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ZeroZeroZero

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“When did it start?” Emma Lynwood asks her brother. Silence. “Chris,” she says for emphasis. “When did it start?” Again, silence. There’s no choice; she has to come right out and say it. “When did the spasms start?” she asks, her tone that of a statement: The spasms have started.

A pause. Then, Chris, quickly: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That’s how this episode of ZeroZeroZero (“Transshipment”) ends, as Mogwai’s melancholy score plays us out over a shot of the Senegalese coast. And there’s an ocean of character in that brief, terse exchange. It tells us that with everything else she has to worry about—the cargo stuck in international limbo, the cocaine she’s desperate to move from Mexico to Italy, the new Senegalese partners Chris cut in on the deal in exchange for their help in offloading the coke—she’s worried about her kid brother’s disease.

This is true despite how she first found out about his spasms: He had one right after he hit her in the face. She’s letting that slide as if they were no more than children, fighting in the way siblings do. (Given how easily she shook off Don Stefano roughing her up, I wonder if we’ll eventually find out Emma is used to being beaten.)

And Chris’s response? Pure, and pointless, denial. He knows what she saw. He knows there’s no denying it. And he denies it anyway. Again, there’s an ocean of character here. He’s young man who has made an uneasy peace with his condition—held at bay, barely, by some kind of tincture he procured from a Senegalese black-marketeer named Mongo (Mark Grosy)—by ignoring it as much as possible, even when ignoring it is impossible.

We learn more about the Lynwoods in this episode, too. We see once again that Chris is a quick, resourceful thinker: He’s able to secure a rescue at sea, a tow to the friendly port of Dakar, Senegal, and a fixer to provide him with medication and move the cargo before the authorities can search it—not to mention helping them evade capture from the cops by setting up a perfect roadblock in the middle of a high-speed chase cum gun battle. Emma’s more reputable fixer, by contrast, is repeatedly stymied in his efforts. Emma takes out her frustration on Chris, blowing up when she discovers he’s given 50 kilos of coke to Mongo as his cut and revealing that their father wanted him out of the family business. It’s no coincidence that that’s when Chris hits her: The younger Lynwoods loved their father so much that hearing he wanted one of them kept at a distance is a devastating blow.

Meanwhile, in Mexico (there is no Italian segment in this episode), Manuel jumpstarts his plan to move his backers the Leyra brothers into the local cocaine trade in brutal fashion. “From now on,” he says after he and his men chase a dealer to his trap house, “anyone who wants to deal has to do it through the Firm.” He drives his point home with a sledgehammer. “Resign yourself,” he tells the person he’s about to brutally execute. “Accept your fucking destiny.” Everyone else is spared, in order to spread the word.

Then, in a sort of act of charity that only a murderer steeped in evangelical Christianity can cook up, he stops by the house of Chiquitita (Claudia Pineda), the pregnant widow of the soldier he executed to throw his captain off his trail. “He was one of us,” he tells her as he hands her an envelope full of cash. But it’s Manuel’s company she wants, not his money. It’s heartbreaking to hear her almost beg him to stay; “I know you’re good,” she tells him, as wrong as she could possibly be. I have a feeling she’ll have cause to rue those words before the end.

And there you have it: Another smart, sophisticated, and (despite the sledgehammer) subtle episode of ZeroZeroZero. It’s a rare crime drama that actually provides you with interesting characters whose colors shift and change but who remain true to who they really are deep down. For a point of comparison, I’d skip the Narcos franchise, which aside from Wagner Moura’s magnificent work as Pablo Escobar only rarely transcends its formula, and go back to Boardwalk Empire, a show that had a similar micro/macro approach to portraying organized crime by delving into the personalities of the people involved.

And as for director Janus Metz, I’d compare some of his shot compositions and the stately tone he produces for much of the episode to no less a figure than Michael Mann. (Seriously, that shot of Emma counting money through a window on which the sea is reflected is straight out of Manhunter.) This is a very, very good show, and it comes at a time when very, very good shows are somehow in short supply. I can’t wait to see where it takes us next.