Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
“In December 1994, it all fell apart.” Inauspicious words with which to begin an episode of Narcos: Mexico, but accurate ones. After a cold-open flashback to Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s first encounter with his predecessor Félix Gallardo—at the runway for his very first plane, no less—the episode, titled “Last Dance,” gets underway with a voiceover from reporter Andréa Nuñez, recounting how the economy collapsed under the country’s new president. In response, his allies and backers hung the previous president out to dry. While he flees to Ireland, his chief backer Carlos Hank González becomes more dependent than ever on the unfettered flow of cocaine and cash in and out of Amado’s Juárez cartel. What could go wrong?
Lots, as it turns out. Amado survives the economic downturn relatively unscathed; since his money is in dollars rather than pesos, his fortune in Mexico has effectively doubled in value. But the pressure from Hank, coupled with his experience watching the empires run by Pablo Escobar, Gallardo, and the Cali cartel fall one by one, has Amado in a pensive mood. This goes double once he’s told by his new North Valley partner Henao that the ascendant Colombian cartel plans to kill Pacho Herrera when he travels to Mexico, just in case he ever changes his tune and starts really talking to the Colombian government instead of accepting a slap on the wrist. (Despite looking and sounding regretful about it, Amado does not warn Pacho when given the chance.)
So, rather shockingly, Amado begins making plans to quit the empire he built. He sends a bag full of cash to his estranged wife, he visits his daughter’s grave, and he sends his Cuban girlfriend Marta the deed to a mountainside villa in Chile, where he hopes to join her. “If I’m careful, do it right,” he says, “I can start over.” We’ll see about that.
All the while, the new alliance between Amado, Chapo, and Mayo continues to pay dividends, leaving the Arellanos reeling on their own Tijuana turf. While Enedina encourages her brother Benjamín to move to a new safehouse—something he’s reluctant to do because his sick daughter is receiving treatment from nearby doctors—she also sends her chief hitman Barron looking for Alfredo Hodoyan, the narcojunior whose trouble with the law leaves the Arellanos exposed.
Unfortunately for Walt Breslin, who promises Alfredo’s imprisoned brother Alex that he’ll keep Alfredo safe if Alex coughs up his location, the Arellanos find him first. But in his desperation to produce results for his bosses back home, Walt lies to Alex, telling him that Alfredo was gone (as in missing, not dead) by the time the army arrived at his safehouse. Alex’s only hope now, Walt says, is to help them pore over wiretaps for any clues as to the Arellanos’ whereabouts.
The side plots involving Tijuana reporter Andréa and Juárez cop Victor serve primarily to demonstrate the impact of the 1994 economic crash and devaluation of the peso. Andréa’s paper is losing advertisers left and right, but she and her coworkers persist in their investigation into ties between Carlos Hank Gonzalez, controller of the ruling PRI party’s illegal slush fund, and the Juárez cartel. “At some point the bad guys have to lose, right?” she asks her PRI informant. I’m not holding my breath.
Victor, meanwhile, loses his job due to budget cuts, and picks up a new gig as a bouncer at one of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes’s clubs. When he’s not busy busting heads or arguing with his Long-Suffering Wife (that old Narcos standby), he’s continuing to watch over the factory workers. When he sees one of them get in a fancy car matching the description of the vehicle into which his original murder victim was last seen entering, he gives chase, only for a blowout to ruin his best chance yet at finding the killer.
Without an episode-ending shootout to anchor it, this episode’s real highlight is simply the performance of José María Yazpik as Amado. For my money, with the possible exception of Alberto Ammann’s Pacho Herrera, he’s the most interesting narco since Wagner Moura’s Pablo Escobar, with his signature all-black ensemble and lanky frame a mirror image of Pablo’s dorky sweatshirts and doughy physique. Pablo was a terrorist who dressed like a guy running to the store at 10:30pm for groceries; Amado is a daring narcobillionaire whose cool and confident exterior masks how ill at ease he is with his success. You get the feeling some part of him wishes he’d gotten in that plane on that long-ago airstrip and simply flown away.
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.
