The first episode of Telemundo's newest soap opera, Marina, is available for viewing online, if you simply can't wait another eight hours for it to air on television (8:30p.m.). The plot revolves around Marina, a virtuous Mexican girl raised in the humble shacks of Acapulco who suddenly finds herself luxuriously wealthy. (Tagline: "The heat of Acapulco; the passion of a woman.") Never heard that one, right?
The show's not that exciting, though. In the first episode Marina only gets into a boating accident, finds her mother collapsed on the floor of the house after a heart attack, fends off a would-be rapist, and passes out while he sets her house on fire. I mean... it's not like waking up after smoke inhalation to find your mother dead and everything you own in ashes is really that dramatic. Or finding out that your uncle — the man who truly loved your mother, much more than your father, who left her and you to suffer — your uncle, who you've never even heard of, has been supporting you all these years, and that your mother's dying wish was that he take you in as if you were his daughter. Yawn.
And then when Marina shows up to the mansion on the cliffs of Acapulco with its myriad bubbling fountains and uniformed maids she (of course) encounters the guy who crashed his yacht into her humble fishing boat, who takes her by the shoulders, shakes her, and demands to know what she is doing in his house (not knowing that they have an uncle in common and that Marina is his half-sister) and then as he's clutching her arms his pregnant, slightly unhinged wife — predictably no? -- appears at the top of the stairs and mistakes Marina for a mistress. So everybody's yelling at Marina — who has already had a really shitty day by the way -- and demanding to know why she is in their house and then the crazed pregnant (not by her husband) wife gets so hysterical that she trips and tumbles down the stairs with potential consequences ranging from miscarriage to amnesia. But we don't know what happens. It just ends.
THIS IS NOT EXAGGERATION.-Emily Witt
