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Narcos

It’s long been my contention that the single greatest act of cinematic revenge belongs to Robert De Niro’s bank-robber character in Michael Mann’s crime epic Heat. (Spoilers ahead, though really this is just a signal that you should go watch Heat immediately.) Discovering the location of an associate who betrayed him, he risks everything to infiltrate the hotel where the man is being kept under guard, distract his protective detail, break into his hotel room, and kill him. But does he just shoot him in the back of the head, like so many mobsters from The Godfather to GoodFellas have been content to do? Hell no. “Look at me,” he demands, then shoots the guy in the gut, then in the head. If the point were simply to kill him, none of this would be necessary. But the point is to make sure he knows he’s about to be killed — knows he’s in the process of dying, in fact — and knows why. Otherwise, what’s the point?

This is a lesson Pablo Escobar has clearly internalized. In “The Good, The Bad, and The Dead,” the cornily titled fourth episode of Narcos’ second season, Pablo quite shockingly gets the drop on Colonel Horacio Carrillo, the ruthless Colombian police officer who’s been his nemesis from the jump. Though he and his men are peppered with bullets, Pablo insists on delivering the killing blow himself. “Look at me,” he says. “Look at me,” he says again, repeating himself just as De Niro’s character did. He then fires the bullet Carrillo sent to him as a warning into the man’s leg before finally delivering the coup de grace to his head. Pablo understands that there’s no point in simply defeating your enemy. He has to know he’s being defeated, he has to know he has no hope of not being defeated, and he has to know who has defeated him. Death isn’t enough. Agony is paramount.

And there’s plenty of that to go around in this episode, which feels like something of a turning point for the season. (The never-better score by Pedro Bromfman, which evolves from tense percussive strings to eerie synths to unnerving, expansive steel drums and vibraphones, marks the occasion.) For one thing, it brings DEA agent Steve Murphy and his wife Connie back together. Their reunion isn’t a joyful or romantic one — it involves Steve clinging to Connie and sobbing over the horror he’s witnessed, like a child hanging on to a parent after a bad dream.

Then there’s the end of the relationship between President César Gaviria and Vice-Miniser Eduardo Sandoval, his right-hand man and closest friend. Sensing that between Carrillo’s death and Attorney General De Greiff’s ambitions there must be a sacrificial lamb, Sandoval offers up himself, taking the fall for both Pablo’s escape and Carrillo’s execution. In retrospect, Gaviria and Sandoval’s relationship has been a rare portrait of professional respect and friendship. There’s no romantic angle, nor is this an alliance of convenience: Sandoval genuinely loves and respects Gaviria as a leader and friend, and Sandoval feels the same way. In watching them say goodbye, the sense of loss is profound.

In an odd way, this is echoed by the relationship between Límon and Maritza. We find out here that the cab driver turned chauffeur to Don Pablo wasn’t setting his childhood friend up for a fall at all. On the contrary, he was playing both sides against the middle, using Maritza’s credulity to lure Carrillo into Pablo’s ambush, then selling this to Pablo as a deliberate act of solidarity on Maritza’s part. Once again, there’s no romance, no power play — it’s just one person trying, in his own fucked-up way, to do right by the friend he wronged.

Contrast both these relationships with the calculated camaraderie evolving among Pablo’s enemies. You’ve got Judy Moncada, who’d clearly like to do to Pablo what Pablo did to Carrillo; Don Berna, her more pragmatic lieutenant; Pacha and the Rodriguez Brothers, the wealthy and powerful chieftains of the Cali cartel; Bill Stechner, the frizzy-headed CIA goon who’ll by-any-means-necessary himself to the goal of killing Pablo; the Castaña Brothers, a pair of right-wing psychopaths tearing up the countryside in order to exterminate anything Communist or Communist-adjacent, now including Pablo; and, perhaps, Javier Peña, the DEA agent who’s been dealt one body blow too many by Escobar’s associates. Knowing our history, we can suss out this group’s likelihood of success. But it’s hard to imagine that compared to the more honest relationships we’ve seen in this episode they’ll build anything of lasting value.