‘Narcos: Mexico’ Season 3 Episode 9 Recap: Inside Job

“Narcos is always at its best when it’s simultaneously at its most elegiac and most cynical.” I wrote those words about the Season One finale of Narcos: Mexico, an alternately languid and brutal episode in which Félix Gallardo sold out his friends, the American government in the form of Walt Breslin doubled down on their disastrous drug war, and DEA Agent Kiki Camarena turned out to have died for nothing, nothing at all. It was confident, engrossing filmmaking designed to destroy the myth of the War on Drugs by any means necessary.

I think many of the same things can be said about this penultimate episode of the show’s third season. Narcos: Mexico Season 3 Episode 9, titled “The Reckoning,” does not settle all of the show’s accounts—there’s still one more episode to go, after all. But there’s something genuinely mournful in the way it chronicles the failures of so many of its main characters: Walt, Victor, Amado, General Rebollo. Representing nearly every side and level of the War on Drugs, they’re all revealed to be grim-faced failures in the end.

Take Victor, for instance. His hunt for the man who’s been killing factory workers has left him a shadow of the man he once was—a haggard, ashen-faced zombie who seems like a bystander watching his own life pass him by. This is equally true of his relationship with his Long-Suffering Wife and his partnership with rogue cop Rogelio, with whom he still conducts the occasional murder on the part of the Juárez cartel and its main muscle, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

And for all that he’s burning the candle at both ends, he has virtually nothing to show for it. When he has DEA station chief Jaime Kuykendall run the license plate number he jotted down while pursuing his quarry, it’s a dead end—the plates were stolen and reused. When he questions another group of factory women about the mysterious man in the gold Cadillac, they have nothing to say to him; all he can do is warn them that the man driving that car is dangerous.

“Who are you?” one woman asks him.

“Used to be a cop,” he mumbles. It’s a mesmerizing performance by actor Luis Gerardo Méndez, who makes Victor feel like a man who’s hit rock bottom yet still keeps plummeting into the mystery he has yet to solve.

While Victor is off on his own side plot—tied into the main story only by his continued use as an informant on the Juárez cartel by Kuykendall, activity that nearly costs Victor his life when Vicente catches him snooping around his truck—the fates of Walt, Amado, and Rebollo are all tied together.

And it’s reporter Andréa Nuñez and her colleagues who do the tying. Digging deep into old newspaper archives, they manage to identify the woman who withdraws the bribe money being sent from Juárez to Tijuana every month like clockwork. To their surprise, she has nothing to do with crooked businessman Carlos Hank González; rather, she’s the mistress of none other than General Rebollo, and she’s funneling the bribe money directly to him.

That’s right: Rebollo has been working for Amado this whole time.

Perhaps that’s why Walt’s raid on the house where Benjamín Arellano Félix has been hiding turns up no one but his wife and daughter, whom he managed to pin down by finding the clinic where the little girl is being treated for a rare disease. Or maybe it’s just bad luck, and a matter of Mín taking his sister Enedina’s advice to keep moving from house to house. After all, I’m not sure why an employee of the Juárez cartel would protect the rival boss of Tijuana, unless it’s just out of an abundance of caution lest Benjamín somehow be flipped against Amado after his capture.

Speaking of rival bosses, the episode opens with the arrest of Güero Palma, Chapo’s long-missing patrón. He winds up in the same prison as Chapo and Don Neto—who warns Chapo that with Güero back in the fold, El Mayo, who’s running point on the Sinaloans’ now Amado-free attempt to take over Tijuana, won’t need Chapo anymore. With the Arellanos killing Mayo’s men to send a message, the issue of leadership is a pressing one.

At any rate, Walt is quickly alerted by Jaime that Rebollo’s arrest is imminent. He returns to the army base where he’s been stationed and finds an inferno, as military and intelligence officials burn anything that would make Rebollo’s bosses look bad. Walt’s nationality effectively shields him in what might otherwise seem like an incredibly hostile environment; everyone learned from the Kiki Camarena debacle what happens when you kill a DEA agent. But it’s still a close call when he decides to spring Alex Hodoyan from captivity lest he be killed to cover up his torture and illegal detention. Walt has to tell Alex he’d been lying about the death of his brother Alfredo to make the hapless narcojunior come with him. Walt winds up pointing a gun at his former army allies before he slides into a car and makes his getaway.

As for Amado himself, his plant to extricate himself from the drug trade hits a major speed bump when Hank reveals that his organization is wise to the unusual withdrawals and transactions Amado has been making in preparation for his exit. Hank sends accountants to investigate, and threatens to kill Amado’s girlfriend Marta, using the very security guards Amado is paying. In both cases, Amado and company get the jump on their enemies.

But it’s all for naught. Rebollo’s ouster and arrest is major international news—after all, he was ostensibly the leader of the War on Drugs—and this makes his paymaster Amado famous as well. He gets a call that his airfield has been seized, cutting off his escape route to Chile. Director Amat Escalante’s camera pivots away from Amado’s face after this conversation to show the Mexican landscape as it passes by his car’s window, as if Amado can no longer bear to be looked at. The episode ends with the camera gazing at Amado’s car as it drives out of sight, growing smaller and smaller until it all but vanishes. If that’s not an apt image for the hopes of everyone on this show, I don’t know what is.

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 Narcos: Mexico Season 3 Episode 9 on Netflix