Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Obliterated’ follows a team of highly trained people tasked with saving the city of Las Vegas from an imminent nuclear threat. The urgency of their mission is apparent from the fact that the whole story takes place over the course of around twenty-four hours, in which the team makes some game-changing revelations, which puts a lot of things into perspective. One of those twists comes from the truth about the identity of Lana. What happens to her by the end of the season? SPOILERS AHEAD
Lana’s Plans are Foiled by Ava Winters and the Team
Right from the start, there is so much going on in ‘Obliterated’ that it becomes difficult to keep track of who is doing what. However chaotic it might seem on the outside, it soon becomes clear that every character in the show serves a purpose. No time and space is wasted by the writers to include unnecessary things, and whatever’s in front of the audience matters on the grander scale of the story. This is particularly true with Lana’s arc.
Lana is found by the team when they arrest Ivan Koslov at the beginning of the show. She is introduced as a stripper who ends up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and because of this, she, too, is taken to the CIA’s secret prison, where they keep Koslov imprisoned. Lana presents herself as a harmless and innocent girl who is only focused on getting herself out of trouble and using TikTok. Later, however, it turns out that she is one of the major players in the story. She is Ivan Koslov’s long-lost sister.
While Ivan wants to make money out of selling the nuclear device to the interested parties, Lana wants just one thing. She wants to be reunited with her brother and is ready to make the trade with the authorities. She will give up the bomb if they let her brother go. But, of course, she doesn’t actually intend to give up the bomb, and this double play costs her her brother’s life. Ivan is killed in the chaos of the exchange, leaving Lana so heartbroken that she decides to make the bomb go off.
Lana wants Ava Winters and her team to suffer. She wants them to try desperately to find and stop the bomb from exploding and destroying Vegas, which is why she puts a clock on it. She relishes their doomed endeavor of saving the city and considers it her revenge for the death of her brother. What’s worse is that she doesn’t intend to leave the city. When Vegas blows up, she’ll die with it. She doesn’t have anything to live for now that her brother is gone.
Eventually, however, the team succeeds in stopping her. Even when it looks like the bomb will go off because Lana had planned a contingency to make sure no one got to it, even if she changed her mind. Still, things align in such a way that the team ends up disarming the bomb and saving the city with barely a second left to spare. Where does that leave Lana?
Lana is captured and most probably sent to the same CIA secret facility where her brother was held captive and where she spent a few hours as a prisoner when no one knew about her real identity. By the end, Lana realizes that in her desire for revenge, she is going to become the very thing that destroyed her life. When Ava Winters recounts the backstory of Ivan Koslov to her team during the first briefing, she reveals that Ivan’s family was killed, including his sister, and he blames America for it. Later, it turned out that the sister, Lana had survived and was sent to live in America all these years.
Ivan was focused on revenge and money, but Lana’s only desire was to go back home. When Ivan dies, she becomes focused on revenge, too, until Ava points out that her actions would do to millions of children exactly what had happened to her. How could Lana justify her actions if she was no different than the evil that destroyed her family? It does seem to have an impact on her, especially when she realizes that Paul is ready to sacrifice himself to save the city and his daughter, who is also in Vegas. Still, one cannot completely scrape the possibility that she still has revenge on her mind. While she might be in the CIA prison for now, she might not stay there forever. She’ll try to escape the first chance she gets and make Ava Winters and her team pay for what they did to her and Ivan.
Read More: Is Obliterated Based on a True Story?
