White Lines Episode 1 begins with Laura Haddock’s Zoe narrating straight to the camera, and that’s a formal gimmick repeated all throughout the episode. She isn’t quite breaking the fourth wall, as it’s revealed later, but it certainly feels that way as she sets the scene:
Rain in a Spanish desert has revealed a mummified corpse that she, and the local authorities, believe to be her brother, Axel, a famous Ibiza DJ who disappeared twenty years prior.
But the body hasn’t been discovered on Ibiza. It has instead turned up in the territory of Andreu Calafat, who believes the placement to be intentional.
Axel had a tattoo of the name Kika, subsequently revealed to be Andreu’s daughter, and since the police are prohibited from opening an investigation into a crime that is twenty years old, it’s Zoe and the Calafat family who have a vested interest in finding out what happened.
For Zoe, the death of her brother has defined her life, since it’s strongly implied that she has had some kind of breakdown as a result of it.
Her husband tries to talk her out of following the trail to Ibiza for precisely this reason, but she insists, and he goes the way of all spouses in crime dramas like this one — he gets out of the way.
I imagine he’ll be forgotten about for most of the season unless he’s returned to in order to remind Zoey that she’s getting too close to the truth or some such. We’ll see.
As for the Calafats, there is obviously a connection between Axel and Kika, and throughout White Lines Episode 1 it becomes very clear that a) Andreu wasn’t responsible and that b) he strongly suspects his wife Conchita and his son Oriol were. Both are immediately characterized as shady and rather creepily close, and they’re very invested in a looming casino deal that requires Ibiza’s famous excess to be massively toned down. The murder of an English DJ would, one assumes, threaten this deal quite a bit.
The covering up also threatens the business of Daniel Mays’ Marcus, one of Axel’s friends from back in the day and a resident DJ and drug dealer who recovers a hefty helping of cocaine from the ocean and stuffs it all inside an inflatable banana boat only to be told by Oriol that none of it can be sold in his family’s clubs until the deal has been finalized.
Oriol charmingly threatens Marcus and his kids with social services, which means we’re getting him on-side as a potential ally to Zoey.
They know each other from way back, he has cute kids, and their mother is played by Angela Griffin, whose job on the island seems to be organizing and overseeing swanky orgies — one of which is later attended by Oriol because of course he attends orgies!
