Series / Kaleidoscope (2023)

Witness a heist 25 years in the making.

Kaleidoscope is a 2023 American crime drama limited series created by Eric Garcia, on Netflix January 1, 2023. It stars Giancarlo Esposito, Rufus Sewell, Paz Vega, Rosaline Elbay, Jai Courtney, Tati Gabrielle, and Peter Mark Kendall.

The series is a heist story told in a non-linear fashion, where each episode contains a piece of the overall puzzle, and as such, viewers are able to start on any episode they wish; heck, Netflix outright randomly chooses a random order for what episodes are seen per person (though Netflix will always place "White" as the final episode).

Not to be confused with the 1966 film Kaleidoscope.

Previews: Trailer

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Kaleidoscope contains the following examples:

• 10-Minute Retirement: In "Violet" Ray gets out of the game until his wife is fired and racism played a factor in the firing.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Bob dies gunned down by the FBI and has a dying vision of the "pink sands" he wanted to retire to, caused by his blood leaking out on the beach.
• All for Nothing: How Ray ended up in jail. He agreed to pull a heist on the country club that fired his wife, and was outspokenly racist to him and his young daughter. But it Went Horribly Wrong, and set off a fire which ended up killing Ray's wife (who was there unbeknownst to him) and got Ray arrested, which drove a deep wedge into his relationship with his daughter.
• Anachronic Order: The series was designed to be non-linear, with the viewer able to jump into any episode. "White" is meant to be watched last, however.
• Animal Motifs: Judy has a loose association with butterflies. Bob gets his hand shot trying to steal a priceless bracelet with a butterfly design on it for Judy, and Stan gives her a butterfly-shaped soap that Ray carved.
• Arc Words: "Show me where you're brave" and "Show me where you're strong."
• Asshole Victim: The Senior VP working for Salas is framed for compromising security. When he later tries to blackmail Salas, Carlos murders him.
  • In "Violet", Ray targets a country club that was openly racist towards him and his loved ones.
  • Bob Strauss is an abrasive Jerkass who's not above using violence and bullying against his fellow heist-mates to get his point across, and has a bitter and untamed resentment for Stan who was his girlfriend's ex. But it was only until he beat RJ to a pulp and tried to kill the witness Stan that Judy nearly choked him to death and crushed his windpipe.
• The Atoner: The series implies Salas mentors Hannah partially because he feels guilty over accidentally killing her mom and getting Ray imprisoned.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Though they aren't the main antagonists, the Triplets murder Agent Abassi for getting too close to them and it's implied they will face no consequences for this.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In "Pink", Bob forces Ray to call Stan and Judy and arrange a meeting with them, wherein Bob will show up and presumably kill Stan on the spot. The show leads us to believe that Ray did make that call— we cut to Stan and Judy getting ready to go, and Stan remarking that they're going to be late. However, it turns out Ray called Agent Abassi instead, and the name "Porky" in Ava's book was code for the FBI A.K.A. "the pigs." Meanwhile, Stan just wanted to get to a food truck before they ran out of lengua tacos.
  • If you watch "White" after "Red" and/or "Pink," you will be waiting for the moment where RJ dies. At one point we see him in the sewer tunnel just as the charges go off and the show cuts away, making it seem like this is when it happens. However, we find out later he survived that, and is actually killed by Judy after he shoots Bob.
• Bathos: In "Pink", Bob has lost his voice, and has to use a text to speech app. While he's intimidating Ava, the app reads out an ad that tells him to subscribe to the paid version. Since he and Ava continue to Death Glare at each other as the ad plays and don't seem to be amused in the slightest, it might be a tad less humorous to some viewers.
• Big Storm Episode: the entirety of "White" takes place during a major hurricane that's sweeping across Manhattan.
• Bittersweet Ending: Leans more towards the bitter side. Ray, RJ, Ava, Teresa, and Agent Abassi are all dead without anything to show for it. Bob dies without Judy knowing his commitment to be a better husband. However, Hannah ends up starting a new life with her baby, and Roger Salas is in prison. Finally on an ambiguous note, Judy contemplates fleeing with the remaining money while abandoning Stan.
  • Note that the above applies only to the chronological ending of the story. The actual final moments of the show you see will depend on your viewing order. Netflix programs "White" to be last but in theory you could end with any episode.
• Blackmail Backfire: Agent Abassi essentially blackmails Ava Mercer into becoming the crew's mole, in exchange for keeping her former nanny Teresa in the country. However, when the heist begins, Ava distracts the FBI agents by setting off explosives on the 59th floor of the SLS building, leading Abassi and her partner away from where the real heist is taking place. When Abassi confronts Ava later at gunpoint, Ava says that Teresa's already long gone and manages to drive away from the scene in the crew's van.
  • Salas's VP gets fired, and tries to leverage Salas's real identity against him in exchange for all of his assets. The identity could cost him a lucrative deal with the Triplets. Instead of paying, Salas sends Carlos to kill him, and it turns out to have been All for Nothing anyway because the Triplets had already thoroughly looked into Salas's past. In fact, it's part of why they hired him.
• Break the Cutie: One of the hired killers in "Pink" is notably talkative and easygoing, unbefitting for the serious job at hand. When Bob catches him reading his intimate letters, he slams his head against their car's steering wheel multiple times, covering his face in blood. His friendly attitude is replaced with a stoic silence thereafter.
• Call-Back: Depending on the order you watch the episodes in, there are a few of these which could function as either this or a Call-Forward:
  • The main necklace that Ray and Graham try to steal in "Violet" is the object Ray leaves in the vault at the end of "White", which Salas and Abassi find in "Red".
  • In "Blue". Bob mentions wanting to retire to "pink sands." The last thing he sees before dying in "Pink" is, fittingly, the sands of the beach turning pink after being shot.
  • In "White", we see Brad Salas, Roger's son, wearing a black shirt with a colorful pattern on it. This heavily implies that he's the one who shoots Ray at the end of "Pink".
  • If you watch "Blue", "Orange", or "White" before "Yellow", you'll notice Bob's wounded hand. "Yellow" shows how he was shot during the Diamond Way job.
• The Caper
• Caper Crew: The episode "Yellow" is centered around a formation of the job crew.
• Chekhov's Gun: Zig-zagged, especially if you watch the episodes out of chronological order. At the end of "Blue," Judy gives RJ the gun he's asked for. In "Red," RJ and Bob are mysteriously absent. In “White,” we find out RJ attempted to shoot Bob but only hit his ass, and Judy killed him in retaliation. So there was a gun and it did go off, but it didn't ultimately do much on its own.
  • In "Green", Ava makes a point of emphasizing her Second Amendment rights as an American to Agent Abassi. In "Pink", she makes very good use of them.
  • At the last scene of "Pink", the man who murders Ray/Leo is wearing the same shirt as Salas' son.
• Color Motif: Part of the premise of the show is that each episode is named after a different color, and that color and lighting scheme changes to emphasize it (fitting the idea of a kaleidoscope). In addition, specific objects that match the episode's color will also crop up, and each episode ends on a fade into that color. Even the soundtrack for the show is mostly comprised^note as in, all but 3 out of the 24 tracks of puns on colors ("Old Yella", "Purple Rain", "A Whiter Shade of Pale"). Below are just a few selected examples of each color and where they crop up:
  • "Green":
    • Washington Correctional Facility features green walls and uniforms.
    • Ray's letter to Hannah uses green paper, and he whittles Irish Spring soap into a butterfly shape.
  • "Yellow":
    • The color of the USB stick found in the senior VP's bag.
    • The gas during the Diamond Way job.
  • "Orange":
    • The letters on the "FBI" jackets.
  • "Blue":
    • The sauna.
  • "Violet":
    • Ray Vernon's auto-shop business has a purple-colored title.
    • The necklace Ray steals from the country club has an amethyst gem in its center.
    • Ava Mercer shields a young Hannah away from the scene of her father getting arrested with the flaps of her purple trenchcoat.
  • "Red":
    • There's a giant reflective red screen at the hideout.
    • The boat Ray's crew escapes on has a red stripe on it.
  • "Pink":
    • The taco truck is shaped like a giant pink pig.
    • The cabin where Ray, Ava, and Teresa hide out, and Bob's visions of the "pink sands" after he's been shot by the FBI. The stripes on Bob's tracksuit are also closer to pink than their usual red, and the earbud cords he has people wear so they can hear him speak through a text-to-voice translator are a neon pink as well.
    • There's also the pink blossoms on the trees seen as Ray is shot at the very end of the episode.
  • "White":
    • The flashbacks to the scenes of previous episodes have a white color filter.
• Cool Old Guy: Ray may not be trustworthy, and has plenty of flaws, but he's also a smart and capable thief with years of experience pulling off jobs. Most visible in "Green", "Yellow", and "Blue". Even in "Pink", when he's clearly suffering from Parkinson's, he manages to defeat Bob and save Judy and Stan's lives, although it ends up costing Ava and Teresa's lives and he doesn't live much longer after that. As with much of the show, the order you view the episodes in could change how sympathetically you view him, but his cool factor is almost always present.
• Crazy-Prepared: In "Pink", Ava has a lot of guns stashed around her house. And she needed them.
• A Day in the Limelight: A few episodes give extra scenes to a specific character:
  • "Orange" mostly follows Agent Abassi and her personal and professional struggles. In fact, one of the suggested viewing orders recommends watching this one first to turn the entire series into more of a detective story.
  • "Blue" gives us more details on Roger Salas though it doesn't reveal his true name and backstory.
  • "Yellow" dedicates more time to Hannah and her relationship with her sister.
  • "Violet" has a hard focus on Ray Vernon, and features no other characters from the modern day besides Hannah and Roger, whos' backstories are developed alongside Ray's.
• Determinator: Ray, Bob, and Agent Abassi. All of them to unhealthy and dangerous levels. Ray is the only one who gives up, but it's already too late. The other two end up dead because they don't know how to quit.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: In "Pink", Abassi dies due to contact with a "random" stranger in public. This is very similar to the assassinations of Alexander Litvinenko (poisoned tea in public) or Georgi Markov (ricin pellet shot from an umbrella).
• Downer Ending: If you watch the show chronologically, anyway. The heist Ray and the crew worked so hard on fails spectacularly in "White", and by the end of "Pink", nearly every member of the show who ever tried to wrong Roger Salas or the Triplets have died miserably, and so have their loved ones. The few who are still alive now live a life of constant paranoia and turmoil, and the only people still living comfortably are the villains, and those who had to appease them to avoid such a fate.
• Empathic Environment: The height of the tension of the heist itself is punctuated with the hurricane that Ray takes advantage of to break into Roger Salas's vault.
• "Eureka!" Moment: In "Blue", Leo nearly murders Salas in cold blood. Ironically, they're in a sauna. Salas doesn't know who he Leo , so he just tries to start a friendly conversation about the oncoming storm, which gives Leo the idea to use the storm for the heist.
• Fade Out: (Or red, or green, or blue...) Every episode ends with a fade to whatever color the episode's titled after, and vice versa, a Fade In with the same color when the episode begins.
• Faking the Dead: Ray Vernon had to in order to complete his prison escape. Ava took the car he stowed away in and burned it in a ditch, leaving a corpse behind with teeth that the police matched to Ray's dental records. In the seven years since, Ray has been living his life under the name Leo Pap.
• Fatal Flaw: Many of the characters have these:
  • Ray's obsession with revenge and his refusal to let the team in on the full picture ultimately leads to his death and is arguably the main reason the heist falls apart.
  • Bob is too hotheaded, ambitious, and jealous, and doesn't like to follow orders. In "Pink," he's so focused on getting revenge that he doesn't realize Ray has set him up until it's too late.
  • On the flip side, Judy's commitment to Bob and insistence that she and him are a "package deal" leads to all the problems above, including the fact that she had to kill RJ because he was ready to shoot Bob after the bloke beat him up in order to make off with the bonds.
  • Agent Abassi refuses to back off in her investigation. While she does successfully catch Graham and Bob, the Triplets ultimately take her out for getting too close to them.
• Foreshadowing:
  • "Violet" opens with Leo breaking into a safe while Roger distracts the owner. Due to certain circumstances, he gets locked in that safe, temporarily. By the end of the episode, he's headed for a much more permanent stay in a much bigger box. One with steel bars, guards, and very unflattering uniforms.
  • Salas warns Hannah that if you cross the Triplets, you might be walking down the street one day, brush up against someone, and die of a heart attack thirty minutes later— that's how dangerous they are. In "Pink", a stranger shakes Abassi's hands, she walks a few steps, and collapses. More like thirty seconds. As with much of the show, though, whether or not this is actually foreshadowed in your viewing depends on which episodes you watch first.
  • In "Pink", one of Bob's hired goons pisses Bob off. One surprise beating later, and the goon has a bloody face and chest. Later on, Ava surprise-shotguns him through a door, which puts a lot more red on him. In fact, Bob's whole team ends up dead from unexpected attacks to the chest.
• Frame-Up: In order to secure her position as Roger Salas's senior VP, Hannah plants a USB full of incriminating security info into the pocket of the current VP and comments to her coworker that he "seems suspicious", leading the Senior VP to lose his job and for Roger promote Hannah as his new VP in turn.
• Framing the Guilty Party: Ava files a complaint against Agent Abassi alleging that Abassi is a drug addict and her negligence led to Ray's murder. Abassi is a drug addict and is negligent in her duties but the murder was staged. As a result of this, Abassi is suspended and barely manages to keep her job. She also loses custody of her daughter.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Heist partner, in any event. Nobody on the crew, besides Judy, is able to stand Bob. At one point, Ava tells him point blank that if he and Judy weren't a package deal, they would never have even considered dealing with him.
• Generation Xerox:
  • Hannah ends up helping her dad Ray/Leo with the heist. She's remarkably good at it. And then it's averted. She sabotages the heist to save Ray's life, because she remembered what happened to her mom, and how Ray ended up separated from her. And she doesn't want that for her kid. Ironically, she ends up stealing from the thieves, which is what Ray was trying to do.
  • In "Violet", Ray's wife dies because of a heist gone wrong, arguably because Salas didn't help. Ray ends up in jail. This is part of Hannah's motivation to screw over Salas. In "Pink", Salas' son murders Ray, over a heist gone wrong that put his dad in prison.
• Gold Fever: Bob is so obsessed with big, fancy jewelry that he'd steal from Ava's trusted fence and also get his hand shot trying to break into a special display case just to get his hands on something shiny.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Triplets are mainly just the marks in Ray's scheme and not a direct threat, but they are implied to be involved in shady activities, have spies everywhere, and can have people murdered at a whim. Abassi finds this out the hard way.
• Gun Nut: Ava keeps several guns in her basement, and is shown to be proficient with them. Partly played for laughs in "Pink," when Bob keeps finding guns hidden throughout the safe house, including the knife rack in the kitchen. And he still misses one.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Bob is an arrogant jerk, but he tearfully admits he's feeling insecure about his hand injury and what it means for his value to the team.
  • In "Pink", Bob hires two thugs to help him kill Leo. One of them looks highly disreputable and stupid even by thug standards - facial tats and distinctive piercings are not a smart idea for criminals - but he turns out to be remarkably well read, or at least good enough to fake it. Not smart enough not to read Bob's letter to Judy, unfortunately. Also, Bob himself was smart enough to hire the thugs to Draw Aggro while he snuck up on Ava and subdued her.
• How We Got Here: The entire rest of the series becomes this if one chooses to watch "Pink" first, the episode otherwise serving as something of a Distant Finale if viewed chronologically.
• I Can Change My Beloved: A non-romantic example, but Hannah's speech to Ray in "White" is her expressing this trope, saying that Ray is going to be the kind of person he is and there's nothing Hannah can do to change that anymore.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Each episode is named after a color: "Yellow", "Green", "Blue", "Orange", "Violet", "Red", "Pink", and "White".
• Insurance Fraud: Hannah turns the heist into this in order to avoid retaliation from the Triplets. The Triplets get their bonds back, and also get a nice payout from the insurance company.
• Intoxication Ensues: As part of the plan to break out of prison in "Green", Stan laces a pot of oatmeal with crushed up magic mushrooms and serves it to the inmates, getting everyone in the cafeteria high. The distraction helps lure the CO's away from the infirmary, where Ray is held up.
• Irony:
  • Bob is the team's safecracker. In traditional heist stories, a safecracker is often a skilled technician and/or prima-donna artiste. Bob has the ego and the skill, but he's also a insecure bully, and The Millstone. He's a large, muscled, boisterous working-class Australian with Perma-Stubble who loves to wear tracksuits and use violence. In short, he looks and often acts like the stereotypical Dumb Muscle thug. He loses his voice in the heist.
    • In "White", the team sees the FBI bearing down on them, and Bob - of all people - is the one who goes Screw This, I'm Outta Here and calls the others "greedy". Albeit as part of his plan to lock them in the vault for a bigger cut.
  • Ava is a glamorous, dignified, middle-aged lawyer who is The Social Expert. She's also a Gun Nut. And possibly the best shot on the crew. Also, By-the-Book Cop Agent Abassi bends the law to force Ava to be The Mole, which is ironic for both of them.
  • The person who gives Leo the final idea of how to break into Salas' vault in Leo's Darkest Hour is Salas himself, making conversation with a "stranger" in a sauna.
  • Agent Abassi tells her colleagues that Bob is ambitious, but fails to back it up. She doesn't notice that she's also describing her own dogged pursuit of Ray's crew and Salas, which ruins her personal life. And like Bob, it ends her life.
  • Hannah acts like a Femme Fatale for a security probe, by seducing a woman. She's also the Inside Man in Salas' company. In "White", she sabotages the heist from the inside to save lives and prevent death.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: There are a few moments where it's possible to feel sympathy for Bob... but these are undone once you know the full story. His hand injury from the Diamond Way robbery comes across as tragic until you see how he got it in "Yellow" and learn it was pretty much his own fault. In "Pink," he can barely speak due to his crushed windpipe, and tries to write a letter to Judy declaring his commitment to be a better man. He almost seems to take Ray's advice to give up and walk away from his Roaring Rampage of Revenge plot. However, Bob continues pursuing his revenge and ultimately dies because of it.
• Karma Houdini: The Triplets, whom are not above assassinating an FBI agent to keep away those looking too deeply into their several million dollar laundering scheme, end up keeping all their bonds and get a nice payout from the insurance company thanks to Hannah. The jury's out whether anyone will know they killed Abassi, but it doesn't look like they will.
• Kill the Cutie: RJ, arguably the team's most innocent member, is the first to die during the heist.
• Love Triangle: Both Type 1 and Type 3: Judy has feelings for both Bob and Stan, and both Bob and Stan have clear feelings for her. Judy and Stan were exes by the time of "Yellow", the former getting together with Bob since then. The tension between Bob and Stan grows as a result of Bob's fear of Judy getting back with her ex. In "White", it seems Judy made her choice when she chokes Bob nearly to death, and in "Pink" where she is now in a relationship with Stan again. However, after seeing Bob's car in a parking lot, she has second thoughts and contemplates abandoning him with the money Bob left.
• Master of Disguise: Among the team, Stan, Judy, and Ava seem to be the best at this.
• Meaningful Funeral: Or a meaningful clearing out of the office. The book Moby Dick is seen in "Pink" when Abassi's office is being cleared out.
• Mexican Standoff: A four-way between Ava, Judy, Ray and Stan in "Red" at the height of the group's tension and mistrust. Judy pulls her gun on Ava believing she and Ray made off with the bonds and played the group, and the others follow suit either to back up Judy or back up Ava. Their standoff is interrupted when Carlos and his group of mercenaries come in, guns blazing.
• The Millstone: Bob Strauss is a extremely volatile Jerkass whose greed and shortsightedness routinely jeopardizes the entire heist. His insistence on stealing a butterfly bracelet for Judy during the Diamond Way hit results in him lagging behind the entire team long enough to get shot in the hand by a cop. This makes it impossible for him to crack the safe at SLS by himself since he needed both of his hands to operate the dual dials, which in turn forces Stan and Ray to pick up his slack. His brazen attempt to show up on Ava's doorstep in broad daylight to try and extort her for a bigger cut also results in him being identified by Agent Abbasi who was staking out Ava's home, which confirms Abbasi's suspicions that Ava really was involved in the Diamond Way hit and puts the entire team under even more scrutiny. Then on the night of the SLS heist, as soon as it seems they've looted all of the bonds, Bob betrays the team by locking Ray, Stan, and Ava in the safe room before getting in a fight with RJ for trying to stop him and Judy from running away with the money.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In "White", RJ points the gun Judy gave him at Bob. This forces Judy to shoot RJ. If she hadn't given him the gun, he would've just been knocked down.
  • Also, in that episode, Ava sets off explosives on the 59th floor as a distraction, while the heist is going on in the basement. Agent Abassi rushes to the floor, and realizes she's been duped. And then she notices a suspicious drywall nearby, and finds the hacker cave the crew is using to spoof the feeds. A few pulled wires later, and Salas sees the actual camera feeds of the theft.
  • When Hannah infiltrates Salas' company, she frames the VP and gets him fired, so she can take his position. He tries to blackmail Salas. Which gets him killed.
  • One particular impulsive action caused a lot of extra damage. You could call it the Butterfly Effect.
    • During the diamond heist, Bob gets greedy and steals a butterfly bracelet for Judy. He gets shot, which damages his hand, and causes a lot of issues for the group. Also, both him and Ava shoot.
    • Abassi finds a bullet at that heist with Ava's prints, then Bob shows up at Ava's house and gives Abassi a lead. Ava's attempts to shake Abassi mean Abassi loses a shot at custody of her kid, so Abassi has literally nothing but her job to live for. She threatens Ava's friend with deportation, unless Ava becomes a mole.
    • The bracelet itself gets caught in Ava's demo charges and nearly gets her and RJ killed.
    • And Bob had to teach Stan how to safecrack because of Bob's injured hand. Which gives Bob a chance to lock Ava, Leo, and Stan in the vault. Also, Judy had to killed RJ to protect Bob, and Abassi showed up and shot Ava.
    • And finally, in "Pink", Stan tries to sell Judy's bracelet, which leads the FBI to their location, where they find and kill Bob.
• Oh, Crap!: In "Pink", Ray lets out a loud "NO!" as he sees Ava Mercer die in front of him. Doubles as Five-Second Foreshadowing.
• Once More, with Clarity: Depending on what order the series is watched in, some scenes can repeat but now showing a different side to the truth. That's particularly true for "White" which shows the actual heist.
• One Last Job: In "Violet", Salas recruits retired thief Ray (Leo) for one, which kicks off the whole plot. Leo doesn't notice the irony when he does the same to Stan in "Yellow", and it ends just as poorly. Arguably worse.
• Only Sane Man: Hannah is the only one who is not blinded by obsession and/or greed and realizes that the heist can only end in tragedy.
• Opposites Attract: Judy is a smart, compassionate woman, but for the bulk of the series she's with Bob. Bob's a brutish bully who keeps messing with others out of insecurity, though he's not as dumb as he acts. Her previous boyfriend was Stan, who's a much closer match for her. As Abassi points out, Bob's ambition often exceeds his grasp and gets him into trouble, and the same is true of Stan. Judy is more willing to settle for "good enough", and eventually realizes she might not be compatible with either man.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Ray gets his revenge, but at a horrible cost. They do not get the money. Most of the heist crew and a number of innocent people are dead. Ray spends the rest of his life in hiding with only sporadic interactions with Hannah. In the end, Brad Salas tracks him down and presumably kills him.
• The Quiet One: Bob is this in "Pink", after his windpipe was crushed beyond repair in "White". His communication method of choice is a free text-to-speech app on his phone. He gets a Mood Whiplash moment when an advertisement for the app in question plays while he holds Ava, Ray and Teresa at gunpoint. He can speak, but it presumably exacerbates his windpipe, so he only speaks when he really needs to emphasize something.
• Red Herring: By the time we watch "White", we're fully aware that RJ is either dead or missing by the events of "Red". When Judy is setting the charges in the sewer, and running out of time, RJ comes into the tube to check up on her to see how she's doing. They complete their work in the nick of time, but as they rush out of the sewer, the charges begin to detonate, causing the sewer to flood. The two start to ascend the ladder out of the sewer, but RJ hesitates to witness a wall of water rushing towards him. We cut away before we see what happens next and are lead to believe he drowned, until we later learn that he managed to escape. RJ instead dies when Judy shoots him.
• Revenge Before Reason: Rational as Ray may seem, his desire for revenge keeps getting the better of him. His crew is dysfunctional. Bob is The Friend Nobody Likes who seems like a poster boy for No Honor Among Thieves. They are trying to steal billions of dollars from people who Roger says are the types of guys who "You could be walking down the street, have someone brush up against you, and die of a heart attack in thirty minutes" if you cross them. More importantly, all of it costs Ray precious time he could have spent being a father to Hannah.
• Revenge Is Not Justice: Ray Vernon was willing to risk his second chance at life, and the lives of his heistmates and daughter just to implicate Roger Salas for the Glen Club incident. The seven billion dollars was more of a second priority and a nice bonus for finally getting revenge on Roger, who got away from the Glen Club incident scot-free and left his wife for dead. In the end, Ray gets revenge, at too high a cost, and it ruined - or ended - the lives of all of his heistmates. In "Pink", when Ray visits Roger in prison, Roger essentially asks, Was It Worth It? Ray doesn't have an easy answer.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Eric Garcia said the series was inspired by the Hurricane Sandy bearer bonds incident. Though those bonds were ruined, not stolen.
• Rising Water, Rising Tension: As the crew breaks into each safe in the vault, the room they're in gradually fills with water. Ray later swims back into the vault room after the water has reached a story high to place the amulet Roger stole in "Violet" inside his personal safe, implicating him for the incident. In "Red", he gets his foot stuck in a gate as he tries to escape the room, and nearly drowns.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The main plot of “Pink”. Six months after the heist, Bob works with Roger Salas and a pair of hired killers to track down the surviving members of the heist crew, specifically intending to kill Stan. Despite this, he actually doesn't kill anyone himself: one of his henchmen kills Ava and Teresa, and Brad Salas kills Ray, while Stan and Judy are unharmed.
• Safecracking: A rare modern example, but the safes Roger Salas keeps in his otherwise high-tech and highly-secured vault are purely mechanical. Bob is put on the heist crew because of his expert skills in safecracking, but those skills come into question when he permanently loses motor function in one of his hands.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: By the end of the series, Hannah starts a new life on her own terms. But her objective to protect her father seemingly fails. After everything she did to try and protect him, Brad Salas is seen pulling a weapon from behind her Parkinson's ridden father. A gunshot is heard, and the last episode in the timeline ends.
• Signature Sound Effect: the cranking and clicking noises of a combination lock punctuate the beginning and end of every episode, and is featured at length in "White".
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Bob is constantly in conflict with the rest of the team, and unable to control his impulses.
    • For example, during the Diamond Way heist, he lags behind the others and gets his hand shot because he couldn't resist stealing a piece of fancy jewelry for Judy, which almost makes them.
    • Later on, he attempts to make off with the bonds they stole with a rather unwilling Judy, which gets RJ killed and gets Bob's windpipe permanently crushed. His actions also essentially ruined the heist (which wouldn't have mattered, since they ended up stealing hundreds of cases of colored paper anyway) and helped get the Feds after the crew.
  • In "Violet", when the heist of the Glen Club starts going south, Salas sets fire to the building in order to buy them more time. This ends up killing Ray Vernon's wife, who was in the building unbeknownst to him and Ray.
• Strictly Professional Relationship: Agent Abassi and Agent Toby clearly have a thing for each other, though she feels they shouldn't cross that boundary, feeling that "there's things we can't do" encapsulating her current By-the-Book Cop attitude. When Ava Mercer frames her for possession and as a result makes her lose custody of her son, she decides to make out with Toby anyway, in addition to threatening Mercer's nanny with deportation in order to have Mercer as her mole.
• Those Two Guys: In "Pink," Bob hires two killers who banter with each other for most of the episode and bond over a relationship advice-themed podcast.
• Token Evil Teammate: Bob is a loudmouthed Jerkass and the crew's biggest liability who almost got them made because of an Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! moment between him and a butterfly-shaped jewel. During the heist, he betrays the group with Judy and tries to make off with the bonds they've stolen, killing RJ in the process. Six months later, he helps Roger Salas track down his former crewmates in an attempt to find and kill Stan, which gets Ava and her mother Teresa killed.
• Too Dumb to Live: In "Red", Stan's mother, who is aware of her son's criminal past, just cannot keep her mouth shut in front of a detective (actually Carlos, who's looking for Stan and his accomplices so he can kill them), even though her daughter-in-law is not so subtly trying to tell her to be quiet. Once she tells Carlos that she can track Stan's phone location, he shoots them both.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Stan really loves lengua.
• Wham Episode:
  • "Pink", although the impact can change depending on when you view it.
  • "White", which is intended as the final episode, even though it's chronologically the third-to-last. If you watch it after all the others, it fills in some important gaps, specifically what happened to the bonds, what Ray left in the vault, what happened to RJ and Bob, and who shot Ray at the end of "Pink.”
• Wham Shot: "White" contains several:
  • If you watch "Pink" first, the shot of Brad Salas wearing the same shirt as Ray's killer in is this, though the show doesn't emphasize it.
  • If you watch "Violet" and "Red" before "White", the shot of the gem Ray places in the vault is this.
  • Also, the shot revealing Judy has just killed RJ. This one works no matter what order you watch the episodes in.
• What Does She See in Him?: After Bob punches him and bloodies his nose for no reason besides petty jealousy, Stan tells Judy that she needs to figure out "the shit inside [her]" that makes her want to stay with someone as violent and abrasive as Bob. Judy seems to have realized this in "White" after Bob turned on everyone else in the crew, so she put him in a chokehold and crushed his windpipe.
• Whole Episode Flashback: Since the episodes are supposed to be watched in random order (though Netflix will always place "White" as the finale), the show plays with this. Two episodes, “Violet,” and “Green,” take place significantly earlier than most of the other events of the story, making them most likely to qualify no matter what order you watch. However, if "Pink" or "Red" are viewed first, most, if not all, of the remaining episodes could be seen as this. Alternately, viewing the episodes in chronological order averts this trope entirely (though "Red" does feature flashbacks to the heist itself).
• Wishful Projection: One of the Glen Club employees assumes Ray Vernon is an irresponsible father largely because he's black; he chides in him after catching a young Hannah playing around in the country club where she shouldn't by saying "This isn't your ghetto neighborhood".
• Zany Scheme: Part of the plan to break into Roger Salas's vault involves creating a mask of his face, flooding the safe room by detonating bombs in a sewer, and filling a hallway with bees, to list its weirder aspects.
  • In order to break into the Diamond Way jewelry store, the crew set off a series of smokebombs along the busy Manhattan street, filling an entire block with a thick yellow fog.

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