Aahana Swrup
Netflix’s ‘Sara: Woman in the Shadows’ brings an intriguing web of mysteries captivating enough to pull a retired Secret Service agent back into the field. The Italian crime drama show, originally titled ‘Sara: La Donna Nell’ombra,’ follows the titular Sara Morozzi, who has long wiped her hands clean of any detective work. However, this inevitably changes when news arrives of the death of her estranged son, Giorgio. Consequently, once the older woman dips her toes back into the world of secret services, criminal investigations, and conspiracies, her life plummets back into a dangerous game. Thus, before she knows it, the former agent is once again chasing government corruption with the help of old contacts and new friends. Naturally, the deeper she and her colleagues dig into the case, the muddier the water gets. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Sara: Woman in the Shadows Recap
In the middle of the night, Sara Morozzi receives a dreadful call when she’s asked to come down to a hospital to identify the dead body of her son, Giorgio. The young man seemed to have died in an innocuous car accident while walking his dog. Still, the mother, who hadn’t been a part of her son’s life for a long time, can’t help but snoop around a bit to see if anything is amiss. Consequently, when the guilty driver mentions something about the victim possibly jumping in front of his car, it catches Sara’s attention. As a result, she ends up conducting a private investigation, which forces her to reach out to Teresa, her colleague from her Secret Service days. Furthermore, she also gets to know Viola, Giorgio’s wife, who is pregnant with his child.
Although Sara assumes her son’s apparent suicide could’ve been related to his professional life, a different truth emerges. As it turns out, Giorgio was involved with another woman, who had a vengeful lover: the same guy who ran the former over with his car. Once the ex-agent learns about the same, she decides to take justice into her own hands and delivers a similar fate to the guilty driver with her own car. Unfortunately for her, Teresa, who knows her too well, manages to capture a recording of the incriminating act. Therefore, the Unit Head now has the perfect blackmail material to force Sara to return to her sleuthing ways. Apparently, Sergio, one of Teresa’s agents, with whom she was romantically involved, has unceremoniously gone missing.
Given the sensitive nature of the disappearance, Teresa needs the off-the-books agent to take on the case. Thus, Sara has no choice but to return to a world she exited years ago. With some help, she manages to recruit Detective David Pardo, a thrill-seeking agent stuck in a dead-end department, as her badge-bearing partner. Together, the duo begins looking into the complicated threads of Sergio’s life. This brings them to Rachele, a casual and carefree girlfriend, whose father’s connections helped Sergio get a job at political candidate Tarallo’s payroll. On the other hand, they discover that while he was using this job to spy on the politician for Teresa, he was also secretly working with investigative journalist Edoardo Belliti.
Although Edoardo is initially reluctant to trust Sara and Pardo, he eventually reveals that Sergio was helping him with a big exposé piece on Tarallo. The politician is campaigning on an anti-migrant platform. As a result, he has been staging crimes and pinning them on migrants in order to sway the public in his favor for the upcoming elections. Tarallo and his team do the same with Sergio’s murder, painting it to look like he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once the dots begin to connect, Sara realizes the eerie similarity these events have to an older case she worked on while she was still with the Secret Service Unit. Back then, a man named Enricho Vigilante had come on the department’s radar in connection with possible terrorist attacks. Nonetheless, despite Head Massimiliano’s herculean efforts, they hadn’t been able to stop the man from enacting his nefarious plans.
Sara Woman in the Shadows Ending: Was Massimiliano Aware of Lembo’s Partnership With Vigilante?
Once Sergio’s involvement with Edoardo comes to the forefront, various other truths come to the forefront. The journalist had been working on a piece exposing Tarallo’s corruption in light of the upcoming election. For the same reason, Sara and others believe that the politician must have gotten Sergio killed in order to keep his secrets safe and punish an inside traitor. Nonetheless, Edoardo’s near-death encounter with Aldo and Vito Esposito confirms that it was actually Enricho Vigilante who put out the hit on the man. Vigilante had been on the Secret Service Unit’s radar for a long time. In fact, back when Sara was in the department in the 90s, they explicitly tried to catch the guy, but to no avail.
Weeks after their failed attempts, a terrorist attack was carried out in Florence, presumably under Vigilant’s command. Now, he seems to have resurfaced for an equally nefarious purpose. He and the powerful network of people he works for have funded Tarallo’s campaign to make him a political puppet they can command at their whim. Nonetheless, once Tarallo’s priorities threaten to swerve away from their agenda, they decide to pull the plug on the entire endeavor. However, the means they employ to pull this charade remain well above any civilian’s pay grade. Pardo is the first one to realize this after he notices that even the official security cameras at the political candidate’s disastrous rally had somehow turned off.
If Vigilante and his men had access to this level of tampering, they must have an inside man on retainer. Consequently, Sara concludes that Lembo, the same man who had funded Massimiliano’s Secret Service Unit, must be in cahoots with the villain. Way back in the 90s, when the department was trying ot nail Vigilante, they faced much opposition from the higher-ups who always found a way to invalidate their investigation. Eventually, a final opportunity arose to make their case. Massimiliano went out to this meeting with Catapano. The latter wasn’t allowed to attend the actual meeting with Lembo, and the former walked out without any permission to go after his target.
Weeks later, the attack on Florence happened. Even though there was no tangible way to connect this to Vigilante, the Secret Service always held their assumptions. Therefore, now decades later, when Sara watches a similar thing unfold in a different context, with Vigilante and Lembo as some of the only consistent variables, the pieces automatically fall into place. However, when she tries to confront Lembo about the same, he brushes her off with the implication that others in her place have known to keep their silence. This inevitably compels her to wonder if Massimiliano knew about their boss’ unethical connections.
Catapano, in his biased opinion, believes otherwise, while Teresa echoes the same sentiment. Yet, it’s blatantly evident that she’s only doing it to spare her friend some heartbreak. In the end, given Massimiliano’s death, there’s no real way for Sara to know the truth about what kind of skeletons he might have kept in his closet. Nonetheless, as an agent herself, she’s well-versed in the art of keeping secrets. She may have left her husband and her seven-year-old son for her romance with Massimiliano, but her dangerous profession had also played a part in the decision. Therefore, she decides to let sleeping dogs lie and accept the fact that she may never gain any closure on the matter. Ultimately, she embraces her partner’s memory for everything it was, as proven by her final decision to at last listen to the recording he had left her after his death.
Who Shot Tarallo? Does He Win The Election?
Tarallo’s election campaign reveals itself to be the nucleus of several dead bodies dropping all across town. Even though he isn’t directly responsible for Sergio’s death or the various attempts on Edoardo’s life, both instances have intrinsic links to the politician’s career. The only reason Tarallo has managed to get this far ahead in his campaign is because of the funding he has received from his benefactors from the shadows. Vigilante and his people want to open a new nuclear power plant in Campania. The only way to ensure this happens is to control the governing body of the area and spearhead their plans through the political mouthpiece. For the same reason, Vigilante has been carrying out various conspiracies, including attempts to silence Edoardo and planting anti-migrant sentiments among the masses.
Nonetheless, Tarallo gets greedy as the elections get closer and his chances of winning increase. He begins to receive other offers and bribes from outside parties to champion their own agenda, one of which directly opposes nuclear power. As such, the politician tries to have his cake and eat it too, by profiting off of Vigilante’s funding without following through on his own promise. He makes up some lies about poll numbers and his supporters’ resistance to nuclear energy. Thus, he insists that he won’t be able to win the election without dwindling his support for the power plant, at least for now.
Naturally, this ruffles some very dangerous feathers for Vigilante and his associates. In the end, they take their revenge by staging a perfect assassination of the candidate at his own rally. Even though Sara and her team notice the sniper taking Tarallo out, Vigilante covers his tracks by cutting the cameras with Lembo’s help. As such, they’re able to pin the blame for the attack on a random migrant protester, who just so happened to be at the rally. In the end, the sniper attack kills Tarall, effectively cutting his campaign short.
Did Eduardo Die? What Happens to His Investigation?
As an investigative journalist, passionate about taking Tarallo down, Eduardo has been investigating the politician for a long time. Nonetheless, he manages to slide by under the radar for some time. Nonetheless, his informant and close friend Sergio’s death inevitably puts him back on the visible game board. For the same reason, Vigilante, who has a lot riding on Tarallo’s reputation, lures the journalist out to an abandoned construction site to soundlessly kill him under the cover of the night. Still, Eduardo manages to survive the attack and flee the area.
Consequently, while fleeing from the hitmen after him, Eduardo manages to make a cryptic social media post about real estate, a message Sara knows is a code of some sort. Initially, the retired agent and Pardo attempt to use this to track the journalist down. Yet, all they find is an empty hotel room with the dead body of his assailant. Hours later, a credit card purchase and hacked airport security footage reveal that Eduardo has managed to book a flight out to Lisbon, where he’s planning to lay low for a while. As such, even though he’s assumed dead for quite some time, the journalist actually manages to survive. Still, in his disappearance, his hard-won work seems to go away with him.
With the help of his various informants, Eduardo had managed to build a pretty strong case against Tarallo. His article could have connected the corrupt politician to the various cases of migrant violence, which were actually intentionally planted crimes to spread hateful propaganda. Fortunately, Pardo is able to crack Eduardo’s last coded social media post, which brings him to the apartment of the journalist’s neighbor. As it turns out, he had hidden a USB drive in a toy he had given to the neighbor’s kid, Ely. Therefore, once the detective retrieves the drive, he’s able to publish the exposé article about Tarallo, further tarnishing the assassinated politician and his party’s reputation.
What Happens to Vigilante?
Enricho Vigilante remains the unambiguous puppet master who has been pulling immoral strings for a long time for his own evil purposes. Even though his intentions behind funding Tarallo remain unclear, his willingness to kill anyone and everyone who stands in his path firmly cements his tainted morality. Still, for the longest time, it seems he has built a perfect escape from reckoning for himself. Massimiliano had constructed his Secret Service to get rid of villains like him, but he was still helpless in stopping him. The second time that he comes on the Secret Service’s radar, it seems he might meet a similar fate.
In fact, this time, the Secret Service is even more ill-equipped to go against him since Lembo has already dissolved the department. Even though he cites budget cuts as the deciding factor to close the unit, his intentions are likely more corrupt. Yet, even after the unit closes down, justice still manages to come for Vigilante. Earlier, the department’s resident hacker had managed to crack Esposito’s phone, which allowed her some insight into his boss’ life. As such, Teresa learns about Vigilante’s jogging route and ends up ambushing him while he’s out on a run. In the end, she shoots him down, exacting her revenge for his involvement in Sergio’s death as well as the dissolution of her department.
Who Killed Sergio? Why?
The central mystery of Sergio’s death ends up having an unexpected explanation, which eventually slots everything in place. Even though he had been secretly working for Teresa and her department, his demise actually had nothing to do with it. Instead, he became a target due to his work with Edoardo, which threatened to expose Vigilante’s crimes. Sergio had only gotten his job at Tarallo’s with the help of her girlfriend, Rachele’s father, who ran security for the politician. Therefore, once his girlfriend discovered the nature of his investigation, she ended up revealing the truth about it to her father.
Thus, unintentionally, Rachele set her boyfriend up for his death. Her father, Anzovino, reached out to Vigilante, who had Sergio kidnapped and tortured. Initially, his goons, the Espositos, were only supposed to extract information from him about his work with the journalist. Nonetheless, they accidentally ended up killing him in the process. For the same reason, they staged his death to pin the blame on migrants, furthering Tarallo’s political agenda in the process. In the end, with Vigilante’s death at Teresa’s hand, his death is somewhat avenged, even if it is only in the shadows.
Read More: Where is Sara Woman in the Shadows Filmed?
