Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Crystal Cuckoo’ On Netflix, Where A Young Doctor Goes To Her Heart Donor’s Hometown And Lots Of Secrets Come Out

The Crystal Cuckoo, a new Netflix thriller from Spain, is one of the many entries in the “small town with secrets” genre, but the way the show’s main character enters this small town is certainly done in a creative manner. What we wonder, though, is if her way into the town actually has anything to do with the mysteries that she’s going to be looking into.

THE CRYSTAL CUCKOO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: Scenes of woods in a rural section of Spain.

The Gist:  In 2005, Miguel Ferrer (Alex Garcia) comes out of those woods covered in blood; his young son sees him and asks him what happened. “There was a fight at work,” Miguel replies.

In 2023, a patient comes into the ER of the hospital where Clara Merlo (Catalina Sopelana) is a medical resident. As she’s working on the patient, though, she collapses. She wakes up weeks later in the cardiac ICU; she finds out then that her heart failed and she received a transplant.

We go back to 2004, and Miguel, a cop in the town of Yesques, is with his family on a trip to a local lake, when he sees a fire on the other side. He comes upon the house and tries to save the woman inside, but can’t. Her body is the only one inside. As Miguel and his partner Rafa (Iván Massagué) investigate, they find out that the woman and her husband were separated, and that she had become addicted to pain pills.

Back in 2023, Carla starts to wonder who donated her heart. Her roommate and coworker reminds her that in Spain, organ donors are anonymous. But she does end up finding out that it was a man who died in an auto accident. That sets Clara off to do some sleuthing, and she determines that the donor is a young man named Carlos.

She calls Carlos’ mother, Marta (Itziar Ituno), who at first doesn’t want to talk, but then calls back to invite her to Yesques to see where Carlos grew up and be there when they spread his ashes. When Carla arrives, Marta shows her a picture of Miguel, her husband, and says that “he left us” years ago. His older son Juan (Alfons Nieto) has followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the police force in town. But during the ashes spreading, Carla finds out from Rafa that Miguel isn’t dead, but he went missing.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Adapted by Jesús Mesas and Javier Andrés from Javier Castillo’s novel, The Crystal Cuckoo is essentially a “small town with secrets” series along the lines of Broadchurch.

Our Take: From what we can tell in the first episode of The Crystal Cuckoo, Clara’s heart transplant is merely a plot device that gets the big-city medical resident to small-town Yesques, and from there the story will be about the secrets surrounding not only the fire in 2004, but Miguel’s disappearance in 2005 and the case of a baby that goes missing not long after Clara arrives in town in 2023.

We were a bit distracted by the time jumping in the first episode, but it started settling down once we got a better sense of where the characters in Yesques are in 2005 as opposed to 2023. The show will also go further back than 2005 at some point, probably to explore the situation that led to the fire that Miguel was investigating.

There still needs to be more filled in to give viewers an idea about how the fire, Miguel’s disappearance and the baby’s disappearance are connected — and we’re pretty sure they are.

Performance Worth Watching: Catalina Sopelana does an effective job of making Clara both curious and probing at the same time, though we wish her character acted more like the doctor she’s supposed to be.

Sex And Skin: None.

Parting Shot: A woman calls out for help when she realizes that someone took her baby.

Sleeper Star: Iván Massagué’s character Rafa knows more than he lets on about the fire and his partner Miguel’s disappearance.

Most Pilot-y Line: Not sure why, but Radiohead’s “Creep” plays while Clara drives to Yesques. Is she listening to the 33-year-old song in her car? Otherwise, how does it even relate to the scene or the show?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Crystal Cuckoo is a solid mystery thriller that isn’t trying to distract viewers with red herrings. We hope that it connects its various mysteries together sooner rather than later, though.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.