‘Suburra: Blood on Rome’ Season 3 Episode 5 Recap: You Come at the King, You’d Best Not Miss

Well, that went poorly.

The penultimate episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome—which I kind of can’t believe; just one more episode to settle all of <gestures around wildly>?—is all about a confrontation three seasons in the making: Aureliano and Spadino versus Manfredi, for all the marbles. But try as our heroes might, they just can’t take the big man down. In fact, if the way innocent bystander Angelica is holding her belly at episode’s end, they may have done more harm than good.

It starts with Spadino. Moving with surprising rapidity, his men have captured the three stickup kids who shot Nadia and held Angelica at gunpoint and strung them up in a sheep’s pen—the better to bleed them out, I suppose. It takes some doing to get the ringleader to talk, i.e. killing the other two dudes right in front of him, but eventually the guy sings. Despite appearances to the contrary with their anti-“gypsy” shit-talking, it was Manfredi Anacleti himself who put them up to it, the better to undermine Spadino. As Manfredi tells the assembled Sinti leadership elsewhere, what kind of man would send two women to do a man’s job? Not even a man at all, amirite?

Aureliano is holed up with Nadia, who’s recuperating well (she calls the shooting “an accident at work,” like when she got her arm sliced up by the merry-go-round at her family’s amusement park), when Spadino comes by with the news that his big brother was behind it all—the incident at the party, the robbery, the whole schmear.

“This time I have to kill him, bro,” Aureliano says.

No, Spadino replies—if anyone’s going to kill Manfredi, it must be his own brother. The episode’s opening flashback, in which Manfredi gives Spadino his namesake knife, only drives the ironic closeness of their relationship home.

But when push literally comes to shove and the two brothers have a physical faceoff, Spadino can’t go through with it, not even when his knife is at his hated older sibling’s throat. Manfredi unleashes a torrent of homophobic mockery then, and all Spadino can do is retreat from the battlefield, sobbing about his own inadequacy. If you care about this character at all, and I have a hard time believing you’d be reading this if you didn’t, this is painful to watch.

There’s plenty of pain to go around, as a matter of fact. Crooked politician Amedeo Cinaglia goes through quite a bit of it when he tries to pay a visit to his professor friend, only to discover that the old man has fallen out of his window and died while trying to water one of his beloved plants. Their relationship was not central to the plot in any way, the professor was a bit player at best, and so the sum total of the sequence seems to be nothing more than atmosphere, but it certainly colors the way we see Cinaglia’s behavior in the rest of the episode.

Because after getting roughed up by Aureliano in Sibilla’s office—not that she seems to care or anything—he’s fed up with his junior partners. He makes an offer to his frenemy Cardinal Nascari: Call off his wife’s Alice’s attempts to get him to turn himself in, and he’ll call off Spadino and Aureliano’s attempt to blackmail the cardinal by threatening the life of his secret son. Unfortunately for Cinaglia, Alice isn’t buying what he’s selling, telling him his very presence corrupts the Christianity of the cliffside chapel where she’s come to pray.

For her part, Sibilla doesn’t seem pleased with any of her alternatives in establishing a new criminal-legal power structure in Rome. Aureliano killed her one friend, Samurai, so she says they can only be business partners at best; Cinaglia threatens her with his “I am the one who knocks” routine, so I’m not sure she considers him much of an alternative.

For his part, Aureliano is understanding of Spadino’s reluctance to kill his own brother. Not about the outcome necessarily—he’s still intent on killing the older man for staging the attack on Nadia—but about Spadino’s failure. “I am fucking worthless,” Spadino cries to him. Aureliano’s response is as gentle as a lovers, which, in a sense, they are.

I’ll note here, because the backdrop is so beautiful, that Aureliano and Spadino no longer meet in the abandoned domed construction site that used to be their meeting place with their late friend Lele. No one mentions this, no one brings it up at all, but it’s there to notice if you’re so inclined, and it says a lot about how they feel.

So Aureliano puts his plan in motion and ambushes Manfredi on his way to the physical therapist. Unfortunately for Aureliano, Manfredi unexpectedly has forced Angelica to come with him; by the time Aureliano succesfully forces Manfredi’s car off the road, the Sinti gangster has his knife at Angelica’s throat, making killing him impossible without killing her too. So Aureliano flees, screaming in frustration and rage—and, I don’t doubt, legitimate concern for the wellbeing of his best friend’s wife.

It’s a hell of a note to end on. Only one episode remains before Suburra arrives at its final destination, and I find myself just as enthralled by these handsome criminals and their emotional misadventures as ever. Almost certainly this will leave me bereaved by the season’s end, as I just can’t imagine all of them making it out alive. I want them to, though—that’s the thing. I want my beautiful boys to live to fight another day. I want them to get along. I want the New Kings of Rome to stand triumphant, that’s how successful this show has been, over the course of its three seasons, in making me care about these dirtbags. And I have a sinking feeling I’m going to be disappointed.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Suburra Season 3 Episode 5 ("Brothers") on Netflix