HOME / ENTERTAINMENT / TV

'Vida' Season 3 Episode 1 Review: Emma and Lyn finally find out that their father is still alive

The 'Vida' Season 3 premiere saw Emma and Lyn take us back to Boyle Heights where the community that they have set up their bar in continues to resist their establishment

Emma and Lyn had successfully set up their bar Vida in the previous seasons and towards the end of season 2, we saw how the Boyle Heights population resisted Lyn and Emma's bar being set in their neighborhood and it had also led to the arrest of Yoli. Season 3 begins with Lyn and Emma dealing with the aftermath of this resistance while Yoli and her friends continue to resist and protest outside Vida. Their slogans tell Lyn to "go back to Coachella" among other creative lines. But Lyn makes it clear in episode 1 that she is not going to pay heed to the protest. 

In fact, Lyn wants Emma to let the protestors be and voice dissent from the other side of the street while they continue to run their bar. Emma believes that this is the local population terrorizing them into submitting, but Lyn wants Emma to "turn their cheeks" and concentrate on making Vida the best stop in LA. She is excited about the first real review that the bar has got which praises it for being the hotspot for Latinx people to relax and wants to further execute plans that will make Vida more popular. 

However, the sisters are in for a rude awakening. Eddy, Vida's wife, had learned in the previous season that Vida was still married to Emma and Lyn's father and that he was still alive. Eddy had been keeping it to herself because "this was not her drama" and she did not want to be the bad guy who told the girls that their father was not only alive but doing well too. However, it would be s***ty to let the girls continue to believe that their father was dead. So Eddy ends up writing a letter to the sisters revealing everything that she had learned. 

With this news, both Lyn and Emma's life is going to be turned upside down. Not only are they facing the wrath of the community that they live in, and have to find a way to get the resistors on their side, they would now be dealing with the conflict that their not so dead father would bring. The episode did not really reveal what Eddy had written in the letter and all we see is a very frustrated and angry Emma hand over the letter to Lyn who just returned from her boyfriend's mother's birthday party. 

The one thing that Emma surely knows about her father was the fact that he was undocumented and that this fact did not help him at all. This reference in fact only comes after Nico tries to convince Emma not to press charges on Yoli for what went down in season 2. She brings up the fact that Yoli is part of DACA, and tries to explain that any stain on the record would spell Yoli's life being ruined. Nico might have been a friendly fixture in season 2 at Vida, but after how she stood aside as her friends terrorized Lyn, she is not in Emma's good books at the moment. 

Yet Emma tells Nico that she is not a monster who would touch a DACA person's record because she knows the consequences of it. Yet, Emma is unable to comprehend the fact that Yoli would be walking scot-free without answering for her actions. This conflict within the community takes different forms in the first episode of season 3 as we also see Lyn face judgments for not knowing how to speak her native tongue when she attends her boyfriend's mother's elite birthday party. 

In a moment of frustration, Lyn explains how everyone outside of the community looks at her and thinks straight away that she is Mexican, but within the community, everyone believes that she is not Mexican enough because "she was born with a broken tongue". She speaks about how her mother used to call them Chicano. 

All of these conflicts make a hodgepodge beginning for the third season of the show and that's how it should be, after all, Vida is about presenting different gazes within the Latinx community. 

'Vida' Season 3 episodes will air every Sunday at 9 pm ET on Starz.