Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
We’re only halfway through Narcos: Mexico’s third season, but the party is already over. That’s the message of Episode 5, “Boots on the Ground,” which tracks the aftermath of the disastrous airport shootout that claimed the life of a Catholic cardinal and brought unprecedented public and government scrutiny to the warring Tijuana and Sinaloa narco factions. As our narrator Andréa puts it, when the Mexican president feels the need to visit a Catholic church for the first time in a century just to look good to the voters, you know things have changed.
It’s a change both sides of the war have a hard time accepting. The Sinaloans, at least, realize the need to lie low faster than their Tijuana counterparts do. Almost immediately, their ringleader El Chapo shaves off his trademark mustache and heads south to Guatemala to hide out.
The Arellano Félix siblings in Tijuana, however, keep insisting that their friendship with local bigwigs—such as the infamous Mr. Hank, himself under increased scrutiny by Andréa and her newspaper (who’ve lethally crossed swords with him in the past) for allegedly holding a plane on the runway for Ramón Arellano Félix the day of the shootout—can save their bacon. While two of their lieutenant David Barron’s American henchmen volunteer to take the fall for the cardinal’s killing in exchange for a hefty reward to their families back home, Benjamín Arellano Félix himself struggles to find anyone in the legit world willing to take his phonecalls.
Mín finally secures a meeting with Father Baiz (Marco Treiño), the priest who presided over his sister Enedina’s ill-fated nuptials. But the priest, who’s being forced to take the meeting by the army, signals to Benjamín that he’s being set up, and thus yet another gunfight breaks out, from which Mín barely escapes.
As for poor DEA Agent Walt Breslin, it’s too little, too late. Risking the future of his relationship with his girlfriend Dani, he requests a transfer to Tijuana when it becomes apparent that the government will really be cracking down on the narcos. But he’s given the runaround by the General Rebollo (José Zúñiga), the man in charge of the operation, who sends Walt on an obviously bogus mission while he himself presides over an attempt to capture Benjamín.
But General Rebollo is cut from a different cloth not only from Walt, who tells him he wants to be where “the action” is, but also previous wielders of military/law-enforcement authority like the thuggish and on-again-off-again crooked cop Calderoni, who alternately aided and persecuted Félix Gallardo last season. (Rebollo grumbles about Walt’s previous ties to Calderoni, in fact.) Rather than allow a high-speed chase and running gun battle to jeopardize innocent lives, he calls off the pursuit and allows Benjamín to escape when things start to go bad. If he’s going to succeed in taking down the narcos, he tells Walt, he’ll need the public on his side.
And all the while, he has another ace up his sleeve. The same Guatemalan soldiers who’d been paid to escort El Chapo across Mexico’s southern border, he tells Walt, simply turned around and sold the druglord back to the Mexican authorities.
Thus ends Chapo’s reign, or at least his freedom; if you know anything about El Chapo, you know this is only a temporary setback. And even in prison, he’s greeted warmly by one-time cartel kingpin Don Neto (Joaquín Cosio), who offers him some advice and a smoke over an illicit game of cards. Things are pretty bad for the Sinaloans at this point, but hey, they could be worse.
The episode constructs an interesting parallel between Rebollo’s dedication to his profession’s higher ideals and that of Victor Tapia, the Juárez cop whose investigation into the unsolved murders of his city’s young women has been a throughline for the season so far. Following up on clue he found in the morgue in the previous episode, he stakes out a local factory where hundreds of young women work. It’s unclear if this will actually get him anywhere in his investigation, but hey, at least he’s trying. It beats the shit out of his normal routine of shaking people down and shooting up the occasional safehouse for quick cash, that’s for sure.
The action ends with a lingering shot of the ranking member of the Arellanos now that Benjamín is on the run—not Ramón, not Francisco, but their sister Enedina. The Narcos franchise has seen its fair share of would-be women crime bosses, but few if any of them were given the resources and the blessing of their predecessors that Enedina now enjoys. Along with the matter of whether Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s grand plans for the Juárez cartel will work out (a matter deferred entirely for this episode), the question of Enedina’s leadership is one of the show’s more intriguing storylines at this point. For her sake, and for the sake of the story, let’s hope her own merger of crime and business goes better than her brothers’. After all, there’s a lot more Narcos: Mexico left to come.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
