'The Law According To Lidia Poet' Season 3 Recap (Episodes 1-6): Who Is The Killer?

The final season of Netflix’s Italian murder mystery based on true events, feminist tale The Law According To Lidia Poet, has returned with many ups and downs. The final season certainly felt like a let down to me, but still, one can’t deny that Lidia’s a character we’ve all fallen in love with, and are always happy to see more of. This season follows the same pattern as season 2, where there are cases in each episode, but there is one overarching case, and that is about Grazia, Lidia’s dear friend. The final season gives us answers as to who Lidia chooses and why. Whether she finds her voice and who are the people who genuinely care for her. In this recap, I’ll break down each episode for easier understanding. With that said, let’s jump straight into season 3.

Spoiler Alert

The Bloody Circus

Episode 1 of season 3 begins with the death of a circus performer who chooses to do her act without a safety net at the last minute. This feels like a big case, but it takes time for us to settle into it because this is the episode in which we get introduced to Lidia’s bestie from back in the day, Grazia. Now, Grazia shows up to Enrico’s to ask Lidia for a favor, she needs 2000 Lire, but Lidia doesn’t have it. Still, she offers to help her. Simultaneously, she takes on the case of the circus performer, and it isn’t too long until she gets into the groove of things. Now, the person who gets arrested for the murder of this circus performer named Miranda is Lorena Guerri, who happens to be the wife of Rubino, who does some acts with Miranda at different shows. This makes the prosecutor immediately believe that the whole thing wasn’t an accident, but an orchestrated murder by a jealous wife. Of course, Lidia would never believe such a thing, and she quickly figures things out. Turns out, there were some analgesics in Miranda’s system, proving that she was sedated before the performance, and this is why she wasn’t able to hold on to the swing. But what nobody knew, including her blood-oath sister Susana, was that she was going to do the act without the net. Turns out, it was Susana who had wanted her to fail in the act (no intention to kill her), because a man named Calvart was coming to see Miranda perform and take her into his own crew. This left Susana devastated, and she didn’t want to lose her friend, so she simply wanted her to do a bad job at the act. Unfortunately, Calvart didn’t even show up, and the worst possible outcome ended up happening. 

One could say we see some parallels in the relationship between Susana and Miranda, and Lidia and her friend, Grazia. Turns out, Grazia’s kept some secrets too, and they made a blood pact many moons ago themselves. Grazia then fell pregnant and got married, leaving Lidia to go back to her family. Now, before the end of the episode, Grazia’s so freaked out that she decides to run away with her daughter and a stolen necklace from Lidia. However, she comes back, because the person she tried to pawn the necklace with didn’t accept it. Turns out she’s been trying to run away, because her husband Mr. Fontana was abusive. But at the end of episode 1, he shows up and grabs his daughter, showing his authority to Grazia. He asks to see her in another room of the house and Enrico allows it, keeping Mila with them. Everyone suddenly hears a scream. Fontana is dead, and Grazia did it with a letter opener in self-defense. But will people believe her in 19th century Italy? Will she get her justice? We shall find out. 

Death Of An Artist

Episode 2 opens with a man being caught by the carabinieri as he tries to carry away a dead body in the middle of the night. This man is later revealed to be an artist named Luigi Castel, and the murder victim is someone named Elio Storti. At a time when Lidia is focused on Grazia’s case, she is frustrated when her brother, Enrico, decides to ignore Grazia and take on the defense of Castel instead. Ultimately, Lidia makes up her mind to help her brother anyway, so this case can end quickly and they can move on to Grazia’s case. When they speak to Castel, he tells them he and Elio were in a homosexual relationship, but he did not murder the man. Apparently, Elio was dead when he came home, and he panicked and decided to move the body so nobody would think he murdered him. The story’s difficult to believe, especially when the only alibi Castel can offer is a woman named Elisabetta Ferri, who seemingly hates his guts and says he was only with her for 10 minutes on the afternoon of the murder. In the middle of all this, Lidia manages to convince Dr. Tullia Munari to testify in court that the bruises he saw on Grazia’s body indicate severe physical abuse, but also, Guido Fontana’s brother, Pietro, shows up to take away his niece, Mila, who’s been living with the Poets since her mother’s arrest. Since they can’t do anything legally to stop him, they let her leave, even though she seems unwilling. In the meanwhile, Enrico finds a stash of secret letters written to Elio by a lover, and Lidia uses the references to various landmarks to track down the lover’s residence, almost as if she’s Liam Neeson from “Taken.”

Eventually, the countess they track down admits that she and Elio were lovers, and that she knows Elio was only with her for the money. She set him up with his own studio in her estate, where he churned out masterful forgeries, though he always worked his signature, Helios, into them. Armed with this knowledge, Lidia goes home and basically twists Enrico’s elbow into agreeing to represent Grazia before she helps him out with Castel’s case. Turns out, the paintings city hall commissioned from Castel were also Elio’s work, since they can see the Helios signature in them. Eventually, it’s revealed that whoever shot Elio was trying to kill Castel, but they just shot from outside the window at the person they saw working on the painting. Castel and Elio weren’t really lovers, Castel was teaching Elio how to forge his painting style, since he’d developed a sickness that made his hands tremor. Even though Castel is innocent, and there’s someone out there who wants to kill him, he confesses to murdering Elio out of jealousy, since he would rather go down in history as a murderer than a fake. Also, in the ending of the episode, it’s revealed by Fourneau that Grazia had sent a telegram to Fontana two days before his murder, meaning she can’t claim she didn’t know he would be coming to the Poet household.

Bare-Knuckle Boxing Murder

Episode 3 opens with a boxer in a seedy-looking bar losing a fight, and then going outside to wash off, which is when someone comes up behind him and drowns him in the washing-up tub. When a man notices him later and goes over to help, the crowd assumes he’s the one who drowned him, and he almost gets lynched. Turns out, this man, Ernesto Dozza, is the cousin of Enrico’s maid, Albertina, so Enrico takes on the man’s case. Lidia and Enrico go to see the dead boxer, Nino’s sister, Romilda, but she refuses to help them. Instead, Lidia takes Jacopo along to Mario Fedeli’s bar, where the fights are held and bets are made. She gets Jacopo into a fight against a big brute named Simone, and though Jacopo gets a tooth knocked out, Lidia notices Mario turning a mug upside down at one point, after which Simone basically lets Jacopo win and knock him out.

Just like that, Lidia works out that the fights are being fixed, and Dozza has a reputation as a bit of a gambler and drinker, so that just gives the prosecution more motive to pin the murder on him. However, it turns out he personally knew Nino, though Dozza had earlier lied and said he only knew him by name. Nino is the boxer who’d accidentally killed Dozza’s son in a fight, and the guilt of it got to him so much that when he saw Dozza, he personally approached him and offered to throw a fight so he could bet on him losing and make a ton of money. Lidia works out that Mario must have found out about this and killed him so the other fighters learned not to mess with his business. Finally, Lidia talks to Romilda again, and this time she confesses that she did tell Mario about Nino’s plan to throw the fight, and she agrees to testify in Dozza’s favor. But there’s one thing she says that catches Lidia’s ear; Romilda doesn’t view what she sees as a betrayal of Nino, she just wanted them to get along. Lidia remembers Mila using very similar language, and so at the next hearing, she asks for Mila to be called to testify, and it’s finally revealed that Grazia wasn’t the one who sent the telegram, it was Mila, who just wanted her parents to get along and acted without realizing the consequences of her actions. However, at the end of the episode, we’re hit with another twist as Dr. Munari is called away by the carabinieri before he can testify in court the next day.

The Witness Becomes A Suspect

Turns out, Dr. Munari’s sister, Eloisa, has been murdered, and Munari’s the obvious suspect. This is owing to an inheritance dispute between the siblings over some property in Genoa, which Eloisa successfully sued for recently. Munari has also been paying for Eloisa’s living expenses, so the death of Eloisa works entirely to his benefit, besides the obvious bereavement. Given Lidia and Enrico can no longer present his testimony in court, they ask for a 2-week adjournment, but Judge Davanzati grants them only a week. To replace Munari in case they can’t get him off in time, they try to get Dr. Lombroso to try hypnosis on Grazia so he can write a character report of her. However, under hypnosis, Grazia reveals that she burned a letter from Lidia’s father back when they used to live together just because she didn’t want Lidia to leave. The letter would have let Lidia reconcile with her father, but she never had the chance to do that before her father died, so Lidia walks out on Grazia, furious. Meanwhile, Teresa wants to have another child, but Enrico seems to have trouble getting in the mood for her, leaving her miserable, especially since this is also the episode where she finds out Consuelo’s pregnant with Jacopo’s child, though she doesn’t want him to know yet. Consuelo joins Jacopo and Lidia on their trip to the Cafe Valli, a seedy joint where Eloisa used to sing comic opera, and they find out that Eloisa had tried to report a man with three fingers on his left hand for harassment. Also, Consuelo dedicates a song to Jacopo, trying to claim her man in front of Lidia, who she suspects of still being in love with him. When they talk to the carabinieri, he says he never filed a report, so Jacopo threatens to publish his name in his newspaper if he doesn’t reveal the harasser’s identity.

That leads them to a man named Glauco Bonetti, and he reveals that he’d been paid by Munari’s own wife, Margherita, to convince Eloisa to leave. However, when she’d asked him to kill her, he’d refused, and Margherita had said she’d do it herself. With this testimony, they have Margherita arrested, and Munari gets let out, though he’s understandably broken-hearted. Margherita had apparently been worried that Eloisa would rob Munari of the entirety of his inheritance, but Munari had loved his sister, she was the only family he had left. Meanwhile, inspired by the sight of a beautiful child at the home of Glauco, Enrico finally agrees to try for a child with Teresa. However, when it’s time for Munari to testify, Fourneau reveals correspondence that had been discovered when Munari was being investigated, and it’s revealed that he’s in love with Grazia, meaning he can’t be considered an unbiased witness, and his testimony is invalid, landing Lidia back at square one. Also, the radical feminist prisoner Grazia’s been talking to for a few episodes, Virginia, becomes Grazia’s cellmate in this episode, and she begins trying to break them out of prison.

A Schoolyard Fight

At the start of episode 5, Lidia has nightmares of her father sentencing her to execution for her various failures, but she wakes up into a fresh nightmare. Apparently, the newspapers have caught onto rumors that she’s seeing Fourneau, and since it’s controversial for a member of the prosecution to be involved with the lawyer defending someone they’re prosecuting, it’s a massive scandal. Enrico’s already contacted the newspaper and gotten them to retract the story, but when Lidia tells him that it’s true, he gets furious and throws her out of his house, telling her he’s been doing everything in his power to help her, but she’s violated the very basics of the ethics of their profession. While she’s at an inn where she’s putting up for a while, she bumps into a former classmate from law school, Giulio Bonomo, who wants her help with a schoolboy he’s defending, who’s been accused of murder. Before she can discuss the case, though, she has to talk to Fourneau, and when he asks her to go public with their relationship and marry him, she turns him down, and they break up. Getting back to the case, the 14-year-old Berto Tonelli supposedly hit his teacher, Mr. Borromei, on the head with a stone from his collection, and was found next to his body. Lidia visits the classroom and quickly points out to the others that whoever killed Borromei must have pushed him against the wall, where he hit his head on the stone, but it’s impossible for a 14-year-old to have been strong enough to do that, even one as brutish as Berto. She sees drawings on the wall that the students had gifted Borromei, and she visits a student who had drawn Borromei being confronted by a massive monster.

This kid is named Dante Ferrarotti, and his loud dad, Ernesto, says Berto was a rough kid, who even roughed up Dante and gave him a scar on his forehead. Talking to the family, Lidia finds out a local spinning mill owner, Calcagno, employs the local kids, a practice Borromei was deeply opposed to, since he wanted the kids to be in school. When she talks to him, though, she finds he has an alibi. In the meanwhile, she decides to forgive Grazia, and she visits her in prison and says they’ll always be best friends. When she talks to Berto next, she finds out Borromei had wanted Dante to go to a fancy school for gifted children, since he saw the potential in him, but Ernesto wanted him to stay back and work in the mill instead. Instantly, she knows what must have gone down, and she finds Dante’s mother, Rosa, and tries to get her to testify against her husband. When Ernesto shows up and threatens Lidia, Rosa grabs a knife and warns him to back off, leaving with Lidia and agreeing to testify, meaning Berto can go free and reunite with his parents. Meanwhile, Enrico talks to Fontana’s old crewmate from back when he was helping establish the Italian colony in Eritrea, and finds out he was hated by everyone, but most importantly, he was a pedophile. Most egregiously, he brought back a girl named Amira from there when he returned to Italy. They have no idea where this girl is now, but she could be crucial to the case, so when they find out Fontana used to have a mansion in Avigliana, they decide to head there to investigate, but not before Jacopo tells Lidia he doesn’t really love Consuelo, and they end up sleeping together. Also, Grazia’s new cellmate, Virginia, is trying to cut through their cell bars to break out, and Grazia eventually decides to help her too.

Fontana Is A Murderer

When they get to the mansion in Avigliana, they find it abandoned, but someone has scrawled “Fontana is a murderer” onto one of the walls. They discover that it is a squatter named Roberto Ronco who is responsible, and he tells them the whole story. Apparently, he and Amira were lovers, and he wanted to elope with her so she could get away from the villainous Fontano, who used to rape her. When they go to the local chief of the carabinieri, Lieutenant Povano, he says Ronco’s delusional, and he personally saw Amira run off into the woods one night, backing it up with the witness testimony of Fontano’s cook, Serafina Malpezzi. However, they end up finding out Serafina’s testimony was false, since she was with a man at the time, which means the lieutenant was lying. While Lidia and Jacopo go hunting, Enrico goes home, and Consuelo’s mad that the two are hanging out so much. At this point, Teresa’s told Lidia about the pregnancy, and Lidia’s told Jacopo they can’t be together, though she claimed it was because she loves Fourneau even now. They end up stumbling into Povano trying to move Amira’s body, but he has his revolver, and they end up getting locked in a cellar together. Povano and Fontano had been great friends, and he’d helped him hide the body when Fontano had killed Amira in a rage for trying to run away with Ronco. In the cellar, Lidia tells Jacopo that the real reason they can’t be together is that Consuelo’s pregnant. When Lidia tries to crawl out through a tunnel, she passes out and ends up hallucinating a future where she ends up being accepted into the bar registry, though she’s an old woman by this point.

In the meanwhile, Enrico and Consuelo show up and rescue the two, and the news that Fontano murdered a 16-year-old makes it to the papers. When it’s time for the closing statements, Fourneau has been blackmailed by Davanzati to draw up a particularly harsh prosecutor’s demand. The old judge has found tickets to Vienna in both Fourneau and Lidia’s names, and sending them to the press could cause quite a scandal, threatening Fourneau’s career. So after he makes his closing statements on the final day of the hearing, Fourneau pushes for the death penalty for Grazia. In contrast, Enrico’s closing statements are full of compassion, a plea that points out the hypocrisy in how the law treats women. If Fontana had killed Grazia, he would have got only 6 years in prison, and here she faces death. While this hearing is happening, Jacopo is on a date with Consuelo, and he asks her to marry him, claiming he had a revelation when he was in the cellar. She’s overjoyed, but when she finds out he already knew she was pregnant, she realizes what’s going on. Immediately, she asks if he still loves Lidia, and his evasive answer tells her all she needs to know. She’s out of his life, but she’ll let him be there for his son. He comes back to Lidia after the jury convenes to discuss their verdict, and they both let themselves give in to each other. In prison, Virginia breaks through the cell bars, but Grazia refuses to leave, so Virginia stays back too.

Finally, in the ending of season 3, Grazia is declared innocent on all charges. She’s overjoyed to finally reunite with Mila, and Lidia is glad to have defended her friend successfully. Finally, at the end, we see a vision Lidia has, being accepted into the bar registry, but this time it’s her youthful self. We could hypothesize this means she’ll always be the same person on the inside, no matter how old she gets. The real-life Lidia never married, and she stayed true to her ideals all her life, fighting for women’s rights until she finally got accepted into the registry at age 65 in 1920.

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