Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
A lot of people die in the season finale of ZeroZeroZero. The Manuel whom we saw grieving over the loss of one of his comrades, the Manuel who was filled with joy at the birth of his friend Chiquitita’s daughter, is the first to go. He dies the moment he tells the beaming mother that while he’ll send her enough money to keep her comfortable for life, “I’ll never see you again,” as blunt and plain as possible. It’s for the baby’s safety, he explains. It’s because “I’m not a good person.” Why?
“I killed your husband.”
The camera locks in on Chiquitita’s eyes as she processes this revelation, from the mouth of a man who’s reverted to the emotionless robot we’ve known up until just a few minutes ago. As the heartbreak washes over her, Manuel leaves the hospital, where we now see his entire army has been waiting for him. They have work to do.
That work involves them taking advantage of the night before’s internecine violence between themselves and the Leyra Brothers’ traditional soldiers by taking the fight directly to the Leyras themselves, with military precision—in the middle of a child’s birthday party, no less. Not that that stops them from slaughtering dozens, including at least one child and a birthday clown. They keep one Leyra alive just long enough to arrange for a meeting with Emma Lynwood, who’s finally carrying the $32 million the Leyras have been waiting for this whole time.
How she got that money takes up much of the rest of the episode. We flash back to her discovering Amina, tied up in the bathroom—and then Chris, beaten to death on the floor of a warehouse. Emma’s grief seems to fling her body around the room; at one point, only screaming “FUCK!” at the top of her lungs seems to release some of the pressure. She winds up lying next to his corpse, holding his hand. And why not? She’s getting used to being around murder victims.
But thanks to Amina, she knows that Italians led by Stefano are responsible for the killing. Even as his one-time lieutenant turned captor Italo Curtiga threatens to execute his family if he himself doesn’t execute his grandfather Don Minu, Emma has beaten him to the punch, arriving in Italy with the shipment and tipping Minu off to Stefano’s actions. When he sees her, he knows it’s all over.
So Don Minu kills his grandson, just as he once killed his own son, Stefano’s father. (Emma watches.) The last we see of him, he’s at the distribution center where the cocaine shipment is being divided up and repackaged for sale, taking the hand of his great-grandson Domenico, freed from the Curtiga’s clutches by Minu’s men. With any luck, he’ll be dead by the time the boy reaches adulthood and starts having ideas of his own.
Finally, we return to Mexico, where Emma has arrived to hand off the $32 million to a person she thinks will be Jacinto Leyra. Instead, upon arriving at the Leyra mansion, she is paraded past a line of corpses, with obvious deliberation on the part of the men who are marching alongside her. She is brought in to have an audience with Manuel, and told to sit down. It’s only when the camera cuts to a different angle that we see the seat Manuel has prepared for her.
What a shot. What a power play.
Anyway, Emma is unflappable, or at least that’s the air she presents to Manuel. Sitting between the corpses of men she once knew, she gives Manuel the money, demands to know his name, and—this may well be the reason she’s allowed to leave alive—orders 2,000 kilos of cocaine for a shipment to Russia in three weeks’ time. Manuel says he can pull it off.
So Emma leaves. She even smiles at some of the guards as she walks away. What she feels inside after this whole ordeal is a mystery; we only know that she’s the kind of person who can look at mountains of corpses and still do business as usual.
Again, what a shot. (So many in this sequence are long takes, tracking Emma’s progress through the carnage.) What a choice by actor Andrea Riseborough, to remain all business. And what an episode. Emotional, unsparing, thrilling, and horrifying in turns, it displays all of the strengths of the season that led up to it. And it never loses sight of the fact that this excellent series is, in the end, a character piece—a show that uses its action and suspense sequences to reveal who the characters really are, not simply provide some thrills between dully revelatory monologues. Manuel, Don Minu, Emma: These three survivors have shown us who they really are, what they care about, how they act when up against the wall. I hope we get to see them again.
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.
