Warning: This post contains spoilers for Caught
Caught, based on Harlan Coben’s novel, is the latest adaptation of the best-selling author’s thrillers to join Netflix. Set in Bariloche, in the Argentinian Patagonia, the Spanish language series follows journalist Ema Garay (Soledad Villamil), who is known for exposing criminals who have managed to escape facing justice. When Ema starts investigating the disappearance of 16-year-old Martina Schulz, every question she asks seems to open up more mysteries.
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As Ema looks into numerous suspects over six thrilling episodes, Caught surprises viewers by revealing that nothing is quite as it seems. One person Ema talks to turns out to not be who she thought at all, and while investigating cases of child abuse, Ema discovers that a young girl has disappeared. The plot, full of twists and turns, challenges expectations and keeps the suspense alive until the very end.
Leo Mercer becomes the prime suspect
Caught opens with Ema posing as a teenager in a conversation online with someone she believes is a pedophile who lures underage victims by pretending to be a peer, convincing them to send intimate photos or even meet in person, only to reveal his true identity afterward and abuse them. Ema believes that the person she is talking to may be responsible for attacking 16-year-old Camila Costa.
In the first episode, Ema attempts to uncover the identity of the suspect by arranging a meeting in a Bariloche park, using a 19-year-old jiu-jitsu fighter to lure him there. After hours of waiting, Ema notices a hooded man holding a teddy bear, watching the young woman. She chases him, but he manages to escape. Hours later, in the online game, the man apologizes and claims that when he arrived, she was no longer there. To identify each other, she had said she would be carrying a fuchsia-colored backpack, while he mentioned he would bring a gift. The man then arranges a new meeting to “make it up to her.” The police are informed, but they respond that no officers are available for the sting operation. Ema and her team decide to go through with it alone, choosing an abandoned place called the “house with the red door” where they can control the situation and film the suspect.
However, the person who shows up is not who Ema expects. It’s Leo Mercer, the head of the Fronteras Foundation, which supports vulnerable children through classes and other projects. When he enters the house, Ema and a cameraman confront him. “Did you come here to abuse a child?” she asks.
Leo and Ema previously met when she visited Camila at her home, because Camila had been raped by an abuser she’d met online and arranged to meet in person. Leo, a family friend, didn’t want Ema to bother Camila for “money” and “stories,” but began to trust her after learning about Ema’s work as a journalist.
Ema posts the video of her confronting Leo on social media, and it goes viral. Leo is branded as an abuser and is accused of attacking Camila.
But unbeknownst to Ema, Leo is innocent. His presence in the house where she set up the sting operation was part of a larger plan executed by the actual man she has been talking to. Caught reveals that Leo fell into a trap designed to falsely accuse him of child abuse. He was actually at the house to help a different woman, Martina Schulz, who had called him for help and said she was at that location. Martina later goes missing and is found dead in the forest days later, raising suspicions about Leo even more after Ema’s video goes viral. Camila’s father, Facundo, decides to take on Leo along with some other men from town.
Leo tries to explain himself—at the end of episode 2, he arranges to meet Ema to explain everything that happened, without cameras or police, and tells her that Martina had called him for help. But Facundo arrives at the scene and shoots Leo in the neck, causing him to fall into a river.
Who is the real culprit?
In episode 6, flashbacks of previously unseen events in Caught reveal that the true culprit behind the trap to ruin Leo’s life is someone he knows very well: Marcos Brown. A childhood friend and someone Leo once considered a brother, Marcos had swindled the company he worked for in Buenos Aires and was fired. (He falsely claimed that the company had used him as a scapegoat.) As a result, he returned to Bariloche with the goal of reclaiming his family’s land, now owned by Leo’s Fronteras Foundation. The flashbacks show that Marcos persistently tries to convince Leo to establish a trust fund for the foundation’s land, assuring him that Fran Briguel, a businessman whose family owns half of Bariloche, will want to join the deal, making them both a lot of money.
After Leo refuses, Marcos reminds his friend of something that happened 30 years ago, when the two broke into the Briguel family home because Marcos wanted to steal a badge he believed would show Fran’s family was descended from Nazis, to help his father in his land dispute with them. That plan failed because the rumored badge didn’t exist. When trying to leave the house, they broke the chandelier in the living room to avoid being seen, and the glass shards hit Margarita, who worked for the Briguel family, and was still in the house when the young men entered thinking everyone had left. Bleeding and lying on the floor, Margarita managed to grab Marcos’s leg, while Leo managed to escape. When the Briguel family returned, Marcos was caught, and to avoid legal consequences, his father had to sell the land.
Marcos, who long wanted to reclaim the land, went to visit Fran to talk about establishing a trust fund for the foundation’s land, without Leo’s knowledge. Fran provided a private flight for Marcos—and on the same flight was Martina Schulz, who was also heading to the Argentinian capital to meet Fran.
We learn they met after Martina, a violinist, started posting videos online that grew more risqué over time, gaining her several fans, including Fran, who flew her to Buenos Aires to have her record a video for him in a hotel room. Per their agreement, Fran would watch Martina make the recording, and in exchange, she would attend a violin performance. But Fran broke the agreement by trying to touch Martina’s body. Fran asked Marcos, who was staying in the same hotel, to calm Martina down and take her to another place. In Martina’s hotel room, she told Marcos what happened and asked if he could go with her to a police station. He emphasized that Fran was a powerful man and encouraged her not to report it.
Marcos then took Martina to bus back to Bariloche, and at the station, she realized she recognized him through Leo. It turns out she lived next door to Leo’s ex, Juliana, and knew him.
Martina’s revelation gave Marcos a clear idea to get his family’s land back: he would frame Leo. In another scene, with a laptop in hand, he sends an anonymous email to Ema posing as a minor reporting the abuse she suffered, also mentioning the username the abuser was using to lure his victims. Because of that email, Ema began investigating the supposed criminal, thinking it could be related to other cases of abused young women. In reality, she was falling into Marcos’s trap for Leo.
The final episode also reveals how Leo ended up at the “house with the red door” when Ema and the team of journalists were there. Marcos and Martina kept in touch after returning to Bariloche and met frequently. Although the series does not show any explicit scenes of them having any kind of intimate contact, it is implied that their relationship was something more, with Marcos shown asking if Martina is “behaving,” to which she responds, “Are you controlling me?”
To Martina, Marcos was someone special, but to Marcos, the young woman was just another piece in his bigger plan. He tricks Martina by making up a fake favor that would require her to call Leo for help, so he goes to the house where Ema is waiting to confront the supposed suspect.
When Leo receives the call, he is at the restaurant of his ex-girlfriend Juliana, with whom he had a relationship for almost 10 years and helped raise her son, Armando. Leo steps out of the restaurant to take the call and asks if Martina wants him to call the police, which she declines. He arrives at the location and, looking at his phone, notices that the messages Martina sent him with the address are being deleted one by one. At that moment, a camera appears, and Leo is confronted by Ema, who accuses him of going there to abuse a minor, which he denies. Meanwhile, Marcos is at Leo’s house planting false evidence, such as the laptop he used to communicate with the supposed minor, who was actually Ema, photos of minors, and a teddy bear similar to the one Ema had seen in the hands of the hooded man in the Bariloche park.
The truth about Marcos
The truth about Marcos is revealed to Ema after she asks to meet with him. When she met with Leo before he was shot, she truly believed he was telling the truth about being innocent and continued to investigate, concluding that Fran might have planned everything to buy the foundation’s land for pennies.
Ema meets with Marcos at the lake where Leo used to teach rowing to the children of the foundation. She asks him to help her report Fran, and during their conversation, she receives a call from her coworker Vicky, telling her to leave the area. Vicky explains that Marcos is a scammer and was caught in Buenos Aires, which would explain his return to Bariloche, and informs her that the foundation’s land will not be auctioned, but will be returned to its original owners, the Brown family, with Marcos Brown being the only living heir.
With this information, Ema turns on her phone’s recorder and insists on asking Marcos questions, saying that after the scam he pulled on his former company, he ended up with nothing and needed to recover the land that belonged to his family. However, for that, he needed to frame Leo for a crime and destroy the foundation, using Ema and Martina. When asked if he killed Martina, Marcos replies that he is not a murderer and then strikes Ema on the head with a rowing oar.
When Ema wakes up, she realizes Marcos is trying to drown her in the lake, while blaming her for everything that’s happened. Ema escapes by hitting Marcos on the head with a rock, and manages to walk to her phone and start a live broadcast on social media, revealing everything.
Marcos flees. On the road, he calls his wife, saying that there has been a misunderstanding and that lies will be told about him, but that nothing happened. He asks her to turn off her phone after they finish the call, and once they hang up, he unbuckles his seatbelt and steers his car into a truck carrying several wooden planks, and dies. An easier way to escape all the accusations that were coming—but this time, the accusations were true.
With the case almost over, Ema and Vicky talk about getting evidence against Fran, who is abusing minors. The series doesn’t show what the investigation will look like, but it does who attacked Camila and other minors. A 38-year-old man, Fabián Ramos, was arrested in Neuquén while trying to rape a young woman in a hotel. She managed to escape from the room and call for help in the corridor, prompting guests to leave their rooms and then go after the perpetrator, who tried to lock himself in a room. At the police station, he was identified by all the victims.
What happened to Martina?
Episode 6 of Caught reveals what really happened to Martina, who everyone thought may have been kidnapped by Leo. While looking at a photo of the young woman with a friend—taken at an underground party—in her notebook, Ema noticed that Martina had a red dot on her forehead made with paint. This reminded her of another photo she’d seen of Martina, where she had the same red dot from the party, but that photo was taken in a different location. Ema finds the photo at the memorial the school held after Martina’s body was found, and takes note of the drawings on the wall behind her in the image.
Those drawings, Ema realizes, were made by Armando, Juliana’s son, and she’d seen them when she went to the woman’s restaurant to gather more information for the investigation. Ema goes to Juliana’s house to talk to Armando, and persistently makes her way through the family’s home until she finds a wall with Armando’s drawings—the same wall that appears in the photo of Martina. In other words, Armando, who was also at the underground party thrown by young people from Bariloche, was with Martina after the party. The police and Ema know Martina had been taken from the party by an unidentified person, as a video had captured that moment. Now we find out, with Ema, that Armando was that person.
It emerges that Armando and Martina left the party together and went to his house, where they reminisced about growing up as neighbors. Martina picked up his Polaroid camera and took a picture of him, and then asked him to take the photo that Ema later finds. They had sex and afterward, while Martina was getting dressed, she saw the video of Ema confronting Leo. With Armando still sleeping, Martina used another phone — given to her by Marcos — to call him and ask for an explanation, but he tells her not to worry and to destroy the phone he gave her. Martina breaks the phone, flushes it down the toilet, while Armando knocks on the door and discovers what’s happening when he sees Leo’s face on Martina’s other phone.
He watches the video and says it’s a lie, questioning Martina, who claims she feels like an idiot and blames Marcos. As they argue, they move to Armando’s door, which is near the stairs. What happens is inevitable: Armando asks what Leo did to Martina for her to do something like that, and tries to push her away from him, causing Martina to fall down the stairs and die.
Juliana, as Armando’s mother, did what she had to do to protect her son. When she arrived home, she saw Martina lying at the bottom of the stairs and Armando holding her while crying. “There was nothing we could do for Martina,” Juliana says to Ema. She and her son placed Martina’s body in the car and left it in the woods. But when they returned home, they realized Martina’s phone was still at the house, and Juliana decided to dispose of the device in an unexpected way. When she found out that Leo had been killed by Facundo, and the place where everything happened, she remembered that her ex-boyfriend liked to camp near there. Since Leo was being hunted because of the pedophilia accusation, he hid near a waterfall, the exact place where Juliana found his things. Since Leo was dead, it wouldn’t be a problem to put Martina’s phone with his belongings, right? In the end, Armando decides to end this secret, and he and his mother go to the police station, in Ema’s car, to confess and pay for the crimes they committed.
How does Caught end?
Ema visits Facundo, who shot Leo, and mentions that his lawyer managed to change the charge from homicide to attempted homicide. According to Ema, her testimony about what happened might have helped with that, but she’s not sure, and says she can’t stop thinking about why Leo’s body still hasn’t been found. Facundo responded with, “Why don’t you ask them (the police)?” Ema did that, but the police said that the river probably carried Leo’s body to the lake, which is why they haven’t found it. They explained that the pressure from the water renders the body inert and without oxygen, which is why it doesn’t float. “That’s what the experts say, but I went out there again,” Ema says, adding that before reaching the lake, the river makes a bend. If someone is dragged there, they could easily get out of the water and into the woods, and Leo knew that place like the back of his hand, just like Facundo.
The journalist wants to know if Leo is alive and believes that Facundo knows more than he’s saying. But Facundo says if Leo were alive and wanted to come back, he would. “I know Leo. And that guy can forgive anything. And if he’s alive, he’ll come back. But if he’s not, we’re both gonna have to live with that,” he says. The two of them, even without meaning to, were influenced by lies and false information that resulted in Leo being hunted down and killed, a topic well explored in the series since we live in a digital age and false information is often highlighted without being verified. Caught exposes precisely how hasty judgments and the viralization of content can destroy reputations without concrete proof. The plot keeps the viewer in constant doubt, questioning the extent to which the quest for justice can be manipulated.
Caught tries to give the audience and the characters a happy ending: the abuser has been arrested, the Fronteras Foundation is still working and helping children, what happened to Martina and Marcos Brown’s crimes have been revealed, and… Leo is alive. That’s right.
In the final four minutes of the series, a man appears with his back to the camera while riding a horse in a desert region, looking at the mountains. The camera soon focuses on Leo’s face, and we see that he is not alone, but accompanied by five other people, all mounted on their horses. “I’m getting pretty bored just staring into space,” says a woman. “I’d love a few more nice mates,” says a man shortly afterward, making Leo smile. “Let’s go. We should start heading back,” Leo says, leaving with his new friends.
Facundo thinks Leo would return if he were alive and wanted to, always forgiving people. But maybe, just this time, he didn’t want any of that. Leo had his reputation ruined by lies and was shot by a friend, so now, maybe he just wants to live a simple life with his new friends and their horses. Simple, discreet, and far from lies that can kill innocent people.
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