Hôtel Almirante

I can't give this little series more than a five: while visually pleasing and well acted, it's definitely not very well built.

The plot doesn't really make sense and has all the twist and turns of a classic soap opera.

There seemed to be so much wrong with the historical accuracy of this potboiler. Spanish people a few years after the civil war just didn't snog in the streets. Women from good families had a duenna. But one thing that did ring true was the voice on the radio, exhorting, ceaseless and omnipresent.

The plot was all over the place. There's a suspicious death and then we go off on a tangent for a whole episode into a totally irrelevant love affair that simply couldn't have happened, given its circumstances. I just don't know why we had to watch this diversion for forty five minutes.

There was no cohésion, no development. The plot device of "it's time now that you heard this secret/the whole truth now you're xx years old" was used far too much.

Didn't Andrea's wealthy family have access to a doctor? Why did she just lie in bed when she fell ill? Not at all credible especially as the truth about her illness was established easily at the end of the series.

The parts were filled by actors who seem not to have any previous presence in film or TV. Only two have an IMDB photo. Competent acting suffered from this.

By the way, the synopsis provided at the top of the IMDB page is completely wrong.

I can't recommend this at all.