#jacob van den berg
This is an appreciation for season four of Het Huis Anubis, because the fandom doesn’t give it the love that it truly deserves.
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Not only does this season tie with season two as their best. It also has the best subplots out of all the season finales!
While I still enjoyed the subplots of the other three seasons, I don’t like them anywhere near as much as I love the two from season four.
I appreciated how Marijke actively tried her best to stop the Club from getting out of the house. Like, sis was getting PHYSICAL with them kids! When the Club did eventually manage to get out, she lost the will to go after them and pretty much gave up.
After that, when she finally realized that Jacob lied to her and that the kids were telling the truth all along, you could see the regret written on her face as clear as day.
Then came the part with Danny having found Victor and bringing him back home, after Marijke had kicked him out for lying to her and helping the Club instead. It was very obvious from the moment she saw him again that she regretting doing that to him, that she felt really sorry for the state he was in, despite still being sad and angry, having felt betrayed by her own brother.
The best part of that subplot, of course, came at the end, with Victor telling Marijke that the Anubis House means everything to him, that it’s basically his whole life.
And then that scene with Marijke handing the papers, with the will written by their father, which said that Marijke could claim ownership of the house whenever she wanted, over to Victor, and him ripping them into pieces and becoming the owner of the House once again, was MARVELOUS. I also loved that he agreed to Marijke’s request to let them stay at the house until they could find a place of their own again. It was another testament to how much he has changed throughout the series, how he had become a much better person, despite how horribly he was treated since his childhood by those around him, including his whole family.
The other subplot I want to talk about is the one with the schoolpaper competition between Sofie and Mick. I liked this plot as a kid as well, but having re-watched the last few episodes of this season today, I have come to love it, a lot.
While I got annoyed with Sofie back then, I have now come to really like her character as well. Her stubbornness and refusal to admit defeat is actually entertaining to watch. The fact that she went to visit this paranoid, recluse of a man for an interview for the schoolpaper, despite having a bad feeling about it all, says a lot about how far she is willing to go to win. He could have been somebody dangerous for all we know, and yet she still went to visit the man that the whole neighbourhood is cautious of.
And she mainly did this just to piss off Mick.
Being an avid reader myself, I loved the reveal of this man being a famous writer who disappeared without a trace a few years back.
His story about how he got recognized everywhere he went, and not finding any peace because of it, was honestly really sad to hear. The only place where he could sit down and write in peace was some depressing room with just a desk and a lamp, away from any prying eyes. And that eventually drove him crazy and turned him into a recluse. A recluse that hated journalists in particular, what Sofie basically is.
Van Ginkel’s popularity pretty much led to his complete downfall.
I’m still very bitter that B.J. Van Ginkel’s supposed books, ‘The murdered writer’and'The clouds that ate themselves’, aren’t actually real. 'Cause you can be damn sure that they would be on my bookshelf if they existed.
I love this little paragraph of the latter book that Sofie recited, with Van Ginkel finishing that last sentence:
“Behold, an empty sky.
A sky as it was intended at the beginning of creation.
A sky without clouds, like thoughts without hatred.
Sadly, just a fantasy.
The sky is perpetually riddled with holes, like the clouds that themselves.”
I don’t believe my translation brings any justice to how beautiful it sounds in Dutch.
Then we had that part with Mick and Robbie getting very worried about Sofie, going back to school in the middle of the night, finding out where she went off to and then going after her, thinking she was in danger.
I really loved the scene with Mick admitting to Van Ginkel that it was all his (Mick) fault that Sofie visited him, and that he should take him instead of Sofie, after he and Robbie had broken into the house to ‘save’ her.
Another scene I want to talk about is the one with Sofie accidentally saying the man’s real name, revealing his true identity to Mick and Robbie, and Van Ginkel not getting mad at her for it. If anything, he was happy to hear that someone referred to him by his real name, after having lived with a fake identity all these years.
And then the best bit came; when Van Ginkel handed the last page of his last written book, ‘The murdered writer’, which had never been published, over to Sofie, giving her the permission to put it in the schoolpaper. Something that Van Swieten was all too happy to read about later in that episode, being a big fan of the book himself.
The romance in this was so minimal, almost exclusively restricted to that bit with Mick and Sofie in the very end, that it seemed more of a background thing in this finale, unlike with the other seasons, where it played a bigger role. With them not spending an unnecessary amount of time on the romance, it gave way for other, and imo, more mportant, things, like family issues, friendships and, of course, the whole mystery.
Speaking of, I’m not going to spend my time here talking about how good the mystery plot was, ‘cause I could write a whole essay about that.
What I do want to say is how this was the only finale with the possibility of a character death.
Not just one (Noa), not two (Noa and Rosa), not three (Noa, Rosa and Nienke), but SIX (including Fabian, Amber and Appie) possible deaths. The latter four could have easily drowned if they hadn’t found a way out of that closed swimming pool in time. And who knows what Jeroen would have done if Noa and the whole Club ended up dead. The death tally could’ve been up to eight, because there is no way that he would’ve let Jacob and Matthijs get away with it, dude was losing his mind as it was already.
Jacob van Den Berg was legit ready to kill fiveteenagers just to get his wife back. Matthijs and him would’ve given their lives without a second thought if they could have, but that never was a possibility because of the curse of immortality that Anchesenamun had placed on them.
A tragedy, is what it is.
