place
was to use it as a bargaining chip to free Rio.
The gold was never the real target.
For his plan to work,
The Professor needs to apply financial pressure
to the Spanish government.
It's not enough to take the gold.
As Tamayo explains,
the government have safety nets in place.
Bad news.
I've got the support of the European Central Bank
to inject cash or buy debt.
To amplify the financial crisis,
the robbers broadcast
their successful gold heist online.
In fact, watch back through the series,
and you'll often see characters filming
on their mobile phones.
No, it wasn't just inappropriate TikToks,
they were documenting their heist.
To further destabilise the financial market,
The Professor plants fake clues
to draw the police and army to search
for the gold in the ocean.
Filling the storm water tank
with charred remains of fake documents
reminds us of The Professor planting fake leads
in his hideout
during the Royal Mint heist.
He loves a wild goose chase.
The plan is named after Tom Thumb,
or as he's known in Spain,
Pulgarcito.
The original Tom Thumb story's
where a tiny, thumb-sized man
goes on wild adventures,
where he was passed from bird to fish.
which could relate
to the long journey Marseille leads Angel on
in pursuit of the gold.
But the Tom Thumb story's
also seen as a tale about how a tiny hero
can take on massive challenges.
Which does link nicely
to a handful of robbers bringing down
a financial market.
With the stock market plummeting,
The Professor can negotiate with Tamayo
and offers to return it
in exchange for their freedom.
This is why the whole plan hinges
on retrieving the gold from Raphael and Tatiana.
No bargaining chip, no escape.
Which leads us to the final twist.
The gold is returned,
despite currently being buried under a house
and trapped in a standoff between Sierra and Tatiana.
Yeah, it confused us too.
But this is the brilliance of The Professor's plan.
He returns brass coated in gold,
an idea he had
after noticing how his food tins resembled ingots.
It's also an idea
with a proven Money Heist track record.
Berlin's Copenhagen job swapped Viking treasure
for brass fakes.
The twist hinges on the concept
that the gold in the reserve is more of an idea
than a valuable thing.
Countries don't spend it,
it just sits there, underpinning the economy.
Throughout the series, people are remarking
how no one can truly own the gold.
After all, it just fell from space millions of years ago.
And as Palermo notes
of historic gold…
This gold was already stolen once.
It can't be stolen twice.
Finally, there's Lisbon
dropping a neat literary reference to Tamayo.
Lazarillo de Tormes
wasn't written by the English.
Was it?
Lazarillo de Tormes is a novella
from the Spanish Golden Age
and follows a young boy mastering
the art of thievery.
It was so influential, it invented an entire genre,
the picaresque novel,
taken from the word picaro
meaning "rogue".
She's almost making the case
that ingenious deception and improvisation,
the skills that define The Professor,
are a key part of the Spanish national character.
And so it is
they convince Tamayo to work with them.
While the robbers fake their deaths
to let him walk away from the siege
with a bit of pride,
he also has to accept the fake gold
in the name of stabilising the markets.
And because the robbers reclaimed the real gold
from Raphael and Tatiana,
they can use it as a safety net.
They just need to expose its existence outside the bank
to ruin the economy again.
And it's this that finally secures their future.
It's one hell of a plan.
And so we reach the end of the Bank of Spain heist.
It was not without a few tears along the way,
rest in peace Nairobi and Tokyo,
but it's also not the bloodbath some expected.
There was a popular fan theory
that more characters would die.
Some people felt
the two teams of footballers in part four
represented who would live or die.
And others felt Nairobi's heavenly flashback
pointed towards The Professor's eventual death.
But it was not to be.
The biggest question we still have
is why they never blocked up those air vents.
Between Gandia, Stockholm and Arantxe Arteche,
there was always someone in the walls
during parts four and five.
Air vents, you are the real MVP of Money Heist.
And that brings us to the end of our Ending Explained.
Why not watch our earlier theories videos
to see how they stacked up?
Well, after you've done
an entire Money Heist series re-watch, of course.
For more videos like this,
subscribe to Netflix: Still Watching
and we'll see you soon.