‘ZeroZeroZero’ Episode 5 Recap: Blood in the Sand

From its title, “Sharia,” on down, the fifth episode of ZeroZeroZero is nominally concerned with the fundamentalist militia that becomes the latest obstacle in the path of the show’s ill-fated cocaine shipment. The way it handles the group is…tricky. Much is done to humanize them, particularly their leader, and to portray them as just another gun-toting subculture, like the Italian mob and the Mexican cartel. That said, there’s a degree of stereotyping that American eyes and ears will impose on such characters almost automatically; having a bunch of them cheer “Allahu Akbar!” when a bomb goes off in a hotel on a live news broadcast isn’t doing them any favors, that’s for sure.

But there’s a throughline for this episode, and it’s not jihad—it’s family.

For Don Stefano, family means lying through his teeth. After helping his grandfather, Don Minu, escape from a raid by Stefano’s own men, the young ganglord shot himself in the shoulder to throw off suspicion. Unfortunately, the doctor he turns to for help, a member of the Curtiga family that had previously been Stefano’s main backers against his grandfather, can see from the nature of the wound that it was self-inflicted. He tells as much to Italo Curtiga (Francesco Colella), Stefano’s right-hand man, whose brother was burned alive by Don Minu just prior to the attack and whose father was killed by Don Minu alongside Stefano’s dad (Minu’s son). This can’t possibly bode well for Stefano, at least not until he and his grandfather can reunite. For now he remains in the clutches of men who could become his enemies at a moment’s notice, if they haven’t already.

For the Lynwoods, Emma and Chris, family is something to cling to when everything else has gone sideways. Their cocaine caravan across the Sahara Desert leads them directly to a band of jihadists, whose faction has taken over a nearby city. Emma’s Senegalese fixer, Omar (Seydina Baldé), is cautious but confident that the militants will simply want to be paid to escort the caravan through their territory. But their leader, Brahim (Farid Larbi), puts Emma in an ersatz jail cell and takes Chris on a complicated expedition, in which he bids farewell to his son Tamil (Mohamed Ibrahim) prior to a suicide mission, and bids hello to his newborn baby, delivered in a refugee camp he can only access with the help of Chris, who poses as a doctor to gain entry. Family matters to him, too.

Watching Brahim with his two sons, Chris can clearly see himself and his own father in their tenderness, however different their living situations and cultural backgrounds might be. He winds up pouring his heart out to Brahim, saying he’ll never have a child of his own lest the kid be stricken with his disease, telling him he suspects that his parents knew he’d get sick all along just based on how they looked at him—”The same way you looked at your elder son today.” Earlier in the episode, Brahim said Chris could never truly know him and his people, but they have more in common than meets the eye.

Undoubtedly this unlikely connection is why Chris springs into action when the group is hit with a drone strike. Once he shakes off the cobwebs and picks himself up off the ground (he wasn’t near the targeted group at the time the missile hit), he’s about to pull away in the group’s pickup truck when he sees one man is still moving. It’s Brahim, and Chris proceeds to rescue him and bring him back to the militants’ headquarters—maybe the only thing that could have ensured his and Emma’s continued survival, given that a gun battle had just broken out between Omar and his men on one side and the jihadists on the other as they tried to escape.

Emma and Chris and the two drivers hauling the cocaine make it out alive. Omar, though, dies in the back seat, even as Emma tries to stop his bleeding. Here’s where actor Andrea Riseborough’s careworn face really comes into play; you can read Emma’s guilt all over her as she realizes this decent man died so her family could transfer cocaine from one group of criminals to another.

As the Lynwoods’ long, strange trip continues, and as the factions in both Mexico and Italy continue to ratchet up the violence, the cost of all this cocaine seems likely to be at the forefront of ZeroZeroZero‘s mind. Not the monetary cost, in its tens of millions, but the human cost, both to the main players and anyone unlucky enough to become collateral damage. That all of this is held together by Riseborough and Dane DeHaan’s performances, as siblings in the most functional “dysfunctional” crime family I’ve seen on TV, is a testament both to their skill as actors and to the filmmakers’ instincts. As long as Emma and Chris’s relationship is there to serve as a mirror for gangsters and militants alike, humanity, in all its forms, will remain the focus.

READ NEXT: ‘ZeroZeroZero’ Episode 6 Recap: The World Is a Vampire

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 ZeroZeroZero Episode 5 ("Sharia") on Amazon Prime