Tamal Kundu
‘Snabba Cash,’ a Netflix mystery crime drama series, is a quintessential Scandinavian TV show. The setting is marked with a perpetual grayness, and actors apply a heavy dosage of restraint even while participating in emotional performances. The result is beautiful in its own way. The series is based on Jens Lapidus’ ‘Stockholm Noir’ literary trilogy, which previously inspired the ‘Easy Money’ film trilogy, starring Joel Kinnaman.
The story in the show begins ten years after the films. It primarily revolves around Leya (Evin Ahmad), an ambitious entrepreneur and single mother with big aspirations to make her startup a success. Leya is the widow of a former drug lord and desperate to leave her dark and grimy past behind in favor of the bright and sunny tech world. However, she soon realizes how similar the two worlds are, and if she wants to succeed in the latter, she has to make use of her connections in the former. Here is everything you need to know about the show’s sensational climax. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Snabba Cash Season 1 Recap
As with the books and the films, the web series’ story is about the immigrants’ pursuit of happiness in the Swedish context, though the focus here is mostly on Syrian Kurds and not Serbians. Leya supports herself and her son Sami (Lennox Söderström) by working at a Middle-Eastern restaurant, hoping that her startup TargetCoach will soon become a success.
She figures out that her biggest investor, Marcus Werner (Peter Eggers), is planning to take her life’s work away from her through an overdue convertible loan. She persuades multi-billionaire investor Tomas Storm (Olle Sarri) to invest in her company. He agrees but puts forth one condition: she has to disengage herself and her fledgling company from Werner completely.
After exhausting all her other options, Leya reluctantly reaches out to Ravy (Dada Fungula Bozela), her slain husband’s brother. And as she has feared, she quickly comes to regret the decision because Ravy asserts his control over her company and even meets Storm to tell him about the money he has given to Leya to cover the loan.
Meanwhile, both she and Sami connect with the wedding singer Salim (Alexander Abdallah), who she later finds out is Ravy’s most trusted lieutenant. An important subplot in the show follows Tim, a young delinquent, who initially becomes a drug mule for Ravy’s gang to pay back a debt but is later seduced by all the apparent glamor of the lifestyle and starts working with them of his own volition.
In the season finale, Leya learns that Storm has been falsifying numbers of his communication platform Macking to make its valuation much higher than what it should be and intends to use TargetCoach for it. She eventually agrees to cooperate with Storm and doesn’t pull out the startup from Macking until Macking is launched on the stock market.
After a conversation with her mother-in-law, Leya becomes reluctant to follow through with her’s and Salim’s plan to kill Ravy. Her moment of kindness ends up severely costing her as Ravy finds out from Tim that Leya told Dani (Jozef Wojciechowicz) and his gang about the pick-up. When Salim takes responsibility for it, Ravy kills him.
Snabba Cash Season 1 Ending: Does Leya Own Ravy’s Business Now?
Yes, she does. After Ravy kills Salim and lets Leya go, she goes to his supplier Marko (Johan Jonason). The show establishes the two have a history. Leya’s husband Yannick was killed during one of the meetings that Marko arranged, and evidently, he feels a sense of responsibility towards her. This is why he earlier agrees to meet with Ravy when he reaches out to him through Leya. This time, Leya buys all of Ravy’s debt from Marko with part of the money she receives from Storm.
Throughout the series, Leya proves that she can be quite ruthless if she needs to be. She gets into the seminar with Storm after promising her friend Viktoria a partnership with TargetCoach. Later, when Storm learns about the arrangement, he is baffled that Leya wants to keep the promise and chides her for such sentimentalities. She also realizes the absurdity of such a moralistic stand in the high-stake game they are all playing and resolutely cuts Viktoria out.
After Yannick and Ravy’s mother visits Leya and expresses how distraught she is about losing another son to gang violence, Leya tries to find a way in which everybody will live. She fails miserably. She recognizes that if she hadn’t convinced herself of such things, Ravy would be dead, and Salim would still be alive. She still has reservations about killing Ravy.
So, she does to him what she is extremely good at doing: negotiate a better contract with the man who virtually pulls all of Ravy’s strings. In the process, she frees TargetCoach from Ravy’s control and gains Marko’s protection. By completely turning the tables, she gains some revenge for Salim, a man whom she had come to love.
What Will Happen to Tim?
In the final episode of the season, Ravy forces Tim to take the blame for Salim’s death, warning him that his father and girlfriend’s lives will be in jeopardy if he ever tells the truth to anyone. As Tim is only 15 years old, he will spend a year in the juvenile center before he is released. Tim’s initial fascination with the criminal world quickly disappears when he witnesses people die during the pick-up. For the first time in his life, he begins to re-evaluate the decisions that have led him to such a horrible juncture.
He also finally understands what Salim has been trying to tell him all this time. He earnestly tries to leave the world of crime for good, but as it turns out, the world of crime isn’t done with him. Ravy thinks that Tim is the one who told Dani about the pick-up and decides to kill him. Terrified for his life, Tim blurts out Leya’s name and later watches Salim die in front of him. His life as a criminal is likely over. These traumatic experiences must have made him completely disillusioned.
What Kind of Startup Is TargetCoach?
The primary functionality of TargetCoach is to calculate the prospect of other startups accurately. As Leya tells Storm during their impromptu pitch meeting, when he was establishing Macking, he could have saved hundreds of millions of Swedish krona if he had access to TargetCoach. It doesn’t take long for a shrewd businessman like Storm to see the immense potential of Leya’s company and offer her everything she wants. When Leya threatens to pull TargetCoach from Macking after learning that Storm has been putting forth false data, he reveals that he knows about the drug money. They seem to have more things in common than either of them is willing to admit. And that’s what makes them perfect business partners.
Read More: Is Snabba Cash a True Story?
