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

Two scenes, two minutes: That’s all you’re getting of the Lynwood family saga in ZeroZeroZero Episode 6. The fate of their cocaine shipment and the money owed on it? The subject of two or three lines of throwaway dialogue half a world away. The Italians who purchased it to begin with? Not present at all.

For this episode, it’s Manuel’s world, and we just live in it.

Directed by Pablo Trapero from a script by Leonardo Fasoli and Max Hurwitz, “En El Mismo Camino” is a breathless nightmare journey into the life—I hesitate to say “mind,” since he remains so sociopathically opaque—of Manuel Quinteras, the special forces soldier turned chief muscle for the Leyra Brothers cartel. Only he’s much more than that: He’s the commander of an entire army of young men he’s training to become perfect killers, just like himself and his squad mates. Though known to the outside world as the Firm, they take their internal name from Manuel’s old callsign: They’re the Vampires.

It’s the training sequence that really drives home the scale of ambition at work here, as dozens, if not hundreds, of extras are put through basic training by Manuel and his men. At times it’s like any other training sequence, from Rocky to Full Metal Jacket. At others it’s like something out of Salo. Young men are psychologically conditioned in front of walls of flame; they sleep in vast rope webs like so many spiders; they run and jump and shoot in an elaborate choreography of coordinated movement.

Then they put their skills to use by pulling over a bus, removing all the passengers, and summarily executing all thirty of them, in full view of the camera.

It’s a gutwrenching gut-check of a moment. Until now, we’d been prepared to see Manuel and his army fight other gangsters, not mass murder civilians. I could see people bailing from the show at this point. I wouldn’t even blame them. But without the murders, Manuel might seem too “badass.” The slaughter casts a necessarily harsh light on everything else Manuel does.

That includes chafing at the disrespect shown to him and his men by the Leyras (who stiff them on payday) and the Leyras’ lieutenant, Loco (who insults them to their face, constantly). We know what the Vampires can do, and we know how stupid antagonizing them is—so when one of them goes too far in insulting Loco right back and Loco shoots him, the ensuing massacre of men who are technically their superiors in the Leyra cartel feels as inevitable as it is brutal. (The score by Mogwai seems like a constant crescendo in this scene, making the tension hard to bear.)

The killings also affect how we see Manuel’s continued interest in Chiquitita, the widow of the teammate he murdered to save his own skin earlier in the season; his wooing of her is cross-cut with the training scenes. Courting her while responsible for her situation is awful enough. Watching him take her to his charismatic church as a first date—couldn’t he have gotten her ice cream, she asks?—is like watching the mirror image of Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, whose equally inappropriate idea of a romantic destination is a porno theater.

His later, more successful date with her, at a nightclub, also gives off major Taxi Driver vibes, this time the unbearable slowdance between the pimp Sport and his underage employee Iris. For all Manuel’s surface coolness in life or death circumstances, he reacts to dancing like he’s never seen humans do it before. To his great credit, actor Harold Torres is as convincing here, or in the subsequent scene where he comes across as frightened to put his hand on her pregnant belly like it might burn him, as he is gliding silently from one deadly operation to the next.

The episode is so good at this one-two punch characterization of Manuel as both sadistic and pathetic, the Patrick Bateman of Monterrey, that heartstring-tugging towards the end of the episode trips me up. I can buy the idea that Manuel is genuinely devastated by the death of one of his brothers-in-arms (even though we’ve seen him commit a war atrocity), and I can buy the idea that he’s genuinely thrilled by the birth of Chiquitita’s baby (even if the baby’s father is a man he killed). That said, the awkwardness of his affect during his “dates” with Chiquitita makes his ability to respond appropriately in these circumstances a bit harder of a sell.

Moreover, what I have a tough time with is presenting these emotions, this grief and this joy, without distance or irony. To go back to Scorsese, because why not, when a gangster you’ve become fond of dies in one of his movies the music doesn’t induce you to feel unalloyed grief, the way Mogwai’s magisterial score does when Manuel finds Indio’s body; when they have kids, it’s not handled in the uplifting way it would be on your favorite family drama, the way it is here. The emotions here are warmer than a man this cold merits.

Be that as it may, this is still an outstanding episode of television, and Harold Torres’s performance as Manuel is a TV villain for the ages. Even the brief Lywood material serves up memorable shots, like that of Emma against the desert sky, and cuts, like the abrupt transition between the trucks in the desert to the same trucks in a modern cityscape. This is ambitious, swing-for-the-fences television. What will they do for an encore?

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 ZeroZeroZero Episode 6 ("En El Mismo Camino") on Amazon Prime