Money Heist / Tropes M to Z

Money Heist Trope Examples
A - L | M - Z

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M-R

• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Two cases during the Mint heist storyline:
  • Rio and Tokyo have sex in one of the Mint's bathrooms while doing an early check of the place in a flashback of Season 1's sixth episode. Later in Season 2's premiere episode, Rio suggests Tokyo to do it once again in the exact same bathroom, only to immediately back off when she makes it clear that it's not a good moment.
  • Later during the Mint heist proper, starting with Season 1's eleventh episode, Mónica gets Denver into having sex with her at the Mint's vault several times, one of which Arturo and Helsinki walk in on in the twelfth episode (prompting Arturo to start a Cock Fight with Denver that he quickly loses).
• Man Bites Man: In the Season 2 finale, after she's caught trying to personally arrest the Professor and put on restraining suspension by the Serbian auxiliary team, Raquel tries to bait the Professor into telling her that she needs medication to help her with a fake stomach pain, and bites his hand just as he offers him a pill and a glass of water. Given the circumstances she's in, it proves to be rather useless.
• Maternity Crisis: In Season 5, Sierra goes into labor right after taking the Professor, Marseilles and Benjamin prisoner, forcing her to set them free so they can help her give birth.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: After Nairobi is shot in the head by Gandia, we get a brief scene of her waking up on a quilt in a field, looking on as Oslo, Moscow, and Berlin smile and motion for her to come over to them. The scene can easily be interpreted as her former heist members welcoming her to the afterlife, but it's also entirely possible that it's just a flashback scene of the four of them hanging out before the events of the first two seasons.
• Meaningful Name: Mónica's son with Arturo, whom Denver gets the paternal custody of, ends up being named Cincinnati, after a city like the rest of the gang (except for the fact that it is his actual name, and not just a codename).
• Menacing Mask: Discussed in the series' very first episode, during the scene that follows the title sequence. The heisters wear plastic Salvador Dalí masks that don't really appear to be visually menacing. Rio is not impressed by them and asks why they couldn't have more intimidating masks. In response, Berlin points a gun in his face while he wears his, telling him it does not matter what kind of mask it is as long as you have a gun. As other robbers join in the discussion, Denver interjects by saying that a children's mascot mask like one of Mickey Mouse would make an armed criminal look far more dangerous, due to the contrasting juxtaposition between children's mascots and weaponry.
• Mercy Kill: In the Season 2 premiere, Helsinki mercy kills Oslo once it's made clear that the pipe blow to the head he got during the getaway of some of the hostages in Episode 12 of Season 1 has given him permanent brain damage and catatonia. Tokyo's subsequent narration reflects on this by comparing it to the mercy kills by soldiers in war or people to animals that can't recover from some health problem. Helsinki later says that he knows Oslo would have preferred it this way.
• Misidentified Weapons: A Rheinmetall MG3 machine gun is referred to as "the Browning", and G36 rifles are called M16s. While the former case is at least justifiable, since viewers wouldn't normally know the names of machine gun models, the latter is egregious because the G36 doesn't look remotely similar to the M16.
• Morality Pet: In the first heist, most of the heisters develop bonds with one particular cop/hostage.
  • The Professor: Raquel.
  • Berlin: Ariadna (though in this case it's not mutual).
  • Denver: Mónica.
  • Helsinki: Arturo (though in this case it's not mutual).
  • Nairobi: Torres.
  • Rio: Allison.
• The Most Wanted: Robbing 2.4+ billion euros makes the heist team an objective of Europol and puts them in international search and capture. It also provides the robbers with much better resources for the Bank heist compared with what they had before, like having a team of 65 Pakistanis remotely doing what Rio did by himself in the Mint heist.
• Multigenerational Household: During the first two seasons, Raquel resides in a shared household with her daughter Paula and her mother Mariví. When they move to vacational places with the robbers afterwards, Raquel gets her own residential place apart from Mariví and Paula, though it's still close to theirs.
• Multiple Gunshot Death: In the Season 2 finale, Berlin is killed from the GEO team that's raiding the Mint unloading all their guns on him, just when he deliberately exposes himself to them after his Heroic Sacrifice to let the rest of the robbers escape proved successful.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: For the Mint heist's preparations, the Professor gave Helsinki 1000 euros to get a scrapyard's worker to destroy a car that had some of the team's fingerprints on it, no questions asked. Not only did Helsinki not get the car destroyed — he sent the cash to his family — he didn't even think of cleaning the fingerprints. By the time the Professor asks him about it in Episode 7 of Season 1, the former is forced to risk being identified and his life to find the car and clean it himself before the cops find it.

• No Name Given: One of the rules established at the beginning. The Professor is the only one that knows everyone else's identity. Moscow and Denver are father and son, and Helsinki and Oslo are old friends. The only one that knows the Professor's true name is Berlin.
• "No Peeking!" Request: Mónica takes advantage of this when Arturo asks her to swap Denver's gun with a fake. When she gets the opportunity, she asks Denver to turn his back while she changes, and uses that moment to swap the guns.
• Not Afraid of You Anymore: The shy and awkward Miguel spends most of this season being unwillingly coerced into helping with Arturo's escape plans. When Arturo rapes Amanda (whom Miguel has a crush on) and tries to bully her into keeping quiet, Miguel angrily grabs Arturo and tells him to leave her alone, leading to all the hostages finally turning on Arturo for good.
• Not Me This Time: Raquel correctly concludes that "Salva" is the Professor/Sergio Marquina, the mastermind behind the heist. He has been deceiving her at every turn, including faking an assault by her ex-husband. However, Sergio has to disclaim that he wasn't behind Ángel's accident; the audience knows he got lucky — he did not know Ángel had evidence against him, but Ángel was drinking heavily behind the wheel.
• Not The Illness That Killed Them: Berlin is ultimately killed not by his Helmer's Myopathy, but being gunned down by the police in order to give his cohorts time to escape the Royal Mint at the end of Season 2.
• Not What It Looks Like: Late into the second season, after the Professor is identified, everybody in the police thinks that Raquel was working with the heist team because she was dating him. This forces Raquel into joining the robbers for real when she begins to be prosecuted.
• Once More, with Clarity: The penultimate episode of Season 4, "Strike the Tent", opens with Gandia seemingly getting into a firefight with the heist team as he attempts to flee to the roof of the Bank and escape in a helicopter sent by the government. As we find out in the climax of the next episode, "The Paris Plan", Gandia was actually being held at gunpoint by the gang and being made to give false reports, the gang was faking the firefight (complete with having Denver wear Gandia's armor), and the Professor has hijacked the communications to the helicopter in order to keep it at bay while Marseilles flies in with the gang's own helicopter in order to smuggle Raquel into the Bank.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: After committing so many crimes all across Europe and getting away with it, Berlin broke the mirror of a bar just with an irrational act of vandalism, and let himself be taken by the police. Why? Because he could accept that his girlfriend leaves him, that his son betrays him, but both things combined are too much, even for him.
• Orgy of Evidence: In the Season 1 finale, the Professor allows the police to discover the team's staging area for the first heist because he filled it with irrelevant information and false leads, only making minor subsequent changes to add things belonging to the robbers whom the police had already identified. The police would spend days trying to chase down every lead, only to discover that they had nothing of value. It's eventually subverted in the Season 2 premiere, when Alberto concludes that most of the evidence is useless, and correctly identifies the one place in the house where real evidence might be found. Even then, the Professor takes care of him once he notices what Alberto is doing.

• The Plan: Of course, the two heists are complex plans where pretty much every eventuality is considered and planned for. The robbers also have a number of smaller plans to activate at certain points, many of which have a Meaningful Name.
  • For the first heist, they have the following:
    • Plan Valencia: make a lot of noise by shooting at paper rolls while the hostages are encouraged to scream. This is used so the police will demand proof of life of all the hostages, and when they notice some of the images may have been faked force them to send someone to personally check on everyone, which allows the heist team to print even more money.
    • Plan Chernobyl: the go-to plan if they pass the Godzilla Threshold. Tie all the money they have printed to balloons, throw them out and then blow the balloons, using the confusion as people attempt to take the money to escape. While they discuss about it, the team ultimately doesn't execute this plan.
    • Plan Cameroon: named after a conversation on how people will (nearly) always support the underdog (comparing their situation with a Brazil-Cameroon soccer game), they invite a journalist for an interview where they make things look like they're a lot worse than they really are and free a group of hostages, gaining a lot of sympathy — particularly after the press finds out that the police framed Berlin for a lot of crimes he did not commit. It's also how the Professor wins Raquel's trust and prompts her to ally with the robbers, framing himself as the underdog going against the legal cash-printing of the big government agents.
  • For the second heist, Plan Chernobyl is retooled into a distraction that the robbers use to get into the Bank of Spain, only involving blimps that drop money instead. Tokyo explains this in her narration at the beginning of "Aikido", during which the plan is happening.
• Poor Communication Kills: When the Professor charged Helsinki with destroying the car they used for their stakeouts, Helsinki did not realize that there was a good reason behind it. This nearly causes a problem when the police find about the car, forcing the Professor to risk being identified to erase the fingerprints.
• Posthumous Narration: Tokyo serves as the Character Narrator across the whole series. Even after she dies at the end of Season 5's first volume, she keeps providing narration for the second volume.
• Product Placement: if the gang is eating somewhere, expect to see several bottles of Estrella Galicia beer. In the bar where the Professor and Raquel meet there are several visible adverts for the beverage, and at the end of the first heist they use an Estrella Galicia delivery truck to escape with the money.
• Properly Paranoid: Subverted. By the time of the final season, the authorities are now fully aware of the Professor's penchant for creating elaborate deceptions that send them on wild geese chases so they refuse to fall for his tricks. This means that the Professor can now use simpler schemes and hide them behind more elaborate fake ones. In another instance, the authorities miss a good chance to retake the building because they think that the robbers are just putting on another performance to trick the police.
• Psycho for Hire: All members of the special forces team sent into the bank with Sagasta have felonies on their records, and appear to be way too into the fighting.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: The show uses the Italian protest folk song "Bella ciao" as something of an anthem between two of its characters.
• Putting the Band Back Together: At the beginning of the Season 3, the heist team, with the inclusion of Mónica, Raquel and three ( actually five) new people, reunites for a second heist in order to rescue Río.
• Rape Discretion Shot: In Season 4, Arturo drugs and molests Amanda. The camera cuts as he begins to undress her.

• Refuge in Audacity:
  • The first heist has many of these, mainly in regards to the Professor's plans:
    • When speaking with Raquel, the Professor asks several uncomfortable personal questions to her, such as what she's wearing and whether she has ever faked an orgasm. He also takes the time to personally speak with her by going to the same bar as she does.
    • The Professor has to clean up the car that was left in a scrapyard before the cops find it, which he does, but cannot get away from there before the cops arrive. What does he do? Disguise himself as a hobo and soil himself with mud and his own blood so much that the only cop who talks with him lets him go without issue.
    • But the Russian scrapyard worker saw him before, and the cops get him to help build a portrait. So the Professor distracts a couple of cops to get in their car and uses the radio to call to the police tent (knowing the radio channel they are using) to threaten the scrapyard worker's family so he won't collaborate.
    • The Professor plays The Entertainer on an electronic piano for Raquel. Subtle.
    • When he suspects the reveal that Ángel is going to wake up is a trap, he tricks a large number of clowns into flooding the hospital while he sneaks in and gives one child a toy with a camera, to then send him to spring the trap.
    • To get back into the Mint, Tokyo takes advantage of her cop disguise to get close, and then calls Río so he will open the gate for her, allowing her to get inside the building while gunning her bike.
  • The second heist begins with the heist team dropping 140 million euros from a dirigible marked with the Dali mask. Then, the Professor sends a message where he shows his face, and calls the people of Madrid to demonstrate, while the team sneaks into the Spanish National Bank disguised as the Army, tricking the police and the bank's security into helping to do the initial heavy work for them.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Arturo attempts to talk the Governor into helping him with an escape plan, citing that they're both the de facto leaders of the group. The Governor refuses, dismissing Arturo as a clown who is willing to put the others in danger for the sake of attention. Things only get worse for Arturo when Amanda reveals that he raped her.
• Rock Beats Laser: How the heist team gets around the communication problems in the second heist. They use a 1940s short wave radio to talk between the Professor and the team, and 2nd-generation mobile phones so the police won't be able to track them.
• Rooting for the Empire: Exploited in-universe. The Professor's no-kill rule is meant to get the support of the public, as if the heists were some kind of contra-cultural protest, and thus force the police to negotiate (and waste time, for the robbers to print more money in the Mint heist's case). And it ended up working.
• Russian Roulette: In the climax of the Season 2 premiere, Tokyo doesn't necessarily invoke the game, but she deliberately loads a revolver with a single bullet in a similar manner to Russian Roulette to put tension on Berlin during her attempted interrogation on him. When Nairobi hears the situation and knocks on the door, Berlin outright tells her that they're playing Russian Roulette; he quickly clarifies himself by saying that it's Tokyo, Denver and Rio the ones who are playing when Moscow comes too.

S-Z

• Sacrificial Lamb: Discussed (with a threat to invoke) early on in Season 1. Berlin torments Arturo by telling him how there's always a character in horror movies who gets killed to establish a threat, and that Arturo fits the type perfectly, so he ought to be careful.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Raquel's mother Mariví suffers from memory problems, and has multiple post-its emplaced all around their house during the Mint heist to remind herself of the changes, which becomes relevant when Ángel leaves a message in Raquel's home answering machine and she listens to it. When the Professor finds out about the message, he considers overdosing Mariví with her medicine, but finding about her memory problems means he can just erase any trace of the message to get out of trouble.
• "The Scream" Parody: In both heists, the robbers wear their signature red jumpsuits and Salvador Dalí masks to hide their identity; they also hand these out to the hostages to confuse the police. In Episode 5 of Season 1 (crammed as part of an Episode 4 in the Netflix release), when the police send cops to infiltrate the mint, everyone switches their masks to ones of The Scream, so the two special forces agents sent alongside Ángel (who are only carrying the Dali masks since they didn't know they had Scream masks onhand) would be instantly identified. The mission is promptly called off, with Raquel asking to the Professor in the following episode if the robbers have any more kinds of masks to wear and what painters they'd choose for them.
• Shared Family Quirks: Discussed in Episode 7 of Season 2, when Raquel's mother gives her a set of markers owned by Paula to use on her map for her personal manhunt on the Professor and remarks that Paula chews on the marker's caps, much like how Raquel used to do.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the major parts of both heists involves forcing all the hostages to dress the same way as the robbers so the police cannot distinguish between them, just like in Inside Man.
  • The Professor's fake name is Salvador Martí, just like the man in charge of The Ministry of Time (another Netflix-broadcast Spanish TV show).
  • In Episode 11 of Season 1, during the first feud argument between Raquel and Ángel, the latter says that the Professor has a smell of chemicals as if he cooked methamphetamine.
  • In Episode 12 of Season 1, the Professor plays "The Entertainer" for Raquel.
  • In Episode 2 of Season 2:
    • In the flashback wherein the Professor and Rio are looking through the deep web for weapons to purchase for the heist, Rio points out an APC for sale and makes a joke about buying it and using it to ram through the Mint's front door like The A-Team.
    • In another flashback, Tokyo attempts a Jurassic Park impression when she finds the Professor's origami figures.
  • In Episode 4 of Season 2, Sánchez negatively responds to Raquel's explanation of her plan to catch the Professor at the hospital Ángel is in with infiltrated cops as being something out of Mortadelo y Filemón.
  • In several flashbacks from the Bank heist storyline, Bogota is seen wearing various T-shirts of Slayer, one of which features the cover of the band's album Divine Intervention.
  • In "48 Meters Underground", during the flashback of Berlin explaining the safest and most effective way to break into that Bogota and Nairobi use in the present at the same time, he asks the Professor if James Bond could do such a thing to give him an idea of the procedure, which the Professor quickly denies.
• Significant Birth Date: In the beginning of the Season 2 finale, wherein Moscow's funeral is held by the robbers following his death at the end of the previous episode, it's revealed that he was born on International Labor Day, something Mónica comments on because of him being an ex-laborer.
• Sleeping with the Boss: At the beginning of the series, Arturo, the then-director of the Royal Mint of Spain and a married man, has had an affair relationship with his personal secretary Mónica for several years, with Tokyo narrating that Mónica had made him feel young again ever since his marriage to his wife Laura 14 years ago. By the end of the second season, he ends up losing both Laura and Mónica, the former once she discovered she had been cheating on him for a good while and thus filed a divorce from him, and the latter when she defects to the heist team after finding Denver to be a better boyfriend for her.
• Smoking Hot Sex: In Episode 11 of Season 1, Denver smokes after having sex with Mónica for the first time.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • The scissors in the Mint. When Mercedes takes them, Arturo comes up with a plan to spark a escape plan by the hostage cops — which is the point where things start to go pear-shaped in the first heist.
  • Also for the Mint heist, Raquel. Because she meets with the Professor, he's not there to warn the team that the hostage cops are trying to escape - which they do, opening a way into the mint and screwing up all the plan. In fact, in the Season 2 finale, the Professor explicitly mentions that his plan had gone on perfectly, and would have worked perfectly if not for the fact that he has fallen in love with her.
• Stockholm Syndrome: Several hostages in the first heist experience this towards certain heist team members.
  • Allison apologizes to her captor Rio after she accidentally gets him captured on her mobile phone's camera.
  • Mónica has sex with Denver after he attempts to fake her assassination that Berlín ordered. The beginning of their relationship causes an in-universe discussion of the trope, and it's suggested that her city nickname could be Stockholm. It eventually does when she joins the team.
  • Torres, the mint's chief engineer. In fact, he tells Nairobi that — apart from the guns and being a hostage — she's the best boss he's ever had.
• Survivor's Guilt:
  • The Professor feels quite guilty over the fact that three of the team members died during the first heist.
  • Palermo masterminded both the Mint and Bank of Spain heists with Berlín and later the Professor, but he didn't participate in the first heist. He feels that if he did, then Berlín would be still alive. He joins the second heist as a form of atonement/revenge.
• SWAT Team: Or rather, the Spanish equivalent — the GEO (Grupo Especial de Operaciones, or "Special Operations Group"). Led by Suárez, they have a prominent role in both heists on the police's side.
• Taken Off the Case: In Episode 7 of Season 2, Raquel is taken off her position of lead inspector in the Mint heist's investigation once the police identify the Professor and discover the relationship Raquel had with him. In reaction, Raquel tells them that they can go on without her as she angrily lends her badge and the pistol she had in hand by then to them, determined to go on a manhunt for the Professor on her own.
• Taking You with Me:
  • When the government's torture of Rio is publicly exposed, Sierra is made to take the fall for it. However, during the press conference when she does so, she proceeds to fling blame at all her superiors, tarnishing them as well.
  • Cornered by Gandía and the special forces, Tokyo detonates her grenades, not only killing herself but Gandía and several others with her as well.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: In the Season 1 finale, the Professor attempts to kill Raquel's mother by pouring dioxin into a coffee she was going to drink, when he came to visit her after finding out she had heard an archived phone call of Ángel exposing his identity as the Mint heist's mastermind. He ultimately doesn't go with it, throwing the cup from the mother's hands before she can begin drinking it, and is relieved when he sees that she thought she had accidentally dropped it herself (due to her prominent memory problems).
• Tempting Fate: When Berlin tells the Professor he had Denver kill Mónica (it did not happen, but he doesn't know that), he dares the Professor to punish him, or else he won't think he's worthy of being a leader. The Professor plants one of Berlin's buttons, with his fingerprints on it, in the car used to watch the bank.
• Terminally-Ill Criminal: Midway through the first season, Berlin is revealed to have Helmer's Myopathy, which is mentioned to give him around two years of remaining life. Because of this, he's prompted to die as heroically as possible while fending off the armored police team pursuing the escaping robbers at the end of the second season, so as the make sure that the public remembers him well. Flashbacks featuring him in the following seasons delve further into how the illness motivated him to plan the Bank of Spain heist with Palermo, and spend his life to his fullest while not engaging in any criminal activity, even if it involves questionable choices like constantly marrying a number of women.
• Time Skip: The epilogue sequence of the Season 2 finale, where Raquel comes to see the Professor at the Phillipines, takes place exactly a year after the Mint heist (complete with a news program of La Sexta on television mentioning to heist's first anniversary). The Season 3 premiere takes another jump of a year and a half, totaling to two years and a half after the Mint heist.
• Title Drop: At the end of "Everything Seemed Insignificant", Tokyo drops the episode's title during her closing narration for the episode, stating that despite all the things that she and the rest of the team had gone through over the course of the episode, "everything seemed insignificant" just as she saw Rio being sent by the police into the Bank of Spain as their part of the exchange for 40 hostages offered to them by the Professor.
• Trap Is the Only Option: In Episode 5 of Season 2, the police attempt to suss out the Professor by setting up a sting operation that was first discussed by Raquel and several other leading figures in the previous episode. They tell the press that Ángel — who knows the Professor's identity — is awakening from his coma, but fill the hospital with police agents in case someone comes to kill him. When the Professor notifies Berlin about this, Berlin discusses the trap's obviousness, saying not even a sitcom character would fall for it, but the Professor replies that they can't risk the small chance that it's legitimate. He gets around it by flooding the hospital with clowns to distract the officers, sneaks in as one himself, then gives a child a stuffed animal with a Spy Cam and sends him to Ángel's room. It would have worked entirely well, but he Failed a Spot Check and left a strand of hair from his wig on his shirt, leading Raquel to have a "Eureka!" Moment when she notices it the next time they meet in person.
• Trojan Horse: Discussed and name-dropped twice.
  • In Episode 5 of Season 1, after Arturo got injured at the end of the previous episode, the police try to sneak Ángel as part of the medical team sent to treat Arturo, while Suárez and another GEO agent get in through a tunnel disguised with the standard suits and masks worn by the robbers and hostages. A subsequent flashback has the Professor teaching the team on how to deal with a situation like this, referring to the method as their Trojan Horse. Returning to the present, the robbers sneak a microphone on Ángel's glasses to catch on the police's plan, and have the hostages change their masks alongside most of themselves to make the GEO agents stand out. This prompts Ángel to run back into the police tent and declare to Raquel that their plan must be aborted, much to Suárez's dismay once he receives Raquel's order.
  • In the second volume of Season 5, Sagasta mentions this to Arteche when he instructs her about his ultimate plan for her to carry in order to capture the heist team for once, though the plan itself is more based around a standard stealth attack.
• Tropical Epilogue: The second season ends with Raquel meeting up with the Professor in the tropical island of Palawan, Philippines, which they had previously considered as a vacation spot, on the first anniversary of the Mint heist.
• True Art Is Ancient: Invoked and discussed by Berlin. He planned a heist to steal some viking relics made of gold, to replace them with worthless replicas and melt them for the gold. His son, who loves the arts, was horrified: those relics are 1000 years old! Berlin said that it is all garbage. Work of blacksmiths, not artists. That vikings stole awesome art pieces from the Greeks and British, and melted them to make artifacts of everyday usage! If anything, by melting them Berlin would be returning them to their primal glory as basic gold.
• Undying Loyalty: Subverted multiple times. Loyalty doesn't do much good when your opposers have your (and sometimes your family's) safety dangling above you, which Berlin notes in a flashback.
  • Rio admits he would have leaked the Professor's location to Sierra when he was being tortured to be let go.
  • Raquel would have pled guilty and told everything to Sierra for the safety of her family hadn't the Professor been just in time.
• Unfolding Plan Montage: A voice-over variant. In Episode 11 of Season 1, while going to the bathroom for a break under Oslo's watch, Jacinto finds the tools Pablo gathered as part of Arturo's first plan to escape the Mint attached under the lid of the toilet he went to, alongside a note with instructions for the plan. As Jacinto opts to spend the time Oslo gave him to pick up the tools instead, as part of the instructions' first step, what the entire note reads is spoken in voice-over with Arturo's voice.
• Unintentionally Notorious Crime: Subverted — one of the hostages is Allison Parker, daughter of the British ambassador and close friend of the Queen of England. She is so integral to the plan that she was nicknamed "the lamb" by the Professor, which is one of many initial clues to the Professor's Crazy-Prepared nature.
• Unseen No More: Downplayed with Colonel Prieto's wife, Merche. Prieto mentions her a couple times in Season 1, but it's not until the Season 3 premiere, "We're Back", that she first appears onscreen in a brief cameo. She doesn't appear again after Season 3, being last mentioned by Tamayo in "Everything Seemed Insignificant" (which is when her name is first said), and only making a second onscreen cameo at the beginning of "A Quick Vacation".
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The plans for both heists are revealed to the audience little by little, exactly as the corresponding parts of each plan take place in the present. The first heist's plan succeeds with a few hitches, and while the second heist's faces more problems, the robbers still get an upper hand at the end.
• Villain Protagonist: The series is starred by the criminals, not the cops.
• Villain with Good Publicity:
  • Following the Mint heist, the heist team ends up having a lot of supporters due to their Robin Hood-esque goals. In Season 3, when they publicise Rio's torture at the hands of the police, thousands of protesters march to the Bank of Spain to try to stop the police from arresting the group.
  • Also between the two heists, Arturo becomes a well-known public figure and motivational speaker with legions of fans who believe him to be a courageous hero, and comprise the only notable group of civilians who oppose the robbers. While he makes some good points during one of his speechs (e.g. the heist crew shouldn't be considered heroes at all), Arturo himself is far from a hero, and the following events after he deliberately gets himself inside the Bank reveal him to be even more despicable than he was in the series' beginning.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: In Episode 12 of Season 1, Arturo vomits at the sight of Mónica having sex with Denver, but the resulting puke isn't shown from the angles of the ensuing shots.
• Vorpal Pillow: In the Season 2 premiere, Helsinki does this to Oslo to Mercy Kill him from the severe head trauma he received late in Season 1.
• Warm Place, Warm Lighting: In contrast to the rest of the Madrid-set scenes, which are toned neutrally or with green or blue, the Tropical Epilogue of the second season (set in Palawan, Philippines) has a noticeable yellow filter.
• Was It All a Lie?: Played for Drama in the middle of Season 2, when she realizes that her recently new boyfriend "Salva" is actually the Professor and takes him to the farm to interrogate him, broken down because she thinks he only got close to her to use her. The Professor tells her that he did initially, but actually fell in love with her as he got to know her.
• We Have to Get the Bullet Out!: Several times in the series, important characters are shot, and a big deal is made of having to extract the bullets from their bodies before stitching them back up. While this might be marginally believable in the case of a handgun bullet shot into a leg^note Though if it were the type to stay in it would cause a lot more damage than pictured., it's just not reasonable that a high-power sniper round fired from a relatively close distance would stay lodged into someone's shoulder, to say nothing of the relatively small amount of damage inflicted — the victim survives with minor surgery to remove the bullet and a couple days of rest.
• Wham Line: The reveal that Tokyo was Dead All Along in her final lines:
  Tokyo: Growing old in a prison cell isn't for me. I'd rather be on the run. And if I can't run with my body, at least let my soul be free.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: After spending so much time portraying Ariadna's ordeal, her motivations and her very conflictual relationship with Berlin, the last we get to see her is during the final shootout, having barely survived it, terrified out of her wits and having seen Berlin get riddled with bullets not two feet away from her. No more mention is made of her existence.

• Wilhelm Scream:
  • The Wilhelm Scream is played during the shootout in Episode 6 of Season 2 when Tokyo re-enters the mint, specifically when a SWAT officer ducks under some sandbags.
  • In Episode 5 of Season 5, the Wilhelm Scream can be heard when one of the soldiers gets killed by a grenade that Gandia threw to Tokyo, which she then threw back to the special forces team's location.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit:
  • In Episode 4 of Season 1, Denver has a group of hostages move to the roof so Moscow can calm down from his ongoing mental breakdown by breathing open air. While there, Denver's conversation with Moscow makes Arturo think that Denver has killed Mónica and threatens them with his false gun. Moscow and Denver kneel, and the police, thinking Arturo is one of the robbers about to kill the hostages present, shoot him.
  • In Episode 2 of Season 2, the Professor approaches an option to go to the bathroom at the police station he's being kept detained in to deliberately bruise himself and make it look like Alberto had given him some serious injuries from beating him up; thus, he's able to escape detainment while Alberto is framed for Police Brutality.

• You Are Too Late: In the first heist, the police arrive precisely 1 minute too late to stop the freshly-printed money from being taken from the hideout, and 2-7 minutes too late to capture any of the perpetrators.

• You Monster!: Nairobi calls Berlin a pig, among other things, as she hears the large plethora of his past crimes (including plenty of false ones, much to Berlin's anger) mentioned on the news about him in Episode 8 of Season 1.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Berlín stays behind during the getaway and blasts away at the oncoming police with the Browning machine gun the team brought into the House, buying time for the other robbers to leave and blow up the escape tunnel behind them. Also a variant of Suicide by Cop.

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