‘Too Old to Die Young’ Episode 6 Recap: Eat Tu Mamá También

Jesus and Yaritza got married. Jesus had a sexual relationship with his mother. Yaritza killed 23 people. There’s a lot going on in “The High Priestess,” the sixth episode of Nicolas Winding Refn & Ed Brubaker’s remarkable crime saga on Amazon. The thing is, though, that by the time the episode starts, it’s all already happened.

Uneventful even by the laconic standards the series has already established, this installment of the best goddamn neo-noir-western slow cinema on television catches up with Jesus, his cousin-brother Miguel, and his new wife Yaritza after their (very stylish) wedding. Yeah, it turns out that whatever was going on with Jesus and Miguel at the end of the second episode, Jesus and Yaritza are the ones who wound up seriously involved, though that too happened offscreen. (It’s been about a year since the events of the pilot, we find out later, so they had plenty of time to hook up.)

But the newlyweds don’t stay in Mexico for long. Eager to reclaim the former empire of Magdalena, Jesus’s mom, he and Miguel decide he should return to Los Angeles to take over her business and reconquer her territory. Yaritza comes with him, she later explains, because Miguel is too afraid of her sinister, and as it turns out well deserved reputation for death.

What they find in the States is nothing to write home about. Jesus’s neighbors include his old cokehead school acquaintances (he was their dealer, courtesy of a steady supply from his mom) and the nosy Mrs. Watson (Morgan Fairchild!!!), who waltzes into their house to make sure no one’s selling off Magdalena’s extensive collection of portraits and winds up making the racist assumption that Yaritza is “the help.” (She’s really just very quiet most of the time, is all.)

The criminal empire is more like a criminal municipality at this point, too. Some of the blame for that no doubt falls on Alfonso (Manuel Uriza), a louche underboss straight out of Mexican-American criminal central casting. (Jesus roasts him by asking if he and his low-rent pals get a group discount on their stereotypical outfits at the Gangster Store.) He’s a condescending dipshit who mocks Jesus’s size and calls Yaritza “chiquita” a lot, that sort of thing. He obviously has no idea who he’s dealing with.

Alfonso receives Miguel’s order to kill Damian, who ordered the stick-up that ended in Magdalena’s murder, as a sort of homecoming gift to his relative. In a morbidly funny game of telephone, the order is passed down the food chain from one would-be hitter to the next, until some meth-head named Gameboy winds up gunning down the wrong guy in the picture used to identify the target for the bargain-basement price of $200 and some free crystal. Not that he lives long enough to collect, since he himself gets shot to death by Damian before he makes it down the block.

Alfonso shows up at Jesus and Yaritza’s mansion to tell them the bad news, which he hopes to sweeten by hand-delivering Yaritza the custom-designed gun she’d ordered from his pawnshop. (The grip is studded with diamonds on the outside and has the Hanged Man from the tarot deck on the inside.) Jesus decides he’s heard enough and just absolutely tears the guy a new one, forcing him at the point of Yaritza’s gun to get down on all fours and bray like a donkey after insulting him and his mother as “wetbacks.” It’s like watching Tarantino at half-speed.

Yaritza isn’t fitting in any better. Taking up Jesus’s old school chum Dante on his invitation to a party nearby, she shows up at the house and meets his awful younger sister Carrie (Victoria Park) and her friend…Janey. (Dun dun dunnnnnn!) Here we learn in passing that Martin is recovering from his stab wound, and via a game of three truths and a lie that Yaritza has nearly two dozen dead bodies to her name. We also see Yaritza slap the shit out of Janey as her reward for winning the game—Janey guessed incorrectly that “I’ve killed 23 people” is a lie—and, on a meta level, as deferred fallout from her naïveté about Martin, whose story about getting stabbed in a meth-lab raid she’s bought hook,, line and sinker.

The episode saves the best, using the Too Old to Die Young definition of “best,” for last. Throughout the episode, we’ve observed Jesus in reverie over his late mother, whom he repeatedly pictures posing provocatively on her bed, in lingerie even. His story of how his mom revealed the true nature of her work to him when he “became a man” at 13, how she found out about his coke sideline, how she punished him, then how she officially cut him in on the family business leaves a lot to read between (white) lines.

Yaritza, who as played by Cristina Rodlo is a person so hot she all but distorts the air around her; yet who refreshingly doesn’t get half as objectified as Augusto Aguilera’s Jesus does, picks up what her husband is laying down. In the final scene, after Jesus dreams about being in bed with a snake, he finds her in her bedchamber. She tells him his mother is with them, and that he can have anything he wants of her. He doesn’t want to touch her, or feel her, per Yaritza’s suggestions. He wants to taste her. The sight gag that follows—cunnilingus in the key of Martin Sheen rising up from the waters in Apocalypse Now—is as funny and perverse as it is hot. And brother, it is very much all three of those things.

Running through the plot in that much detail is kind of a must, given how little there is to say about what happens. Aside from the final scene, and everything that happened off camera before the events of the episode begin, and maybe the Janey encounter, there’s just not much there, there. But when a show is this accomplished, this confident, this unlike anything else on the air, it doesn’t matter what is there. The journey is at least half the fun. Like Jesus’s Mama Magdalena, Too Old to Die Young is simply an acquired taste.

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.

Stream Too Old To Die Young Episode 6 ("The High Priestess") on Amazon Prime Video