It’s been three years since Lupin’s last season — a less memorable, less focused entry — so you’d be forgiven for forgetting much of what transpired. The show’s fourth part features an extended recap narrated by the title character before kicking off in earnest, at which point it hits the “soft reboot” button, both narratively and stylistically. Its biggest change is a welcome one: it leans unapologetically into the soap opera underpinnings which have always made it tick. The result is a brisk eight episodes that, despite wheel-spinning near the season’s end, eventually find their way to the kind of ludicrous melodrama that makes the French heist series such a turn-your-brain-off delight.

Part 3 ended with a major cliffhanger, as gentleman thief Assane Diop (Omar Sy) — a devotee of Maurice Leblanc’s fictitious fraudster Arsène Lupin — found himself in prison, in a cell adjacent to his long time, opulent enemy Hubert Pellegrini (Hervé Pierre). How does the new season resolve this tension? Well, it doesn’t. Which is to say, it treats the whole thing like a gag in order for the show to move forward into unexpected territory. Four years have passed, and in that time, Assane has willingly remained behind bars — except for a brief escape where he bamboozled Pellegrini all the way into a shipping container bound for a Malaysian prison. Now on the verge of release for good behavior, it finally seems like Assane has turned over a new leaf. That is, until a slickly-executed pair of simultaneous heists, in his signature style, make the police suspicious, forcing him to go rogue in order to prove his innocence.

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