‘Narcos: Mexico’ Episode 3 Recap: I Will Be Your Father Figure

The Godfather begins with the line “I believe in America.” The third episode of Narcos: Mexico is called “El Padrino,” which translates to “The Godfather”; it believes in its audience.

The most remarkable thing about the episode, in which DEA Agent Kiki Camarena uncovers irrefutable proof of Félix Gallardo’s massive marijuana operation while Gallardo cements his role at the top of the organized-crime pyramid (sort of), is its patience.

Take Kiki’s journey into the belly of the beast, when makes an unauthorized undercover trip to work in Gallardo’s marijuana fields. First, he drives out to the point in the desert where he’d previously seen the unidentified convoy of blindfolded workers drive past. He sits there in his car for hours, until nightfall. When the convoy approaches, he waits until just after it passes and then pulls into line behind them. He arrives at the staging ground for the operation’s workers — a popular enough spot despite being in the middle of nowhere that it has food carts and bars operating 24/7 — and blends in, during a lengthy steadicam shot that does nothing in particular, really, just follows him into this world. He has a three- or four-beer, five- or six-cigarette conversation with the guy next to him at the bar, but then comes up short on getting any useful intel out of him.

He waits around again, napping, until the start of the workday just before dawn. He manages to get himself on one of the transports to the field with the help of his barfly buddy (who demands half his daily wages in exchange for this favor) and gets trundled out to the fields. He spends the whole day there, picking buds and fucking up his hands and eating bad food and, eventually, hiding from the DFS agents who show up on business and might recognize him from their shared time in the Guadalajara cop bar. He gets back on to the bus after what can best be described as a low-speed chase in which he struggles to stay out of sight and ahead of step from DFS underboss El Azul, who spotted and vaguely recognized him. By the time he’s shipped back to the staging ground and can use the payphone to report his findings to his boss, he discovers his wife has gone into labor.

All of this is done with minimal cinematographic razzle-dazzle, and more importantly, with barely a note from the show’s score and nary a peep from its omniscient narrator. Director Andrés Baiz, a series mainstay, clearly trusts his audience enough to grant them this silence, to let them take in the events of Kiki’s day and draw their own emotional conclusions about what he’s thinking, feeling, experiencing. The few times something unusual does happen from a filmmaking perspective — that long but unshowy take, the reveal of the gigantic forest of weed, the split-diopter shot that juxtaposes kiki’s terrified face against the DFS agents in the background — it hits harder because of its restrained context.

The wedding over which Gallardo spends most of the episode presiding is both more and less striking in this respect, and for the exact same reason: We’ve seen this kind of thing before. With its golden color palette, its minimally scripted scenes of revelry amid the partygoers, in-world performances by culturally appropriate musicians, shots of various gangsters and government bigwigs mixing and mingling, and backroom deals involving officially sanctioned violence going on behind the scenes — not to mention the fact that the episode is called “El Padrino,” a title bestowed upon Gallardo both by his actual godson and the DEA agents who are on to his game by the end of the hour — it’s a dead ringer for the opening sequences of the first two Godfather films.

And why not, right? The Narcos franchise has already cribbed liberally from GoodFellas, Casino, Scarface, and other classics of pizzeria wall-art cinema. Why not go for, sorry, the godfather of them all? It seems inevitable rather than surprising in retrospect.

What is surprising is how good the show is at this. It may be paying homage to the most famous mob movie of all time, but it’s doing so with the same patience in its audience displayed in the Kiki segments, and by the end it’s splitting screentime back and forth between the two. (This is a connection the show has emphasized from the start, with its cop protagonist and his ex-cop antagonist going to the same town at the same time with the same goal of professional advancement and drug-war success.)

The Godfather isn’t the only movie to earn a tip of the hat during the wedding sequence. Gallardo’s partner Rafa, who’d tried to pick up a wealthy young woman at a nightclub but got shot down because he still dresses like a hick from the sticks, watches Scarface with his buddies and winds up giving himself a hilarious Tony Montana Makeover — which does the trick where the young lady is concerned, surprisingly enough.

And while Narcos draws on Casino mostly for its “here’s how the sausage gets made” narrated sequences, this time around it pays tribute to that movie’s most brutal murder by burying a badly wounded man alive. This arrangement is arrived at during the wedding by Gallardo as a way to broker a truce between the DFS, who’ve been massacring plaza bosses who stiff them on their share of the proceeds, and the pair of brothers who are among Félix’s most reliable lieutenants and are now out for DFS blood in payback for the execution of one of their cousins. In other words, it tucks the Casino nod into a Godfather baptism/assassination pastiche, like a gangster-movie Russian nesting doll.

Gallardo himself is the reason the wedding sequence works, though. Whatever else may be going on with its overall style and specific plot beats, Gallardo in this moment has no Coppola/Scorsese analogue. It’s true that he’s the boss of the operation, a literal and figurative godfather, and that he successfully backs down his angry underlings and his shark-like liaison in DFS. But mostly, he just sincerely wants to impress Governor Celis, his longtime mentor and one-time employer, by throwing the guy’s kid the wedding of the century. Actor Diego Luna does impressively subtle work conveying Gallardo’s desperation for approval beneath the mask of self-assuredness he must always maintain. When his face starts working in a weird way while Governor Celis toasts him, it took me a minute to realize he’s experiencing waves of love and gratitude and pride and choking back tears about it, that’s how effective Luna is at nailing the way the character has to wrestle his own emotions to the mat.

What a great move by the show, then to save his ugly realization that he’s still just an employee to the Governor despite it all. As they sit together, enjoying the reception deep into the night, Celis turns to him and demands a massive payout not just to himself, but to all the assembled governors. That’s jsut the way it works, he says, smiling unsympathetically, before patting Gallardo on the shoulder and calling him “son.” Earlier in the episode, Gallardo called Celis the closest thing he had to a father; now Celis recognizes this fact and treats him like dirt, simultaneously, in a single word. That’s very strong writing.

It’s worth noting, I think, what part of Kiki’s story runs parallel to this conversation (which is itself followed immediately by the brutal burying-alive scene). Finally returning to the office after his undercover stint and the birth of his baby, he proudly presents his boss Jaime with the weed he handpicked himself in the fields, which he estimates to be 200 miles out into the desert from the city. (“You can see it from outer space,” he says of the operation in the laugh line of the night.) By then, Jaime’d done a little digging himself and discovered that the exculpatory surveillance photos the DEA had been provided by Mexico’s “eradication program” were a year out of date, which means that program has been compromised. And the other two agents in the outpost had just so happened to be tailing a member of the cartel when he went to the wedding, enabling them to connect every single figure there — the gangsters, the cops, the feds, the politicos, and Gallardo at the center of it all.

In other words, Kiki and company figure out exactly what’s going on at the same time Gallardo does. They realize there’s an organized-crime enterprise of unprecedented scale going on right under their nose; he realizes still viewed as a dispensable cog in the machine by the muckety-mucks he thought actually appreciated him as both a partner and a person — that they respect his ideas but don’t fear his power. Those two competing convoys are rolling now, and I wouldn’t want to be around when they collide.

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.

Watch Narcos: Mexico Episode 3 ("El Padrino") on Netflix