Editor’s Note: Watch out, spoilers abound! We invited author Susan Tejada, a long-time fan of ‘The Octopus’, to choose any aspect of the series to write about. Susan selected Seasons 8 and 9 – the prequel years – for her essay. Set in the 1950s, with a lush period atmosphere and terrific production values, both of these seasons can be enjoyed on their own without any prior knowledge of ‘The Octopus’. Season 8 is also noteworthy for featuring Luca Zingaretti as an evil mafia don, a year or so before he made his debut as Detective Montalbano! Susan goes in-depth into spoilers here, so make sure you watch the episodes before proceeding below.
The Prequel: The Octopus, Seasons 8 & 9
The epic Italian crime drama The Octopus attempts something daring and, against all odds, succeeds.
After four seasons filled with non-stop action, with the series less than halfway through its ten-season run, police captain Corrado Cattani—the charismatic, complex, brave and brooding hero of the show—goes down in a fusillade of machine gun fire. Just like that, the main character dies, and disappears from the script.
Who can possibly carry us through the shocking twists and turns of six more violent and emotional seasons? Unexpectedly, the hero and epicenter of the rest of the series turns out to be the villain—Tano Cariddi, whose infamy and conniving intelligence we have already come to know and fear.
Is Tano bad to the bone, or is he a bad guy with a heart of gold? The answers lie in his turbulent past, vividly depicted in the “forgotten” prequel episodes of The Octopus, Seasons 8 and 9.
It’s the late 1950s in the undeveloped backcountry of Sicily, honeycombed with caves and dotted with ancient ruins. Here, the Mafia controls people’s lives, and its tentacles are starting to reach into government, business, and the church. “We mustn’t be against the state,” cautions one mob leader, “but inside it.”
However, not even the Mafia is immune to a generation gap. A power struggle is brewing between Don Albanese, the old Mafia boss, who sees himself as a man of honor who would, for example, never stoop so low as to kidnap a child, and younger thug Pietro Favignana, cunning, disloyal, and absolutely ruthless. He will stop at nothing to overthrow the aging and diabetic Don Albanese and usurp his territory. (Attention, fans of Detective Montalbano: Be prepared to see Luca Zingaretti, the actor who plays the quirky and beloved Salvo Montalbano in that long-running series, cast against type as the evil Pietro, a role he plays to chilling perfection.)
Into this Sicilian swelter of grudges and goons comes an apparent breath of fresh air in the form of Baron Francesco Altamura. This idealistic son of Sicilian nobility has been living in America and has recently returned to his native land with his beautiful American wife, Barbara, and their young son, Paul. The baron is a visionary, with big plans to develop Sicily’s natural resources and cultural heritage. What he hasn’t counted on is the Mafia. Criminals demand a cut of his economic development. A fierce clash inevitably looms.
The wily Pietro, pretending loyalty to Don Albanese but acting independently, schemes first to lure, then to rescue, young Paul Altamura from a precarious balcony perch at the villa where he lives with his parents and grandfather. Pietro next goes much further. He arranges for Paul to be kidnapped and stashed in a remote hideout, the isolated hut of a brutish peasant farmer who is loyal to Pietro. The only other human being on the farm is another boy, about 12 years old but wise beyond his years. Surprise! It’s the adolescent Tano Cariddi, motherless son of the peasant farmer.
Tasked with keeping Paul alive in the hut, Tano brings him food, urges him to eat, and before long the two boys, captive and captor, have formed the unlikeliest of bonds. The illiterate Tano helps Paul survive, and the educated Paul teaches Tano to read.
Concealed inside the hut, the boys witness what must be one of the most brutal but bloodless murders ever imagined. Don Albanese, having by now learned that Pietro masterminded Paul’s kidnapping, orders him to return the boy to his family. Don Albanese arrives with a contingent of armed bodyguards to confront Pietro at the farm, but the bodyguards double-cross Don Albanese and force him at gunpoint to drink the bottle of almond milk that Pietro presses upon him. That seemingly innocuous beverage might as well be poison to a diabetic like Don Albanese. He drinks it and drops dead—a seeming victim only of his own sweet tooth, not a Mafia hit.
Watching unobserved from their hiding place, Tano and Paul see this creepy murder unfold, and Paul has a startling realization: he has seen Pietro before. Pietro is the same man who caught him when he was about to fall from a balcony at his home. Tano who, despite his youth, is already well versed in omerta, the Mafia code of silence, warns Paul to keep quiet about his discovery: “If you talk, I’ll die. But so will you and your family.”
No one suspects that Don Albanese was murdered. Even his only child, his devoted and beautiful daughter Rosaria, thinks his death was an accident. With the corpse laid out for mourners to pay their respects, Pietro arrives and shoos away all the mourners except Rosaria. He has been lusting after her for a long time and now, in a scene that is, if anything, even more shocking than the almond-milk murder, Pietro rapes her beside her father’s corpse.
Marriage is her only path forward. “There’s no way out,” she tells a priest in the confessional. “I have no right to think. Pietro is now the boss. He makes the decisions, even for me.”
For now, Pietro is triumphant. He has usurped Don Albanese in every way—siezed his power, his lands, and his daughter. He struts through the wedding ceremony, and accepts the good wishes of the criminal underlings who now owe their loyalty to him.
Back at the Altamura villa, the abducted Paul is still missing. With his father and grandfather afraid to involve the police, Barbara, his mother, takes matters into her own hands. She secretly visits the American consulate in search of a “private way” to find and rescue Paul.
Enter Lieutenant Carlo Arcuti, a handsome and earnest Special Forces officer, who goes undercover to try and find the boy. When Pietro becomes suspicious of Arcuti, he orders the farmer to get rid of Paul by throwing him down a well.
Tano overhears Pietro’s savage command. He runs panic-stricken to find the lieutenant, whom he’s spotted in the area. He begs him, “Come save Paul!” In a mad dash, Tano leads the lieutenant to the well. With seconds to spare, the lieutenant shoots and wounds the farmer, grabs Paul, and runs for safety into the area’s subterranean network of caves. Tano refuses to go with him, insisting on staying by the side of the dying farmer, his father.
The farmer begs Tano to shoot him and put him out of his misery.
“No, father,” Tano cries.
“I’m not your father! They brought you here when you were three years old!”
“Who is my father?”
From behind Tano, Pietro approaches, bellows the word “Traitor!” and kills the farmer.
“Who is my father?” a desperate Tano now screams at Pietro. He drives the boy away with an angry order: “Get lost!”
Lieutenant Arcuti returns Paul safely to the arms of his parents, crediting Tano for facilitating the rescue. A grateful Baron Altamura happily grants young Tano his only wish: an education.
It’s a joyful moment for Tano, albeit one overshadowed by a haunting memory. Throughout Season 8, Tano is troubled by a powerful vision. Over and over in his mind’s eye, he sees himself at age three, playing with his beautiful, loving, happy mother. She lifts him up and joyfully whirls around the house with him.
Each time that he remembers the scene—and the flashbacks occur repeatedly throughout Season 8—a new, different, and critical detail emerges. A mystery man takes Tano away from his mother and puts him in a swinging bed. The man yells at his mother. The man slaps his mother. The man shoves his mother. His mother falls down. A lantern topples over. A fire ignites. The man tries to lift his mother. She’s unconscious, dead weight, and can’t be lifted. The man scoops Tano out of the bed and dashes out of the burning house with him. Before she falls and is burned alive, his mother says something to the man. She says, “Little Tano is your son.”
From the fog of memories, the identity of the mystery man slowly materializes. The man, Tano realizes, was Pietro Favignana. Pietro, the embodiment of evil, is his biological father.
In real life, relationships often simply taper off. In fiction, however, talented writers try to tie up the loose ends of their characters’ story arcs with satisfactory conclusions. Throughout ten seasons of heroes and villains fighting over money and power, the scriptwriters of The Octopus create a veritable crowd of unforgettable characters and shocking plot lines. Fortunately (to quote an unrelated book review from the New York Times), “No matter what happens, no matter how much time passes or how widely individual paths diverge, the principals are bound to meet again.”
And so, in climactic scenes at the end of Season 8, we see the fugitive Pietro acquitted in absentia of Paul’s attempted murder, then returning to Sicily with machine guns and plans to dominate the illegal drug trade. We—as well as Tano—see a light-hearted Rosaria dancing with the newborn child she has had with Pietro, a sight that triggers Tano’s recurring memory of his own mother and brings him to tears. We see Rosaria ask him why he is crying. And then, in this drama where every character bears a heavy burden of secrets, we see Tano tell Rosaria the secret of all secrets: Her beloved father was murdered by her own husband. “Pietro took advantage of your father’s illness. I saw it with my own eyes. He forced him to drink the almond milk until he foamed at the mouth. Then he laughed and said, ‘Now all your property is mine.’ He said, ‘I’ll marry Rosaria before you’re buried.’ He killed your father like he killed my mother!”
The next day, Rosaria stabs Pietro to death in the town plaza.
But wait, there’s more. Extramarital affairs! Involuntary psychiatric commitments! Murder by drowning in olive oil! Murder by burning in a staged car crash! Gang warfare! Gang rape! Incest! Fratricide! Another kidnapping! And secrets still lurking in every heart.
At the end of Season 9, the prequel episodes conclude. Season 10 will return to the time frame of the first seven seasons, and bring The Octopus to a spectacular finale.
Those floppy disks referred to in the title? They have the potential to ruin countless lives. What will the grown-up Tano do with them? Let’s just say that he makes an explosive decision. Be sure to watch Season 10 to see for yourself.
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About the author:
Susan Tejada is the author of the award-winning book, In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti: Double Lives, Troubled Times, and the Massachusetts Murder Case That Shook the World. A long-time aficionado of the series, Susan’s on-camera commentary and analysis can be seen on MHz Networks’ new ‘The Octopus: The Complete Series‘ DVD box set.
