‘Narcos: Mexico’ Season 2 Episode 2 Recap: Let’s Make a Deal

Let’s get the ugly stuff out of the way early here, shall we? Written by Eric Newman and Eva Aridjis, the Narcos: Mexico Season 2 Episode 2 takes a turn for the generic tough-guy in terms of the dialogue. “You don’t have me, I have you,” snarls a captured torturer, ripping off Rorschach from Watchmen. “What a man wants tells us nothing; what a man needs tells us everything,” says an old crime boss, mistaking a cheap rhetorical reversal for wisdom. “If you’re feeling sorry for him now that it’s his turn,” says our hero Walt Breslin to us as he tortures the aforementioned torturer, “don’t. He’s got it coming.” Uh-oh, we got ourselves a badass here!

But hey, Narcos is gonna be Narcos from time to time. This is not genre revisionism along the lines of what The Sopranos did for mafia stories, or what Deadwood did for Westerns, or what The Wire did for cop shows, or what Game of Thrones did for fantasy and so on. Narcos: Mexico never really promises to be much more than a jaundiced but well-crafted look at the drug war. Sometimes those drug warriors are gonna sound like clichés rather than people. Like getting kidnapped and tortured, it’s an occupational hazard.

It’s the “occupational” element that ties this episode together. All across Mexico and even north of the American border, characters meet up with other characters in order to make deals and secure power. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes people get in a barfight with other people who put pigs in their cocaine delivery trucks.

It happens!

The way it all breaks down is as follows. Walt and his men, including his very hardcore Mexican ex-cop Danilo, torture their captive for information on who was calling the shots during the torture and murder of DEA Agent Kiki Camarena. After shooting the guy in the gut and threatening to let him bleed out in intense pain all the while, they get the name “Zuno,” Félix Gallardo’s rich liaison to the Mexican government.

Elsewhere, Félix’s underboss Amado, who’s in charge of the aerial component of the cocaine transportation network, heads to Juárez to track down Acosta, a plaza boss who’s gone MIA and left the construction of new runways and storage facilities to stand idle. Amado tracks him down in Texas, where he’s shacked up with a daughter of American aristocracy. A combination of romance and a personal vendetta against a guy in a nearby Mexican town are apparently keeping him sidelined.

Félix himself travels east to meet Don Juan Guerra, an elderly plaza boss who controls a lucrative and relatively safe opium trafficking operation. Félix’s goal is to entice Don Juan to enter his narcotrafficing monopoly and get into the cocaine business, reasoning that with this newfound expansion, they’ll have the clout to force their Colombian suppliers to give them coke they can then sell themselves, rather than simply being the middleman between the Colombians and their countrymen north of the border. It takes some persuading, but eventually the beloved old man offers a tentative agreement.

And in Tijuana, Benjamín Arellano Félix and his sister Enedina butt heads about whether to make a deal directly with some American dealers—led by a character played by Narcos superfan Quavo from Migos, no less—in order to supply their newly minted crack operation. (Brother Ramón takes to crack-smoking enthusiastically.) Benjamín is getting squeezed on all sides: by his ambitious sister; by his Sinaloan rivals Chapo and Cochiloco, who pick a fight at the welcome home party for one of Benjamín’s formerly incarcerated brothers; and by Isabella, the female plaza boss Félix pushed out of the organization and who now comes to Benjamín offering to supply him with cocaine herself. He turns her down, but something’s gotta give eventually.

Following all the moving parts takes some effort, and I think that’s long been a part of Narcos‘ strategy. The show keeps the audience engaged with a byzantine plot and a cast of thousands, figuring the effort involved in keeping track of it all will endear the show to the viewer. I don’t think they’re wrong, for what it’s worth, though at times I wish they’d be more artistically ambitious than logistically ambitious.

Ah well. At least the show still finds room to smush in some political commentary: Walt explains that a whole generation of Latin American torturers learned the tools of the trade from Uncle Sam’s Orwellian “School of the Americas,” while Don Juan explains to Félix that the opium trade is safe because its users are “blacks, former soldiers, people the Americans don’t give a shit about,” as opposed to wealthy and often famous cocaine addicts. And hey, Quavo gets a chance to quote Scarface and say “Don’t get high on your own supply.” Who am I to complain? Some clichés are more than clichés—they’re just plain good advice.

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 Narcos: Mexico Season 2 Episode 2 on Netflix