Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine – Netflix Original Series — Deep Dive Review & Analysis

Pedro Alonso Is Back. Seville Is Burning. And the Art World Will Never Be the Same.

May 16, 2026 Money Heist Universe, Netflix : Fan Review

He Told Us He’d Come Back. He Wasn’t Lying.

Let me be completely honest with you before we even begin. I watched Money Heist at an unhealthy pace. I am talking about the kind of pace where you tell yourself “just one more episode” at 1 AM and somehow it is 4:30 and you have been sitting in the dark muttering “Bella Ciao” to nobody. I was fully, embarrassingly, irreversibly invested in that universe. And when Berlin — the prequel spinoff — dropped on December 29, 2023, I treated it like a national holiday.

Season one, officially titled Berlin and the Jewels of Paris, was not a perfect show. Let me get that out of the way. It leaned into romance a little more than some of us wanted. The pacing had its rough patches. But Pedro Alonso as Andrés de Fonollosa? Absolutely magnetic. The man could read the back of a cereal box and make it feel like a heist. The first season pulled in roughly 53 million views, became the most-watched series on Netflix globally in its premiere week, and charted in the top 10 across 91 countries. Safe to say the people wanted more.

And now, nearly two and a half years later, we have Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine. Eight episodes, all dropped simultaneously on May 15, 2026. The gang is back. The city has changed — Paris has given way to the sun-soaked streets of Seville. And this time, the target is not jewellery. It is a 500-year-old Leonardo da Vinci painting, a blackmailing duke, and the audacious idea that Berlin might actually be capable of being outsmarted.

“The advertised target — one of only four surviving Leonardo portraits of women — is a decoy. The Duke of Málaga thinks he has hired Berlin. What he has actually done is walked into the canvas.”— Martin Cid Magazine on the season’s central trick

As someone who has followed this universe from the very first heist at the Royal Mint, who cried at the Professor’s plans falling apart and cheered when they came back together, I have thoughts. A lot of them. Pull up a chair.

For Anyone Just Walking In — Here is the Full Picture

Money Heist: where it all began

If you somehow need a refresher — or you are one of those rare people who skipped Money Heist and jumped straight to Berlin (bold move, respect) — here is the short version. La Casa de Papel, known internationally as Money Heist, was created by Álex Pina and premiered on Spanish television in 2017 before Netflix acquired it and turned it into a global phenomenon. The show follows a criminal mastermind known only as The Professor (played by Álvaro Morte), who orchestrates an elaborate heist on the Royal Mint of Spain with a crew of robbers, each named after a city.

Among that crew, the standout character — the one who got under your skin, made you uneasy, and somehow charmed you despite everything — was Berlin, real name Andrés de Fonollosa. Played with menacing elegance by Pedro Alonso, Berlin was simultaneously the most theatrical person in any room and the most dangerous. He had a degenerative illness. He had wives — plural, serially. He had a philosophy about stealing that felt like it had been written by a man who had read too much Nietzsche and not enough Dostoevsky. And when he died at the end of Part 2, sacrificing himself so the crew could escape, half the internet collectively refused to accept it.

Berlin Season 1 — the Paris heist

The spinoff answered a simple question: what was Berlin doing before all of this? The answer, according to Pina and co-creator Esther Martínez Lobato, was that he was in Paris, assembling a crew of specialists to steal 63 royal jewels from 34 cities — a €44 million haul. The show introduced a new gang: the tech genius Keila (Michelle Jenner), the chaotic and reckless Cameron (Begoña Vargas), the loyal Roi (Julio Peña Fernández), the logistician Bruce (Joel Sánchez), and the emotionally grounding Damián (Tristán Ulloa), Berlin’s oldest friend and the only man alive who could actually tell him he was wrong. The season was lighter in tone than Money Heist — more comedic, more romantic, more concerned with Berlin as a man than Berlin as a villain. It was imperfect. It was also very watchable.Season 2 Plot & Themes

Seville. A Da Vinci. A Duke Who Has No Idea What He’s Just Done.

Here is the basic setup for Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine, and I will keep this spoiler-light for those who have not yet watched. Berlin and Damián reassemble the crew — Keila, Cameron, Roi, Bruce — and bring them south to Seville. The mission, at least on the surface, is to steal The Lady with an Ermine, a Leonardo da Vinci painting that has been fabricated into a Seville museum loan for the purposes of the show. It is one of the most protected artworks in the world, which naturally makes it an ideal target for a man like Berlin.

But here is the twist that the entire season is built around: the painting is not really the point. The Duke of Málaga, Álvaro Hermoso de Medina, has used blackmail to force Berlin’s hand — he wants the painting and he believes he has hired the right man to get it. What he has not understood is that Berlin does not accept being a tool in someone else’s plan. The real heist, the one the audience slowly realizes is happening in parallel, is directed not at the canvas but at the Duke himself. He is the mark. He just does not know it yet.

The Painting Is the Misdirection

The season’s most elegant structural trick is a whiteboard filmed from two angles. In scenes where the gang briefs the Duke, the board shows one plan. In scenes where the gang briefs itself, another square is crossed out, another name is circled. The viewer sees both without being told they are looking at the same room. When the two versions of the board finally converge, the Duke realizes — and the audience realizes — that the whole operation was a portrait of a man painting himself into a corner.

Thematically, this season is asking bigger questions than the first. The original painting — Leonardo’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, historically a commissioned record of a wealthy man’s claim over a woman — becomes a mirror for the Duke’s own ambitions. He wants to acquire things that cannot be acquired. Berlin, for all his faults, refuses to be one of them. The show earns its subtitle in more ways than one.

Add to this Berlin’s complicated new entanglement with Candela, a fierce and unpredictable Sevillian woman who enters his world and promptly refuses to behave according to his plans. There is a romantic thread here, yes — and I know some viewers groaned at that in Season 1 — but Candela is written with more agency than Berlin’s previous love interests, and the actress playing her (Inma Cuesta, who was extraordinary in The Mess You Leave Behind) brings enough fire to justify every scene.

Who Is in This Season — Old Faces, New Threats

The core crew is entirely intact. Every single one of them returned, which honestly matters more than people give it credit for — ensemble chemistry in a heist show is everything, and this team built that chemistry over two years together in Season 1.

Pedro Alonso : Berlín (Andrés de Fonollosa)

The magnetic, dangerous, incorrigibly romantic centrepiece. There is nobody else who could play this character.

Tristán Ulloa : Damián

Berlin’s oldest friend and the one man who can challenge him. Described by Netflix as “the only man capable of questioning Berlin’s instincts.”

Michelle Jenner : Keila

The tech specialist, and this season her tensions with Berlin over the operation’s escalating risks take center stage.

Begoña Vargas : Cameron

Reckless, explosive, and deeply involved in the season’s major emotional conflicts. Netflix called her “unstoppable” in promos.

Julio Peña Fernández : Roi

Berlin’s loyal associate. Quiet, dependable, and given some genuinely good material this season.

Joel Sánchez : Bruce

Weapons and logistics. The crew’s stabilizing force when everything else is on fire — which is often.

Inma Cuesta (New): Candela

A Sevillian woman who enters Berlin’s world and refuses to play by his rules. The season’s most exciting new addition.

José Luis García-Pérez (New) : The Duke of Málaga

Eccentric, hedonistic, and absolutely convinced he is the smartest person in the room. He is not.

Marta Nieto (New) : The Duchess (Genoveva Dante)

Mysterious, refined, and far more interesting than the Duke deserves. Her connection to the painting drives the season’s conflict.

Álvaro Morte : The Professor (cameo)

Berlin’s brother returns. Even in a small role, this is the kind of connective tissue that makes this universe feel real.

Money Heist vs Berlin S1 vs Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine

If you are a Money Heist veteran trying to calibrate your expectations, here is the honest comparison. These are three very different animals, even if they share the same DNA.

Element	Money Heist	Berlin S1 (Paris)	Berlin S2 (Seville)
Tone	Intense, political, urgent	Lighter, more comedic	Theatrical, emotionally layered
Stakes	Life-or-death, national scale	High but personal	Personal with aristocratic intrigue
Heist Complexity	Masterclass level	Sharp and clever	Double-layered misdirection
Romance	Present but secondary	Prominent, divisive	Present, better written this time
Visual Style	Gritty, kinetic	Stylised, Parisian cool	Baroque, warm, Andalusian
Character Focus	Ensemble-driven	Berlin-centric with strong sub-plots	Berlin-dominant; others slightly sidelined
Pacing	Relentless	Occasionally slow	Measured — some drag, some brilliance
Best Episode Count	5 seasons / 41 episodes	8 episodes	8 episodes

The honest truth is that this spinoff was never going to be Money Heist. The parent show had five seasons to build mythology, to make us care about characters so deeply that a red jumpsuit now feels like an emotional object. Berlin has eight episodes per chapter to do something different — and what it chooses to do is focus on the man, not the movement. If you can make peace with that shift, you will enjoy this considerably more.

What Actually Works — and What Still Needs Work

What I loved

The structural trick at the heart of this season — the dual-plan, the whiteboard filmed from two angles, the Duke as the real mark — is genuinely clever storytelling. Pina and Martínez Lobato spent eight years training their audience to expect the stated plan to be wrong, and here they push it to its absolute limit. When the reveal comes, it feels earned rather than cheap.

Pedro Alonso, as ever, is doing something remarkable. He has taken a character that could easily have calcified into self-parody and kept finding new dimensions. The scene where Berlin explains to Candela why he steals — not for money, not for thrills, but because acquisition itself is a form of violence he refuses to participate in as a victim — is the kind of speech that reminds you why this character survived his own death in Money Heist through sheer force of personality.

Inma Cuesta as Candela deserves every bit of praise she is going to receive. She matches Alonso at his most theatrical and does not blink. Their scenes together are the kind of on-screen combustion you cannot manufacture — it just exists or it does not, and here it very much exists.

The visual identity of this season, set against the warm tiles and cathedral shadows of Seville, is more atmospheric than Season 1’s cooler Parisian palette. The direction continues in that refined, almost baroque aesthetic that distinguishes the Berlin spinoff from its parent series — crime as aesthetic spectacle.

What still needs work

Some of the secondary characters, particularly Roi and Bruce, feel slightly pushed to the margins by the Berlin-Candela-Duke triangle. If you came for ensemble dynamics — the thing that made Money Heist so special — you may feel that loss.

The pacing sags in the middle episodes. Eight episodes running close to 50 minutes each is a considerable commitment, and some of that runtime could have been tightened without losing anything essential. There are sequences that linger when they should move.

And while I appreciate that the show is interested in Berlin as a philosophical character rather than a plot machine, there are moments where the melodrama tips into something that feels more like performance than drama. The absence of real narrative urgency — the gnawing sense that something irreversible is about to happen — is what separates this from the tension that Money Heist maintained almost constantly.

“Started watching season 2 of Berlin today and I’m really enjoying it so far. The smart planning, stylish vibe, music and Berlin’s personality make the show super entertaining.”— Audience reaction on X (Twitter), May 2026

Personal View

As a Fan Who Has Been Here From the Beginning — Where Does This Land?

I have genuinely complicated feelings about this season, and I think that is actually the most honest endorsement I can give it. A show that leaves you with complicated feelings is doing something more interesting than a show that simply satisfies or disappoints.

What Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine does best is what the Berlin spinoff has always done best — it asks you to spend time with a man who is simultaneously repellent and magnetic, who has constructed an entire philosophy to justify a life of theft and impermanence, and who is slowly, in this second chapter, confronting the possibility that the system he thinks he is beating has already painted his portrait. The painting metaphor is not subtle, but it is not trying to be. Pina and Martínez Lobato are writers who believe in the power of a good symbol, and they use this one well.

The Professor’s return — even in a brief capacity — hit me harder than I expected. There is something about seeing those two men in the same frame, brothers shaped by the same losses, who chose such different ways of carrying them, that the original series only gave us in flashbacks. Getting even a little more of it here felt like a gift.

And yes, there are slower stretches. Yes, I wanted more from the ensemble. Yes, some of the romantic plotting runs longer than it needs to. But I also stayed up until past midnight watching, and I cared about how it ended. In the streaming landscape of 2026, where dozens of shows compete for that kind of attention, that is not a small thing.

If you loved Money Heist: watch this. If you loved Berlin Season 1: absolutely watch this. If you are coming in cold: start at the beginning — there is context here that lands harder if you have lived with this universe for a while.

Ratings

By the Numbers — Fan Scorecard

Heist Craft : 8.5 out of 10

★★★★☆

Pedro Alonso : 9.8 out of 10

★★★★★

Pacing : 6.5 out of 10

★★★☆☆

New Characters : 8.0 out of 10

★★★★☆

Visuals & Style : 9.0 out of 10

★★★★★

Ensemble Use : 6.8 out of 10

★★★☆☆

Writing : 7.5 out of 10

★★★★☆

Binge-Worthiness : 8.0 out of 10

★★★★☆

Overall Fan Verdict: 7.8 out of 10

A flawed but genuinely compelling chapter in one of streaming’s most interesting criminal universes. Not the rocket-fuel of Money Heist, but a slow-burning portrait of a man who is running out of places to hide from himself — and that, in the end, is worth watching.

Frequently Asked Questions

Everything You Need to Know — Answered

What is Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine about?

It is the second chapter in the Berlin spinoff series from Money Heist creator Álex Pina. In this installment, Berlin (Pedro Alonso) reassembles his crew in Seville, Spain, with a plan to steal Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine painting. The real story, however, is a layered con directed not at the painting but at the aristocratic Duke of Málaga, who has used blackmail to involve Berlin in the operation and has no idea what he has actually set in motion.

Do I need to watch Money Heist and Berlin Season 1 first?

Technically you can watch it as a standalone, but you will get significantly more out of it if you have watched both. The emotional weight of Berlin as a character — and particularly the brief return of The Professor (Álvaro Morte) — lands much harder if you know their history from the parent series. Berlin Season 1 is eight episodes and genuinely worth your time before jumping into this.

Where is Berlin Season 2 set and where was it filmed?

The series is primarily set in Seville, Spain, with additional settings across southern Spain. Filming took place across multiple Spanish locations including Seville, Madrid, San Sebastián, and Peñíscola. The warm Andalusian backdrop is a significant visual shift from the cool Parisian setting of Season 1, and the show uses it beautifully.

Is The Professor in Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine?

Yes. Álvaro Morte reprises his role as Sergio Marquina — The Professor, and Berlin’s brother — in the second season. The extent of his involvement has not been widely detailed to avoid spoilers, but his return was confirmed and is one of the more emotionally satisfying moments for long-term fans of the Money Heist universe.

Is The Lady with an Ermine painting real?

Yes, absolutely. Lady with an Ermine is a genuine Leonardo da Vinci masterwork, painted around 1489 as a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Ludovico Sforza of Milan. It is one of only four surviving Leonardo portraits of women and currently resides at the National Museum in Kraków, Poland. The show fabricates a loan to Seville for narrative purposes — it has never been on permanent display there — but the painting itself is one of the most significant and closely protected artworks in the world, which makes it a perfect target for Berlin.

Who is Candela and why does she matter?

Candela is played by Inma Cuesta and is the season’s most significant new character. Described as an unpredictable and temperamental Sevillian woman, she enters Berlin’s world during the heist and develops a complicated romantic and adversarial dynamic with him. Unlike some of Berlin’s previous love interests, Candela is written with genuine agency — she complicates the plan rather than simply being a part of it. Inma Cuesta brings real ferocity to the role and is one of the season’s highlights.

Why is it called “Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine” instead of “Berlin Season 2”?

Netflix has moved away from traditional seasonal numbering for this series, treating each chapter as a distinct, self-titled installment — similar to how Ryan Murphy’s anthology works operate. Season 1 was officially retitled Berlin and the Jewels of Paris, and Season 2 carries the subtitle The Lady with an Ermine. This suggests Netflix may be positioning the Berlin series as an anthology format, with each new chapter representing a different city and a different heist, connected by the character but not requiring the previous season for entry.

Will there be a Berlin Season 3?

As of the release date, Netflix has not confirmed a third season. However, the same outlet that broke the Season 2 news (What’s on Netflix) has reported that there likely will not be a traditional “Berlin Season 3” in the numbered sense — but the Money Heist universe is actively expanding. A new series featuring Money Heist alumni Álvaro Morte and Patrick Criado, tentatively titled Nine Queens, was reported to be in development, suggesting Pina and Netflix are continuing to build out this criminal universe beyond Berlin’s story specifically.

Is Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine better than Season 1?

This is genuinely a matter of what you are looking for. Season 1 had tighter pacing and a more immediate heist energy. Season 2 has a cleverer structural conceit, better-written new characters (particularly Candela), and a more thematically ambitious core — but it also moves more slowly in places and sidelines some ensemble members more than the first season did. Early critical reviews are mixed-to-positive, with particular praise for Pedro Alonso’s performance and the Seville atmosphere. As a fan, I would say they are different rather than one being objectively better, but Season 2 rewards patient viewers more.

How many episodes and how long is each one?

Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine consists of eight episodes, all released simultaneously on Netflix on May 15, 2026. Most episodes run close to 50 minutes. All eight episodes dropped at once with no weekly release schedule, so it is fully bingeable from day one.

Can I watch this in Hindi, Tamil, or Telugu?

Yes. Netflix has confirmed that Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine is available in multiple dubbed languages including English, Spanish, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu, alongside subtitle formats in numerous languages at launch. This mirrors the international rollout strategy used for Money Heist and the first Berlin season.

This review is written from the perspective of a long-time Money Heist and Berlin fan based on the full season available at publication. All cast and plot details sourced from Netflix official materials, Primetimer, What’s on Netflix, and post-premiere critical coverage. Spoilers have been kept to a minimum throughout.