The season 2 finale of Starz’s Vida was the very definition of bittersweet. On the one hand, Lyn Hernandez (upcoming In the Heights star Melissa Barrera) was doused with a terrifying amount of powdered laundry detergent during a “demonstration” from anti-gentrification protesters. But on the much sunnier side, Lyn and her sister Emma (Mishel Prada) spend the last shot of the season taking in the unapologetically Latinx, young, and creative success of Vida, their revamp of their East L.A. family bar.
If you’re wondering if Vida will lose that tension when its upcoming third and final season premieres on Sunday, April 26, creator Tanya Saracho is here to assuage you of those concerns. In fact, Vida will be diving even further into those complicated gentefication depths as the cable dramedy speeds towards its upcoming series finale.
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“This season on Vida, we pick up only a day and a half after we left off,” Saracho confirms in a video preview, which Refinery29 is exclusively premiering below. “The sisters are in a great place.”
Yes, the relationship between the Hernandez sisters really is flourishing after two seasons of consistently intensifying resentments threatening to tear them apart. Viewers can probably chalk this healthy bit of growth up to one of the season 2 finale’s most important gestures: Emma finally acknowledging Lynn — previously seen as the more immature of the Hernandez sisters — as a full partner in Vida. Emma even tells a prospective business associate that Lyn is “the one in charge.”
Thankfully for Vida, Emma will still be exploring this inviting new part of her personality when we check back in for season 3. “We see an Emma that is thawed out, that is vulnerable,” Saracho teases in the video in between clips of Emma grinning in bed with love interest Nico (Roberta Colindrez). “[An Emma] that is willing to be open with Nico … We have watched a little bit of an ice princess for two seasons. There’s a softening.”
All of that “softening” brings the Hernandezes together as Lyn works to make Vida “the spot in Latinx culture,” as she says in the video. But, unsurprisingly, the Vida sisters are about to hit a few huge roadblocks — and some mean murals — on their way to making their dreams come true. After all, we already know a lot of people in Lyn and Emma's Boyle Heights neighborhood are detergent-throwing angry about Vida's hip new direction. Watch the video below to find out what goes down in the final battle for Vida’s soul — and why Latina creatives simply can’t stop coming back to Vida.