‘Griselda’s Wildest Moment Sees Sofia Vergara Smoking Crack and Going on a Paranoid Rampage with a Golden Machine Gun

Netflix‘s Griselda is a very wacky show. Because it’s theoretically from the same team behind the hit franchise Narcos and features a career-best dramatic performance from Sofia Vergara, you might think that it’s prestigious fare. Instead, it’s soapy, girlboss nonsense that plays fast and loose with history to frame infamous cartel queen Griselda Blanco (Sofia Vergara) as a single mom just, uh, massacring her way through misogyny?? Griselda‘s Vergara made headlines last week when she told Jimmy Fallon that she learned “how to do cocaine” on the show’s set, but that’s far from the wildest moment in the six-part limited series…

**Spoilers for Griselda, now streaming on Netflix.**

Over the course of Griselda‘s run, we get to see Vergara beat a man with a baseball bat, blow up an old man just sitting in his house, try to choke her best friend to death, and blow a sicario’s brains out with a gun. However, nothing will stay burned in your memories like the sequence in Griselda Episode 5 (“Paradise Lost”) in which an increasingly paranoid Blanco smokes a crack pipe at a party and then threatens to murder all of her loved ones, business associates, and party guests with a golden machine gun. It’s unhinged to say the least. And according to the show, Griselda‘s massive meltdown is what ultimately drives the majority of her inner circle to turn on her.

Because many of Griselda‘s biggest dramatic moments don’t really match up with actual historic events, I have a lot of questions about the crack-pipe-to-psychotic-crack-up we see in the show. First of all, was Griselda Blanco’s penchant for smoking crack the real reason she lost her grip on her cocaine queendom? Were she and Medallín cartel princess Marta Ochoa (Julieth Restrepo) actually crack pipe-sharing friends? Does Griselda even earn this seismic psychological breakdown for its titular character? And, most importantly, if someone had to show Sofia Vergara how to “do” cocaine, what sort of research did the Colombian-American actress have to do to nail being on crack???

Let me back up and set the scene. We’ve known since the very first episode of Griselda that Griselda Blanco is very familiar with the world of cocaine. She had been living in Medellín as the wife of a lower level cartel goon, Alberto Bravo (Alberto Ammann), before fleeing in the middle of the night to Miami with her three sons and a brick of high quality cocaine. What Netflix’s Griselda conveniently glosses over, however, is the fact that she had already been running a successful cocaine dealing ring in New York City and had been extradited to Colombia before returning to the states to give it another go.

Netflix’s version of Griselda Blanco is a scrappy underdog who uses her tenacity to outwit the misogynistic cartel kings. As she transforms into the “Godmother,” Griselda reluctantly starts to use violence against her enemies and embarks on a romance with Dario (Alberto Guerra), the man Alberto’s brother sent to kill her. Griselda’s not bad, okay? She lifts up the women of Medallín, offering them an escape from sex work! (Which ultimately results in their violent deaths…) She offers protection to Cuban refugees! (Who also often wind up dead.) She does everything for her sons! (Who…uh…mostly don’t make it to adulthood as they are all gunned down.)

Griselda presents a bizarre, rose-colored version of Blanco’s life story, happily messing up key dates and inventing more flattering explanations for some of her most grim crimes. That said, Griselda Episode 5 (“Paradise Lost”) finally hints that the Godmother might not be the feminist hero we’ve been coerced into seeing her as. And by “hints,” I mean the show pulls out all the stops to bang this reality into our skulls. And it all starts with that damn crack pipe…

Griselda Blanco is sitting on top of the world in Griselda Episode 5. The only problem is that Detective June Hawkins (Juliana Aidén Martinez) has cracked Blanco’s own secret code, revealing where her stash houses are. When news of this leaks, Griselda immediately assumes she has a mole and overreacts by killing a shortlist of potential rats. Hawkins correctly interprets this as proof that Griselda is more afraid than she is powerful. As it turns out, Griselda is also high on crack and paranoid to a degree that makes Game of Thrones‘s Cersei Lannister look even-keeled.

The crack only comes out during Dario’s big birthday bash. The aforementioned cartel princess Marta Ocheo encourages Griselda to take a hit, which soon turns into several. Soon, Griselda is seeing traitors everywhere — specifically in the faces of those who have been ride or die with her from the beginning. She erupts at Dario and uses the golden machine gun she has just gifted him to shoot up his beloved sports car. She then holds rival cartel boss John Roberts (Jeffrey Vincent Parise) at gun point, forcing him to strip and bark like a dog. She’s chaos incarnate, only talked down by bestie Carmen (Vanessa Ferlito), who is thanked for her loyalty by being nearly choked to death.

Griselda posits that the only reason why Blanco lost her grip on her empire was because the crack (and June Hawkins) made her paranoid. Her violent outbursts drove her inner circle away, leaving her vulnerable. Well, that, and they conveniently contrive a situation where Marta Ocheo dies of a messy overdose that looks like a hit (even though the popular theory is that Griselda Blanco DID order a hit on the beloved party girl).

Sofia Vergara’s crack pipe smoking, machine gun-toting breakdown basically sums up what does and doesn’t work for Griselda. It’s a sensationalist dramatization of real events that attempts to make the violence of the era not really Blanco’s sole fault. A more true-to-life depiction of Blanco would have made for a more nuanced and haunting show, but it sure wouldn’t be quite so fun to watch.

Griselda is a show that wants to lionize a cartel queen by softening her hard edges, but in doing so, it ends up turning a real life villainess into a cartoon character.