‘Narcos’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: Blow Back

“Okay,” groans DEA agent Steve Murphy as the second season of Narcos begins. “Here we go again.” Friends, that is the sound of a show that took Socrates’s advice to Know Thyself. Stepping into the prestige-gangster void left behind by the departures of Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire, Narcos has never taken the stylistic risks of those shows (bilingual scripting aside). It’s not as flashy as either its larger-than-life subject matter, the multibillionaire druglords of cocaine-era Columbia, or its Scorsese-indebted, voiceover-narrated, tapestry-of-criminality format would lead you to believe.

Rather, it takes its cues from its central performance: Wagner Moura as the lethal, laconic legend of the drug trade, Pablo Escobar. Portly, poorly rested, perpetually stoned, yet the most dangerous international criminal (non-government-official edition) this side of Osama Bin Laden, his reign of terror over his country rarely requires him to ruffle his own feathers. He simply stares into the distance, his dark brown eyes glowing beneath thick black eyebrows, then issues an order in a deadpan baritone and gets on with his day. His exploits may be unbelievable, but he takes it all in stride. So does Narcos, the most low-key series about a gigantic manhunt for a mass murderer you’re ever likely to see.

So Murphy’s right: Here we go again. “Free at Last,” Season Two’s premiere, picks up directly from where Season One’s finale left off: The Columbian military raids Pablo’s palatial private prison La Catedral, only for him to slip away. In fact, he simply strolls past an army cordon, as casually and confidently as a busy commuter might cut through the crowd gathered outside an opening subway door. For Pablo, for Murphy, for Murphy’s partner Javier Peña, for the entire show, it’s business as usual from there on out.

Which is a wise choice. I, for one, was shocked that there even was a Narcos Season Two. After all, Pablo’s rise and fall is fairly straightforward, and ends (no spoiler alert here — the promos for the show literally list his date of death) with a rooftop shootout immortalized by a photo in which his killers pose with his body like a hunting trophy. When the final ep of the first go-round ended, it took me several minutes to figure out there were no more episodes, and the show wasn’t a done-in-one miniseries that took the story to its conclusion. In that light, simply continuing, rather than restarting, is the correct artistic and narrative choice. Nothing that happens here would feel out of place if this were Season One, Episode 11.

What does happen? We meet a whole lot of new characters as the post-prison Pablo attempts to reestablish himself as the Medellín Cartel’s prime mover. We learn that Judy Moncado, the wife of an underboss Pablo murdered, has gone into business for herself; so does Pablo, and he pays her back by killing her brother, too.

We also spend a great deal of time with two relatively innocent figures drawn into Pablo’s orbit. Límon, a cabbie who sidelines a a chauffeur for prostitutes, is tapped by his hitman buddy Quica to be Pablo’s driver — a task he accepts as much out of gratitude for Escobar’s donations to the city’s poor as for a chance for personal enrichment. To pull it off, he enlists his wholly civilian friend Maritza to ride in the back of the cab as a decoy while Pablo himself lays low in the trunk. Once she realizes who, exactly, she’s the decoy for, and that there’s now no way out but death, her spite for both Quica and Límon is intense and understandable. Actors Leynar Gomez and Martina Garcîa deliver nuanced, humane performances in roles where many would be tempted to play up greed or martyrdom. They demonstrate Escobar’s simultaneous allure and danger better than any exposition could.

Which is not to say the episode’s a simple character study. There’s a rooftop chase, a brutal coke-lab massacre, declarations of vengeance, the end of Murphy’s marriage and an ensuing airport-bathroom beatdown in which he vents his frustrations on a pair of hapless nose-powdering gringo businessmen, and in the end, President Gaviria’s placement of a $1.4 million bounty on Pablo’s head. This last bit is preceded by a telling shot in which the nervous President is made up before the cameras are switched on; you can feel how anxious and out-of-place he must be. A thoroughly baked Escobar watches his subsequent speech in silence in an adorable anchor-festooned sweatshirt. That’s the kind of kingpin he is.

And that’s the kind of story Narcos is telling, no bones about it: We’re just gonna sit back and watch it unfold until the inevitable finally occurs. The international scope of the production aside, that kind of modesty is an extremely becoming trait. The only statement Narcos is trying to make is “Let’s see what kind of damage this megalomaniac can do until he makes the government angry enough take him down for good.” There’s no moral to this story. Here we go again.

[Watch Narcos on Netflix]
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.