The first time I stood in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine in Krakow’s Czartoryski Museum, I didn’t feel awe. I felt claustrophobic. Not because of the crowd — the room was hushed, almost sacred — but because the painting watches you. That girl, Cecilia Gallerani, holds that white ermine like a secret, and her eyes say, “I know what you are.” It’s unsettling. It’s a portrait of purity draped over an animal that was a symbol of virtue and a medieval allegory for deception. And I remember thinking, If a man ever embodied that duality in the flesh, it would be Berlin.
Cut to December 2023. Netflix drops the Berlin spin-off, and the internet detonates. “THE PROFESSOR IS BACK!!!” they scream, incorrectly but passionately. “Bella Ciao” starts ringing in skulls automatically. Grown adults post crying emojis because the smiling sociopath who sang Ti amo before sacrificing himself is back on their screens, wooing women, stealing jewels, and quoting philosophy like a weaponized horoscope. The fans assembled from Money Heist season one like a sleeper cell suddenly activated. And I’m sitting here, staring at the screen, knowing that most of you are going to miss the entire point of what you’re watching.
This is my unfiltered review of Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine — not the spin-off as a simple heist caper, but as a psychosexual portrait of the man who made narcissism an art form. Because the real heist isn’t in Paris. It’s in Krakow. It’s inside that painting. And if you don’t understand why, you haven’t been paying attention to the most fascinating, disturbing, and irresistible character Netflix has ever given us.
The Scream That Broke the Internet Was Wrong
Let’s clear the air immediately. The Professor is not back. Andrés de Fonollosa, Berlin, is not his brother Sergio. If you’re walking into this show expecting the meticulous, socially anxious chessmaster, you’re in the wrong cathedral. Berlin is the chandelier-swinging, sex-drenched, opera-blasting id to the Professor’s superego. The fans who yelled “The Professor is back!” are emotionally drunk on nostalgia, and I forgive them, but we must be precise. Berlin is a man who would steal the Mona Lisa not because it’s valuable but because he wants to see the look on her face when he owns her. He’s not a strategist of escape; he’s an architect of ecstasy. And this spin-off, set in a golden-lit, permanently champagne-buzzed Paris, is the most honest exploration of that ecstasy we’ve ever gotten.
The series revolves around a heist in the City of Lights — a €44 million jewel theft from an auction house vault, executed by a crew Berlin has assembled like a bouquet of dysfunctional geniuses. There’s Keila, the cybersecurity prodigy; Damián, the academic turned thief; Cameron, the wildcard who lives on chaos; Roi, the loyal lockpick; and Bruce, the gadget-obsessed man-child. And then there’s Camille, the wife of the auction house director, who Berlin targets not as a mark but as a conquest, a mirror, a lover. The plot is Ocean’s Eleven filtered through a velvet curtain of erotic tension and French new wave aesthetics. But that’s just the surface. The true north of this show is Berlin’s obsession with the Lady with an Ermine — the real painting, hanging in Krakow, Poland — and what it reveals about his soul.
Why Krakow? Why the Ermine?
If you’ve done your Money Heist homework, you remember the moment. In the original series, Berlin stands before a replica of the Lady with an Ermine in the Royal Mint of Spain. He gazes at it and says, with that serpentine smile, “I’d love to rob the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow.” The line landed like a grenade among art nerds. Why that painting? Why that city? Because the Lady with an Ermine is not just a pretty Renaissance portrait. It’s a coded masterpiece of contradiction. Cecilia Gallerani was the teenage mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan — a woman of high intellect and low societal standing, desired for her mind and her body. The ermine she holds was a symbol of purity (it was said to prefer death to a soiled coat) and a pun on the Duke’s nickname, “Ermellino.” So you have a painting about illicit love, hidden power, and a creature that embodies innocence and predation simultaneously.
Sound familiar? Berlin is the ermine. He is the man in white gloves and tailored suits who orchestrates robberies with the precision of a ballet and the morality of a car crash. He loves deeply, purely, and then shatters what he loves if it threatens his aesthetic vision. In Berlin, the painting is no longer just a throwaway line — it’s the thematic spine. The show finally takes us to Krakow, and let me tell you, I’ve never seen that city look so sun-drenched. The cinematography paints Poland in honey and gold leaf, a deliberate choice to parallel the warmth inside the Czartoryski Museum where the real ermine hangs. The crew doesn’t actually steal the painting (spoiler? barely), but the entire Paris heist is a spiritual homage to it. Every jewel they lift, every seduction Berlin executes, every betrayal he dances around — it’s all an attempt to capture the untouchable perfection of that moment in Krakow, where a girl and her ermine laugh at the viewer across five centuries.
This is why the spin-off is subversive. While you’re busy thinking “Bella Ciao” and waiting for a red jumpsuit, the show is asking you to confront Berlin’s interior museum. What does a man who has everything — charm, intelligence, a terminal illness (remember, this is a prequel, he’s living on borrowed time) — actually desire? He desires to be remembered as art. He wants to be the painting, not the thief. The Lady with an Ermine represents immortality through beauty, and Berlin is ravenous for that kind of permanence.
The Unfiltered Verdict: A Narcissist’s Love Letter to Himself
Now, let’s get down to the brutally honest review you came for. Is Berlin a great heist show? No. If you’re a plot-obsessed purist who needs airtight logic and zero coincidences, this series will make you throw your remote. The heist mechanics are sometimes laughably convenient. The security systems at a world-class Parisian auction house appear to have been designed by toddlers. The romantic subplots multiply like rabbits until you’re genuinely unsure who’s sleeping with whom and why. And there’s a subplot involving a revenge-minded ex-wife that feels imported from a telenovela reject pile.
But none of that matters. Because Berlin is not a heist show. It’s a character excavation disguised as a heist show. Pedro Alonso’s performance is the most extravagant, unhinged, and captivating thing on television right now. He delivers lines about love and destiny with the conviction of a televangelist who knows he’s conning you and doesn’t care because the ride is worth it. The show’s real theft is stealing your affection for a monster. By the end, you’ll be rooting for Berlin to find true love, to escape, to live — even though you know he dies in a sewer years later, firing a machine gun at the Spanish police while screaming defiance. And that emotional manipulation is deliberate, masterful, and deeply unsettling.
The Lady with an Ermine connection elevates the entire enterprise from guilty pleasure to psychological profile. The real painting sits in Krakow, and thousands of tourists shuffle past it every year, snapping photos they’ll never look at again. But Berlin sees it differently. He sees a woman who was loved by a powerful man, immortalized by a genius, and now holds court in a climate-controlled room, untouchable, forever young. That’s what Berlin wants to be for Camille. That’s what he wants to be for the world. And in a meta twist that would make Andrés himself cackle with delight, the Berlin spin-off has now done exactly that. Pedro Alonso’s face, as Berlin, is now streaming globally, permanently embedded in the cultural consciousness. He got his painting.
The Fan Frenzy and the Krakow Effect
The internet’s reaction to Berlin reveals more about us than the show. The cry of “Berlin fans since Money Heist season 1 assemble!” is a rallying cry for a specific tribe: people who fell in love with the villain and have been waiting for permission to celebrate him without the moral weight of the original series. The Professor’s absence is actually a blessing because it forces us to see Berlin without the sibling dynamic that softened him. Here, he’s the sun, and everyone else orbits or burns.
The “Never thought Krakow could be so sunny” line in our notes is crucial. Because it speaks to the show’s visual argument: Krakow, the keeper of the ermine, is not a grey, post-Soviet memory. It’s radiant. It’s alive. It’s a city of hidden treasures, just like Berlin’s Paris. The show deliberately uses travel-porn aesthetics to suggest that beauty is a heist in itself — stealing moments, stealing light, stealing hearts. And the Lady with an Ermine is the ultimate prize that no one can truly possess. You can only stand in front of it, claustrophobic, watched, and transformed.
What Nobody Is Saying About the Spin-Off
Here’s the insight that will separate this review from every other half-baked take out there: Berlin is not a prequel. It’s an altar call. The entire series functions as an extended flashback while Berlin is dying in the mint, his life literally flashing before his eyes. The Paris adventure is the last beautiful dream of a condemned man. The glowing sun, the impossibly chic locations, the love that conquers all — it’s a fantasy constructed by a dying mind to comfort itself. And the Lady with an Ermine is the totem he fixates on because it represents the one thing he can’t have: a legacy untouched by blood. Cecilia Gallerani’s ermine is white. Berlin’s hands are red. He knows this. And that’s why he wanted to rob that museum — not to own the painting, but to get close enough to feel its purity rub off on him.
When you rewatch the show with this lens, the flaws become features. The convenient heist elements are a dying man’s wish fulfillment. The ridiculous romantic entanglements are the fantasies of someone who fears being forgotten. And the relentless charm of Pedro Alonso is the final, desperate act of a character clinging to relevance. It’s heartbreaking and brilliant.
The Call for Tokyo’s Spinoff and the Future
Yes, we want Tokyo’s spinoff too. But let’s be honest: Berlin is the only character whose internal world is rich enough to sustain a standalone series. Tokyo was fire and impulse; she’d make a great movie, but Berlin is a novel. A messy, contradictory, infuriating novel that you can’t put down. The Berlin spin-off is a gift to those of us who understand that villains are the true protagonists of great stories. And the Lady with an Ermine is its silent, smiling co-star.
So assemble, fans. Watch it not for the heist, but for the confession. Listen for the moment when Berlin’s voiceover turns directly to camera in spirit, and you realize you’re not watching a thief — you’re watching a man trying to steal his own soul back. “Bella Ciao” may play in your head, but the song that defines this series is something older, something silent, something hanging on a museum wall in Krakow, asking you whether you’re the hunter or the hunted.
Berlin knows the answer. He always did. And now, thanks to this spin-off, you do too.
Now go book a private jet to Krakow. Stand in front of that painting. And tell me you don’t hear his voice whispering from the canvas.
The first time I stood in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine in Krakow’s Czartoryski Museum, I didn’t feel awe. I felt claustrophobic. Not because of the crowd — the room was hushed, almost sacred — but because the painting watches you. That girl, Cecilia Gallerani, holds that white ermine like a secret, and her eyes say, I know what you are. It’s unsettling. It’s a portrait of purity draped over an animal that was a symbol of virtue and a medieval allegory for deception. And I remember thinking, If a man ever embodied that duality in the flesh, it would be Berlin
Grown adults post crying emojis because the smiling sociopath who sang Ti amo before sacrificing himself is back on their screens, wooing women, stealing jewels, and quoting philosophy like a weaponized horoscope
The fans assembled from Money Heist season one like a sleeper cell suddenly activated. And I’m sitting here, staring at the screen, knowing that most of you are going to miss the entire point of what you’re watching
Psychosexual portrait of the man who made narcissism an art form
The real heist isn’t in Paris. It’s in Krakow. It’s inside that painting. And if you don’t understand why, you haven’t been paying attention to the most fascinating, disturbing, and irresistible character Netflix has ever given us
