‘Narcos: Mexico’ Series Finale Recap: Life After Death

Until the end, the very end, this is arguably the Narcos franchise’s bleakest season finale to date. Here’s how it all goes down:

The American and Mexican governments and their leaders are made to look like fools in front of the entire world for their previous full-throated support of crooked General Rebollo.

Victor murders a man he believes to be a serial killer of Juárez’s woman, only to discover that a mass grave that proves the killings are being done by more than one man and have continued to mount; Andréa’s voiceover notes that the femicide, with a death toll in the hundreds, continues to this day. (The flock of sheep gathered on the site’s outskirts is an unsubtle but impactful image.)

Victor is then killed in turn by his partner for narcing on Vicente Carillo Fuentes’s operation to the DEA.

Dogged newspaper editor Salgado (Alejandro Furth), reporter Andréa Nuñez’s stalwart supporter, is shot by assassins, his status after a subsequent operation unknown.

Chapo exiles both his boss Güero Palma and his advisor Don Neto to another prison in order to take over the Sinaloa cartel, which with El Mayo’s help will now be invading Juárez.

Crooked businessman Carlos Hank Gonzalez dies surrounded by family and friends, receives a hero’s funeral, and is commemorated by a statue. (“Janet Reno issued him an apology” for investigating him, Andréa notes.) 

The Arellano Félix family retakes control of Tijuana. But Ramón Arellano Félix is killed by gunmen dressed as cops and working for El Mayo, an echo of El Chapo’s policeman getup during his own attempt on the Arellano brothers’ lives years earlier. 

Poor naïve Alex Hodoyan escapes from Walt’s custody and winds up hanging from an overpass in Tijuana within hours. 

After revealing the secret of Alex’s detainment and torture to Andréa—”I’m not a good guy,” he comes right out and says—Walt relocates to Chicago, where he runs the same old shitty sting operation exploiting the privacy of Alcoholics Anonymous, for the same old shitty, makes-no-difference results. Ironically, it’s like he’s fallen off the wagon.

Nobody learns anything. Lots of people die.

Then we get to the episode’s mid-credits stinger, which, hoo boy: Though we don’t actually see him, the implication is clear that Amado Carrillo Fuentes is alive and well and living with his girlfriend Marta on the Chilean coast.

The Narcos: Mexico series finale (“Life in Wartime”) primes us for this revelation repeatedly. Prior to his operation, we see Amado reach for his cellular phone before the scene cuts away; who else would he be calling but Marta? When the authorities burst in on the clinic the next morning, we never actually see the body. We also learn that the body ID’d as Amado vanished, along with the surgeons who operated on him; the latter were eventually found dead stuffed in a barrel outside the city. (A cursory Google search reveals a contemporaneous report from the New York Times and a follow-up by the Tampa Bay Times several years later, echoing many of these details.)

Frankly, I’m still processing how I feel about writer and showrunner Carlo Bernard’s choice to go down this road. In dramatic terms, ending the episode on Walt’s scummy sting operation—at first we’re led to believe he’s confessing his personal failings and the evil he’s done in the DEA to his ex-girlfriend Dani, but he’s just lulling a target into a false sense of security—is a much more impactful choice. Moreover, it fits in better with the bitter tone of the show overall, which has always been about how the War on Drugs is waged by criminals on both sides, though it just so happens that some of them carry badges and bear the blessings of the United States government. 

Teasing the idea that Amado lives on? That turns him from a cartel boss—a more likeable and genteel cartel boss than any of the others we’ve encountered since the Escobar days, but still, a cartel boss—into a living legend. It’s fitting that a narcocorrido about Amado accompanies this final scene: Like that genre of music, this ending portrays Amado as a sort of folk hero, a guy who saw that there was no happy ending for anyone who stayed in the game, and who boldly chose to get out on his own terms, to live happily ever after. 

But maybe that’s as fitting an ending, in its way, as Walt’s squalid fate. It’s hardly a controversial statement to say that Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, which ends its own three-season run here, have capitalized on the glitz and glamor of its drug traffickers’ lives, from the Arellanos’ rich narcojunior allies all the way to Pablo Escobar’s imported hippopotami. Is there life after death for a narco? Look no further than the existence of this show for your answer.

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 10 on Netflix