Two years after The Route will show the path of a group of friends in their twenties through the Valencia of the eighties, the journey continues, but it does so in a different destination. That first season was presented as a narrative challenge with its story in reverse, a journey from darkness to light that began with the end of the story to end at the beginning of the vital journey of those friends. It was also a tribute to a time and a place, the Bakalao Route, and to a youth that just wanted to have a good time and break with everything. The ambitious and award-winning Atresplayer series told that the protagonist, Marc Ribó (played by Àlex Monner), headed to Ibiza to continue his career as a DJ there. He told it in his first chapter, but in reality it was the end of the character’s journey. That will be the starting point of The Route, Volume 2: Ibiza, whose filming begins on Monday, October 21 in Valencia, where the series will film for nine weeks to continue another six in the Balearic Islands.
“It felt like a natural and organic step to narrate what would become of him after leaving Valencia, to which we must add that the door was open to explore another social and cultural phenomenon such as the boom that occurred on the island of Ibiza in the middle from the nineties,” explains Montse García, director of Fiction at Atresmedia, by email. “Now, we were always clear that this possible continuation depended on finding a story and some keys at all levels that had the same potential as in the first, and fortunately we managed to find it,” he continues. “It is not at all a typical second season,” he advances.
If that first delivery of The Route followed the characters on a reverse journey that took them from 1993 to 1981 full of dreams and promises, The Route, Volume 2: Ibiza abandons this narrative in reverse to bet on two parallel timelines, a game of mirrors between the Ibiza of the nineties and the seventies. One of the timelines jumps to 1996 to show Marc Ribó settled in Ibiza as resident DJ at the Amnesia nightclub. There you will meet the arrival of English promoters to the island. “We talk about the clubs in Ibiza as an established industry, which handles a lot of money and where English promoters come who bring their parties from England to the Ibizan clubs, which represents an important conflict for national DJs, a certain loss of their own identity. “explains Borja Soler, director of the series, in a telephone conversation.
For the other timeline, the series, created by Roberto Martín Maiztegui and Clara Botas, resorts to a detail that was only mentioned in passing in the first season: precisely in Ibiza the protagonist’s parents died in a plane accident in 1972. The The second timeline will take place a year before the accident, in 1971, to follow the life of Marc’s parents on the island. “If with Marc we talk about the industrialization of the nightlife model, with his father we will talk about developmentalism, the Spain of the seventies that is opening up to a tourism model that in the nineties is already highly exploited,” Soler continues. “An interesting thing about the second season is that it has a reflection on certain debates that we currently have about the country model, because it has a lot to do with the development of tourism, construction…”, completes Soler, who on this occasion is in charge of direct all six episodes of the season.
This game of mirrors between timelines will be reflected in a cast led again by Àlex Monner as Marc Ribó and joined by Irene Escolar, Carla Díaz and Marina Salas. Escolar plays Olivia, a woman who in 1996 will give refuge to the protagonist due to the bond she had in childhood with Marc’s mother. Carla Díaz will be Vicky, a waitress who will have a relationship with Marc. Also in this timeline there will be brief appearances from the rest of the original cast and Claudia Salas, Ricardo Gómez, Elisabet Casanovas will return. In the 1971 timeline, Àlex Monner himself will play Marc’s father, Manuel, who wants to rise thanks to the real estate market and whose ambitions will collide with ideals. hippies of his wife, a Valencian housewife, played by Marina Salas, whose life takes a turn when she meets another world in Ibiza. Monner is not the only one who plays two characters, Escolar also plays Violeta, Olivia’s mother, in the timeline of the 1970s.
According to Soler, the tone of the series will now be different from what it had The Route in its first season. “In the writing process we have documented a lot about Ibiza in general. Above all, the spirituality and magic of the island hovered, which we will touch on very directly in the chronology of the seventies,” explains the director. To document themselves, they have interviewed relevant personalities of the Catalan counterculture and have read a lot of the philosopher Antonio Escohotado, who was one of the founders of the Amnesia nightclub. “We wanted to take a step of maturity, because in the first season we told the best years of the lives of this group of kids in their 20s, the conflicts between them and with their families, the generational break that occurred in the eighties. . In this second season we wanted to find a way for these conflicts to be different and have to do with the paternity and maternity of our characters,” he concludes.
